Mistletoe
Viscum album
It touches neither earth nor sky. That is precisely its power.
Overview
Mistletoe belongs to no world entirely. It is a hemiparasitic plant — partly photosynthetic, partly dependent on the tree it inhabits — growing in the canopy of apple, oak, poplar, and lime, rooted in the branch of another living thing and touching the ground not at all. This quality of suspension, of existing between, made it sacred to the Druids in a way that nothing rooted in soil could be. Cut with a golden sickle on the sixth night of the moon, caught before it touched the earth, it became the most powerful of ritual substances. To find it growing on oak — rare enough to be a portent — was to find something that belonged to the gods.
Botanical Notes
A hemiparasitic, evergreen shrub forming rounded, branching clumps in the canopy of deciduous host trees — most commonly apple, lime, poplar, hawthorn, and occasionally oak. Leaves are paired, yellow-green, leathery, and blunt. Tiny, yellow-green flowers in late winter; white, sticky berries ripening in autumn through winter. Seeds are distributed almost exclusively by birds, particularly the mistle thrush, which wipes the sticky seeds from its beak onto bark, where they germinate into the host. Found throughout Europe and into Asia. The berries and leaves contain viscotoxins and lectins (viscumin) with genuine cytotoxic activity — the basis of both their danger and their medical research interest.
Lore & History
Pliny the Elder recorded the Druidic oak mistletoe ritual in the first century AD — the sixth day of the moon, the white-robed priest, the golden sickle, the two white bulls sacrificed beneath. The account may be embellished, but its detail is unusual enough to suggest a real practice. In Norse myth, Baldr the Beautiful was killed by a dart of mistletoe — the one substance that had been overlooked when his mother Frigg extracted promises of safety from every plant and creature in the world. The Christmas kissing tradition, in which couples who meet beneath a hanging bunch must kiss and the man removes one berry for each kiss until none remain, descends from a protective and fertility tradition whose original form was considerably less decorative. Modern oncology has investigated mistletoe lectins as a cancer adjunct therapy under the preparation name Iscador; the research is serious and ongoing.
Warnings
The white berries are toxic — viscotoxins cause gastrointestinal symptoms, bradycardia, and in large quantities, cardiovascular effects. The berries are attractive to children; grow where accessible only if supervised. Commercially prepared mistletoe extracts (Iscador, Helixor) for cancer adjunct therapy should be used only under medical guidance — they are administered by injection, not orally, and the self-administration of homemade preparations is dangerous. Avoid in pregnancy.