Plant of the day Artemisia absinthium (Wormwood)

This herb is ruled by Mars because of its warming properties, and so Culpeper, the seventeenth-century herbalist, considered it a good treatment for injuries done by "martial creatures" such as wasps, hornets, or scorpions. It is especially connected to snakes: mythology tells that it grew in the tracks of the snake expelled from Eden, for instance, and it was considered a protectant against snake bites. In its association with Mars, wormwood is generally good in protection spells and also a tool for getting vengence through sorcery. In Russia, wormwood was effective against the green-haired Rusalki, female water spirits who in spring would leave their watery bodies and walk in the woods. In the region of Saratov, Rusalki were frightening creatures ill-disposed towards humans and eager to use their sharp claws. If you had to go into the woods when the Rusalki were about, you were advised to carry a handful a wormwood, which they could not stand.

Wormwood has traditionally been used in the West to repel bugs from stored clothing, as a strewing herb, and the seeds taken internally in small amounts to get rid of worms (thus the name). Steeped in ink, wormwood would then protect the paper written on from being eaten by mice (because of its bitterness). It is antiseptic. But it is also a constituent of absinthe. This plant grows wild all over Europe and the US. The bitter component of wormwood is an alkaloid, absinthin, which is separate from the essential oil, thujone. Absinthin is removed by tincturing (soaking the plant in water or alcohol). Absinthe cannot be made by tincturing, only by distillation.


The root is perennial, and from it arise branched, firm, leafy stems, sometimes almost woody at the base. The flowering stem is 2 to 2 1/2 feet high and whitish, being closely covered with fine silky hairs. The leaves, which are also whitish on both sides from the same reason, are about 3 inches long by 1 1/2 broad, cut into deeply and repeatedly (about three times pinnatifid), the segments being narrow (linear) and blunt. The leaf-stalks are slightly winged at the margin. The small, nearly globular flowerheads are arranged in an erect, leafy panicle, the leaves on the flower-stalks being reduced to three, or even one linear segment, and the little flowers themselves being pendulous and of a greenish-yellow tint. They bloom from July to October. The ripe fruits are not crowned by a tuft of hairs, or pappus, as in the majority of the Compositae family.
The leaves and flowers are very bitter, with a characteristic odour, resembling that of thujone. The root has a warm and aromatic taste.

The Common Wormwood held a high reputation in medicine among the Ancients. Tusser (1577), in July's Husbandry, says:

'While Wormwood hath seed get a handful or twaine

To save against March, to make flea to refraine:

Where chamber is sweeped and Wormwood is strowne,

What saver is better (if physick be true)

For places infected than Wormwood and Rue?

It is a comfort for hart and the braine

And therefore to have it it is not in vaine.'