Mardi: Herbal-Wise

Skunks don’t live in Alaska but their smell certainly does.  Walk near a stagnant pond on a summer evening and you’ll swear someone just hit a whole herd of skunks with a vehicle.  Up here that disgusting smell doesn’t come from an animal, however, but from a plant.

Skunk cabbage – generously referred to in Pow-Wow as “meadow” cabbage – is in the same herbal family as the truly nauseating asafetida and it quite literally reeks like skunk spray.  It was used by Native Americans in the treatment of asthma and tuberculosis and it is still used by many different magickal disciplines.

In Wicca, a little bit of skunk cabbage is wrapped in fresh bay leaf.  If this is done on Sunday with proper intent Scott Cunningham tells us, and carried as a pocket piece, fortune will always favor the person who made it.

According to Silver RavenWolf, skunk cabbage is used in American Pow-Wow for “legal matters”, although she does not elaborate.  She also mentions mixing the plant with bay for prosperity.

Hoodoo, taking its usual like-makes-like path, employs skunk cabbage to jinx enemies.  A mixture of dried skunk cabbage leaves, licorice root, poppy seeds and calamus root is used as a throw for sprinkling on an enemy’s front porch and walk.  This will bring about illness and misfortune until the root worker removes the trick.  This is a nasty working that I personally have never tried and don’t recommend.  That like-makes-like can come back to bite you in the butt, I find.  Bonne chance ~

Header: Magpie on the Gallows by Pieter Brueghel the Elder c 1568