On Mugwort

Before all other herbs, remember mugwort.

That is a paraphrase. The original is older, and stranger, and comes from the Lacnunga — a tenth-century Anglo-Saxon medical manuscript that sits in the British Library and has not been fully understood by anyone. The Nine Herbs Charm it contains invokes nine plants against poison and infection, and it begins with mugwort. Erce, eorþan modor — Earth, mother of earth — is addressed somewhere in the same document, in a charm for a fruitful field. The two are not unrelated.

Mugwort was the first. Mugwort was addressed as elder. This was not metaphor.

What It Is

Artemisia vulgaris. Named for Artemis, the hunter goddess, the moon's daughter, the one who moved through wild places and was not tamed. The genus is ancient and enormous — it includes wormwood, sagebrush, southernwood, tarragon. Many of them are bitter. Several are toxic in high doses. All of them carry something of the same grey-green quality, that particular silver-backed leaf, that smell when crushed: sharp, resinous, medicinal, familiar in a way that is hard to account for.

Mugwort grows everywhere. Roadsides, waste ground, the disturbed soil at the edges of things. It is not delicate. It does not require cultivation. It will find its way into your garden whether you invite it or not, and it will be difficult to remove.

This is part of its character.

The Dream Herb

The association between mugwort and dreaming is old enough that its origin cannot be located. It surfaces in Anglo-Saxon texts, in Chinese medicine, in the European folk tradition, in the practices of multiple Indigenous North American peoples independently of any Old World influence. The consistency is striking and has not been satisfactorily explained.

The claim is this: that sleeping with mugwort under your pillow, or burning it before sleep, or drinking it as a tea, produces dreams of unusual vividness and clarity. Prophetic dreams. Dreams that feel, on waking, like they came from somewhere else.

The mechanism, if any, is unclear. Mugwort contains thujone — the same compound found in wormwood and associated with the effects of absinthe — but in quantities too small to produce measurable psychoactive effect at the doses traditionally used. There is some evidence for mild effects on REM sleep. There is more evidence that the expectation of vivid dreams produces vivid dreams, and that mugwort has been associated with this expectation for long enough that the association has become self-reinforcing across cultures and centuries.

Or something else is happening. The honest position is uncertainty.

What the Texts Say

The Lacnunga uses mugwort as the lead herb in a charm against the nine flying venoms — pathogens, we might say now, though the text imagines them as things that fly through the air and enter the body. The charm is sung. It includes Christian and pre-Christian elements woven together without apparent discomfort, which is typical of Anglo-Saxon medical literature and fascinating to anyone who thinks these traditions were cleanly separated.

In Chinese medicine, mugwort is the substance used in moxibustion — the burning of compressed herb cones on or near acupuncture points. The practice is at least two thousand years old. The choice of artemisia for this purpose was not arbitrary; the plant burns slowly, evenly, at a predictable heat, and the smoke carries compounds that have measurable anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties.

In European folk tradition, it appears in recipes for flying ointments — those notorious preparations associated with witches, some of which did contain genuinely psychoactive plant compounds (henbane, belladonna, mandrake), and some of which contained things like mugwort whose effects, in context, were probably more about ritual and intention than pharmacology. The line between the two is less clear than we tend to assume.

Growing It

Plant mugwort if you want it, but know that you are making a commitment. It spreads by root and by seed, it resists removal, and it will be in your garden long after you have decided you no longer want it there.

In exchange it offers: a hedge plant that smells extraordinary when you brush past it in the evening. A companion that has been kept near houses for longer than most of our other cultivated plants. A leaf to tuck under your pillow on the night before something important, if you are the kind of person who does that sort of thing. If you are reading this, you may be.

Harvest in late summer, when the plant is in bud but before full flower. Dry it slowly. The smell intensifies as it dries.

A Note on Caution

Mugwort is an emmenagogue — it stimulates uterine contractions. It should not be used in any form during pregnancy. This is one of those cases where the folk knowledge and the pharmacology are in agreement: it appears in historical herbals as an herb that brings on a delayed menstrual cycle, which means it was known to be capable of causing miscarriage.

The same property made it important to midwives and to anyone who needed to regulate a cycle that had been disrupted. It was a medicine. Medicines have effects.

Handle it accordingly.

Before all other herbs, remember mugwort. Whoever has power over it has power over all herbs.

The Lacnunga does not explain what that power is. Neither will we. But it grows in the waste ground, in the disturbed soil, at the edges of things. It is still there. It has always been there.

Begin, if you wish, with one dried leaf under your pillow. See what you dream.