Before I went to bed, I took a tablespoon of the tincture in a four ounce glass of water. It tasted a little soapy and left a bit of a tingle on my tongue. I asked clary sage to teach me, and I lit some incense to Hermes and asked him to guide me.  Went to bed.

I had three dreams. All were clear and none were feverishly overrun with images, which has been the case when I have worked with mugwort. The first was distinguished by a brilliant emerald green color which appeared intermittently. The third I remember nothing of except the scrap of music which played repeatedly. This happens to me often in dreams. It was the second dream that has been startling.

In part of the second dream, I found myself sitting in a sort of chapel. There were others there, more towards the front. It appeared to be some kind of study class led by an older woman, rather bony and ill-tempered. She scowled at me because she recognized that I did not belong there, so to avoid her wrath and get my bearings, I pretended to be studying also and looked down at the books on my lap. They were two Bibles, both open and resting on top of the other. These were not like Bibles I had seen before. The one on top was open to the Book of Daniel, which I must confess I have never read. All I know about it is the stories, mostly from either kid’s pictures of Daniel in the lion’s den (see the print I remember from childhood) or from movies such as Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible, which as I recall protrays the Fiery Furnace episode (which I never knew was from Daniel until today). I likewise did not know that this book is a favorite of some Christians, who enjoy interpreting it as predictive of the future, parsing out which metal of the statue in the dream represents which historical kingdom, and of course using stuff in it to validate Jesus as God. It is not very important in Judaism, stuck in the biblical hinterlands between Esther and Ezra.

In the dream, I could see the words clearly on the page, which was in English. I focused on the lower right-hand corner of the page, which was where the second chapter began. At the head of each chapter, this Bible gave a series of words that were used as verbs in the Hebrew text (which was not presented). The words were transliterated from Hebrew letters into Roman letters in caps. One word I remember was something like “MATOUION.” I didn’t recognize this word as Hebrew, but I thought at least they are acknowledging this is a Hebrew text. What was striking about this dream was that I could see the words clearly and that many of them were in English. Usually in my dreams, if text is involved, it is in another language, especially Russian (which I know, but it is always some word I don’t recognize!), or if it is in English, it is all jumbled with letters of different sizes and colors. So this was odd for its clarity, although I did not remember anything it said in English when I work up.

Ishtar Gate, constructed in Nebuchadnezzar's day

This morning I decided to look at the Book of Daniel, second chapter. Here’s the first line of that chapter: “In the second year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar had a dream; his spirit was agitated, yet he was overcome by sleep.” The king (ruler of Babylon) orders his “wise men”–magicians, exorcists, sorcerers, and Chaldeans–to prove their talents by telling him what his dream was and then to interpret it for him, but none of them can do it, and they even say that no one can do that except the gods. The king decides he’ll just execute them all as frauds. Among them are three wise men in training, Judeans who were captured and kept in the king’s palace to be educated and form part of his service during the Babylonian Captivity. One of them, Daniel, is able not only to tell the king what the dream was but to interpret it for him. It is a dream of the future, one about the destruction of various kingdoms. These are represented by a statue made of different metals (which reminded me very much of alchemy). The king spares all the wise men, of course.

A couple of interesting things about this text. One, Daniel asks for help from God to learn the dream and what it means, but he uses an odd phrase:  ELH ShMYA [Elah Shmayah], which translated in the JPS Tanakh as “God of Heaven.” I don’t think I have seen this particular phrase used for God in the Bible before, although maybe I was just not paying attention. I know of various names for God in the Hebrew Bible: El, El Shaddai, YHVH, El Elion, Eieh, and Elohim, but not this phrase. I will have to look into it further. [Turns out it's Aramaic and only occurs in three books - Ezra, Daniel, and Jeremiah]

I also noticed that in the first chapter, Daniel and his friends are to be fed on the king’s food and wine, but he asks that they instead be given legumes and water for their food and drink that they not “defile” themselves. This is interesting for me, since I have been giving much thought lately to diet.

I did not find anything like the word “MATOUION” in this section. I thought it was Greek, but apparently it was the Latin name of a town in Scotland north of the Antonine Wall. I wonder if this was anywhere near Nairn, which is the area where Isobel Gowdie lived. Weird. I am not sure if the word has significance. I think I was only meant to look at The Book of Daniel, which, it turns out, centers on dream visions and prophecy.

As you can imagine, I will be working with clary sage further.:)

I ate a couple of the pickling cukes growing right next to the toloache for breakfast this morning, and while I think it’s possible that the datura influence the black nightshade, adding alkaloids, because these plants are related, clearly cucumbers and daturas play well together: my cukes were just cukes, not portals to a world of rage and restless dreams.:) Always nice in a cuke.

I also put a bunch of nightshade berries in the dehydrator, but The Black Toad, as I have begun to refer to it, does not want to be dry. It reveals its fundamental amphibian nature in its preference for the juicy state. It has stayed sticky for days, gumming up my dehydrator screens and making me realize that if I want to save these berries, I will have to freeze or process them in some way. I will try them in an ink and perhaps in a sacramental wine. I’ve got a bumper crop of chichiquelite on the way.

I harvested great bunches of wormwood in the bud stage, stripped off the leaves and flowers, and dehydrated them when the toloache was done. I’m going to use some of that to do Starkey’s glorified essence of wormwood (and will do the same with the mugwort I just dried). I’ve been wanting to do that alchemical procedure for years and noticed that a wine-making supply place had the salts of tartar (potassium carbonate) called for.

Day of the Dead marigolds are sprouting, but I think they will only just be flowering by the time frost hits, since I started them so late. I might get some of the black sunflowers, though, as one of them is pretty tall already. I passed a house the other day that has them growing alongside the driveway. Very nice.

Speaking of black, check out the weird snake head seed pod on the unmatta. I tell you, this plant lives up to its rep.

Continuing with the black theme, I bought ten pounds of black plums last week and started my first wine attempt, a black plum wine in a two-gallon crock. It’s already ready to rack into the secondary fermenter. I mentioned this to my elderly neighbor, and he happily told me how his father-in-law, who had a farm nearby, used to make plum wine in a giant crock waist high. I had read that “old-timers” started wine in a crock with a towel and plate on top, but it was neat to have this confirmed by a real old-timer.:) The only crock-work I had heard about prior to this was how my great-grandmother use to make pickles in a towel-covered crock she kept under the sink.

With the rest of the plums I made a plum pickle in red wine & wine vinegar with cinnamon, ginger, and cloves. That one took three times draining the syrup off the fruit, boiling it, and returning it to the fruit, which to me feels very much like a magical ritual. I had some extra that I didn’t process and tasted–very wonderful. I also tasted some of the spiced black cherry pickle I put together a while ago that has been sitting in the fridge, doing its thing. What a transformation! They have gone from being unpleasantly vinegary to being just-right sour with a cherry taste. On the other hand, I tossed the pickled turnips, although they were still fine, because they were just too salty for me. They weren’t crisp, either, and next time I will try some grape leaves in there to crisp them up. I’ll make more this fall, when turnips come back in season.

I used the timer on my digital camera to take this pic of me studying

Studying for an hour a day was part of Abramelin. Even though I have discontinued the operation (more about that in another post), I’ve been trying to continue the studying.  I’ve been reading the second volume in Joseph Dan’s series: Jewish Mysticism: The Middle Ages. I thought it would be covering the Zohar, but instead he is focusing on Ashkenazi Hasidism–not the hasidism most folks are familiar with. Since this movement did not survive to the present day, you never hear much about these folks. It’s been interesting, though, because Eleazar of Worms, whom Georg Dehn believes is connected to the Abramelin book, is mentioned frequently in Dan’s history as an important figure of Ashkenazi Hasidism. I don’t think I’ll be able to put any significant pieces together on this figure and his possible relationship to Abramelin until I finish reading the book and write up my notes. I’m only about 1/2 of the way through it now. I’ve also got a book on Eleazer himself to look at. I don’t expect much from that, though, because it appears to focus on his ethical writings. Outside of those, Rabbi Eleazar of Worms is perhaps most well-known nowadays for Moshe Idel’s translation of the section of the rabbi’s commentary on Sefer Yetsirah, where he describes how to create a golem (although he is not the same medieval rabbi who supposedly created one–that was Rabbi Loew of Prague). I wish Idel’s golem book was in print. The creation of the golem according to Rabbi Eleazar involves a number of permutations of holy names performed on various parts of the golem’s body. Last night I was reading about how these “gates,” as Eleazar calls them, work in the analysis of Biblical texts–various ways of shuffling around of letters, so that a text becomes like a Rubik’s cube churning out variant meanings. Most interesting of all is the gate of considering the letters that AREN’T used in a verse. This reminds me of what I learned was a quintessentially female/feminine way of reading a text–looking for what is NOT there, what has been driven beyond the margins of the page, the absences and silences and banishments, the unmentionables. I wonder if that is not exactly what a witch is always looking for, the foundation of the occult. It also occurs to me that beyond the margins is also in some sense the place of the witch in society–not in the center of a community, at least, not anymore, but beyond the fringes.

I also picked up Janowitz’s Magic in the Roman World: Pagans, Jews and Christians, which I began reading some time ago and left off for some reason. It’s got some interesting bits in it. Today what struck me was the difference she highlighted between The Greek Magical Papyri and Sepher ha-Razim, which are contemporary works.  The rituals in Sefer ha-Razim depend very much on the intercession of angels. They do basically everything for the operator. In contrast, in the Greek magical papyrus, it’s all “I adjure…” She doesn’t really comment on this difference, just points it out. But she also discussed the shift away from animal sacrifice that was going on in late antiquity, especially with regard to working with entities other than the major gods. Daimones often got herbs or stones as sacrifices instead of animals. So much for the widely believed notion that “real” magic, which can only be “ancient,” MUST involve killing or it isn’t authentically ancient and real.

I also appreciated how Janowitz knocked down Frazer’s (of Golden Bough fame) rather imperialist perspective about magic vs. religion and his whole sympathetic/contagion paradigm that is still horked up in the occult world on occasion. She gave the specific example of “voodoo” dolls, which he uses as an example par excellence of magic. She points out that he (and many after him) assume that practitioners of other religions naively take an object for a deity or person; they aren’t subtle enough (or adult enough) to discern the difference between a thing and a being. Focusing on the ritual doll, she says that it’s clear that people maintain a religious perspective with these images–with an image meant for protection, for instance, they believe it is the spiritual entity represented by the figure who protects them rather than the figure itself that has the power; the latter would be a magical perspective, in this definition. I have certainly seen plenty of the lattter in Judaism with for instance the way people relate to Torah scrolls as magical objects. But IMO, one of the problems modern magic has to deal with sooner or later is a misplaced worship of outmoded (and just plain bad) scholarship such as Frazer’s (or Budge’s or Waite’s, etc.). Older is not better in scholarship. It’s not ipso facto better in magic, either, but that seems to be the assumption.

On a completely different note, I also went outside last evening and sampled the different night-centered flowers in my garden. Oddly, the toloache’s scent might be stronger by day. By night it’s lemony coolness gets swamped by the peanut butter of the leaves. The jasmine tobacco flowers continue to morph from soapy to just weird to gardenia and back. But now the wild white petunias are finally flowering, their sticky fragrance a blend of viscous gardenia, strong spice, and licorice. I love the scent of these things. Tonight I wondered if anyone had ever worked magically with Petunia axillaris. Perhaps long ago, in their homeland, they were spirit guides; here, they are reduced to decorating gas station islands.

The other thing I saw was a black toad. There are plenty of toads around here, but they are all brown with spots. This is the first one I’ve seen that was black. Definitely odd. I figured I just hadn’t realized that black toads live in this area. Well, they don’t.

So I got to wondering if the things I saw had a connection to the experience I was having with black nightshade, which is certainly a toad of a plant and regardless of what Mr. Thayer says, has psychoactive effects,  as does the toadstool (although these effects are of a different nature).

The first thing I thought of was the toad as a familiar of Early Modern witches in Britain, wonderfully described in Wilby’s Cunning-Folk and Familiar Spirits.  This book is expensive right now, but an article she wrote on the topic (The Witch’s Familiar and the Fairy in Early Modern England and Scotland) is available from a legitimate online source (one that honors copyright). Apparently some people kept toads as pets, which would come when called and which would be fed with milk. And of course, some of these toads ended up being identified as witch’s familiars, just as some ordinary cats and dogs did. Some people give a materialist explanation for the Early Modern European witch’s affinity for the toad, hinting that toad venom was a component in flying salves. Perhaps. That might account for why people kept them as pets, too–the venom might have had medicinal uses. At any rate, a connection was in fact made between witches and toads much as between hags and cats. Scylla has been writing about familiars and in fact used the same pic of the witch feeding her toad pets/familiars for her post re familiars as I chose to illustrate my posting on bufonics.

There’s another toad tie-in here, though, and that is with alchemy.

In the old alchemical writings, the black toad is one of the lesser used symbols for either the process of fermentation (ruled by my sign, Scorpio) or for the Prima Materia undergoing the same. The identity of the Prima Materia in alchemy is kept secret in all the old written texts. Generally, it is said to be a substance widely and cheaply available but everywhere despised. I’ve seen a woodcut of it represented as blocks of wood on the road that people are tripping over. Elias Ashmole describes it this way in his poem about alchemy called “Hunting the Greene Lyon”:

And choose what thou shalt finde of meanest price:
Leave sophisters, and following my advice,
Be not deluded; for the truth is one,
‘Tis not in many things, this is Our Stone:
At first appearing in a garb defiled,
And, to deal plainly, it is Saturn’s childe.
His price is meane, his venom very great
His constitution cold, devoid of heat.

Often this has been taken to be a description of lead (cheap, venomous, cold, dull (garb defiled), and definitely Saturn’s childe), but in some alchemical graphics, the Prima Materia is represented by a black toad–also considered venomous, also in a garb defiled (covered with warts), despised, cheap (free), and Saturn’s childe. You can see the toad at the “root” of this alchemical tree in the illustration. Perhaps one reason why the toad is connected with fermentation is because it develops from a fish creature (Water) to a land animal (Earth) with functioning limbs: toads are all about transformation, and transformation is an essential part of fermentation (turning, for instance, grapes into wine). Also, toads hibernate by burrowing down into the ground. They appear to be dead and can even freeze, but they awaken later, fine. Talk about a (literally)  chthonic symbol.

The “c” word ties in to one way that the Prima Materia is figured in modern alchemy. In fact, I just wrote about this–the Barbaults considered dirt to be the Prima Materia. They used astrology and psychic powers to locate a particular patch of dirt which they dug up at an auspicious time and then treated with warmth, the addition of buds and young flowers of medicinal plants, and imbibed the earth with specially collected dew in order to cause ongoing fermentation. As a long-time gardener, I am very much drawn to this interpretation of the Prima Materia. (And speaking of fermentation, today I finally ordered the rest of the equipment I needed to start making wine. This week I should be able to pick up some fruit for that project.)

Scylla brought up how familiars fed upon their partner witches. Weirdly enough, there is a process described in alchemy that is translated graphically as a black toad feeding on a woman’s white breast. This is in Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens.

At any rate, there’s the toad as the Prima Materia, the foundational substance that is transformed, and the toad as the familiar. How could this be connected with my black nightshade experience, if it is?

Someone in another venue asserted that plants could be familiars but that communication with them was very difficult. Was black nightshade coming forward to offer itself as a familiar? That would certainly account for its very demanding character as well as its ubiquity. I seem to remember at least one of the witches in Wilby’s book kept running into her would-be familiar, a man dressed in old-fashioned clothes. Black nightshade has a cold nature, its berries are black, it is ubiquitous, and it has its own “venom.” I have puzzled over its overtaking of my garden, and have wondered if it is not simply a manifestation of the presence of the Dark Spirit of the Crossroads (“I am here”), of the Saturnian divine in plant form. But the discussion about familiars and the toad imagery have caused me to wonder about what exactly it is. Not that I’m asserting that black nightshade is attempting to become my familiar. Perhaps, though, there are some underlying similarities in the ways we communicate with plant spirits, familiars, and other spirits. I’ve been trying to disentangle all the threads, and that’s why it has taken me so long to post. I have much more to say on this matter, but I look forward to any reactions folks might have.

I started out by using the side of a knife to crack the garlic peel and so make it easier to strip off, my usual way of peeling garlic, but after about 30 cloves, my fingertips were starting to burn. So I decided to actually try the tip on p. 313 of Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving for getting the peels off–dunk them in plenty of boiling water, bring the water back to a boil for 30 seconds, then douse in cold water. The skins slide off with ease. What a relief! I modified the recipe on that page a little, using wine vinegar instead of white vinegar (which is only good for cleaning, IMO), slivers of dehydrated Aleppo pepper I grew last year instead of whole dried red chilies, and fresh golden oregano harvested from my garden instead of dried oregano. I also used the French bailed canning jars by Le Parfait that I bought on ebay (where they can be found for a slightly more reasonable price than elsewhere, at least, so far). This was my first time canning with bailed jars, which the USDA considers evil. I found that these jars seal like a champ. In fact, it is difficult to open them. After pulling them out of the kettle, you let them cool with the bails on overnight. The next day, unbail and test the seals by lifting the jar by its lid. I had no seal failures in 12 jars. Leave the bails off and store. These jars are built like tanks. I look forward to using them for many years. I should wait a week or two before tasting the garlic so all the flavors have a chance to meld, but I couldn’t resist and am having some right now, along with dilly beans I made last week, kalamata olives, and carrot and celery sticks. Delicious!

I was looking for info on Hekate suppers and was interested to find in The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology the following: “She would send spooks up into the world at night, or would appear in her own right, especially at crossroads under the dim light of the moon, to roam the pathways at the head of a crew of ghosts. Her retinue, the host of Hekate, was made up of the shades of the restless dead who had died prematurely or violently, or who had received no proper burial. Since she would also be accompanied by loud-barking daimonic dogs, her passage bears a resemblence to the ‘Wild Hunt’ of Western European folklore” (p. 194, emphasis mine). I’ll say it bears a resemblence. Since Hekate is a very old deity, I wonder who the Good Lady of the Hunt really was. I’ve seen her identified with Diana, but perhaps Diana is here a simple euphemism for Hekate. They are both associated with the night and both are childless. It might have been considered perhaps foolish but harmless to follow Diana, but to follow Hekate would not be dismissed as mere silliness, since she has been identified with witchcraft and sorcery since ancient times. That’s a rationale for morphing Hekate into Diana. Also, the image of the restless shades of the dead in her retinue clicks for me with the guiding of the dead that Carlo Ginzburg describes in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath. He found that women generally journeyed to the Great Hunt and men guided groups of the dead. This sounds very much like they are interacting with the same deity and retinue, does it not?

When I planted this garlic, I was not intending to honor Hekate but only, outside of ending up with a lot of good organic garlic, honoring Saturn. This summer has turned out, though, to be one where I become more and more turned towards the Dark Spirit of Crossroads, whoever that might be.

“Black Nightshade, whose leaves and stems are boiled in decoction and employed to bathe rain-bringing effigies. The same may be said for its fair sister Blue Witch, known unto botanists as Solanum douglasii. It maybe also be compounded as a Witches’ Smoke or a concentrated wash.”

I am not sure what is meant by “Witches’ Smoke” here. Some kind of ritual incense, I guess. I’ll have to poke around a bit more to find out for sure. There is nothing about the plant itself that is connected to rain. It doesn’t signal the coming of a storm, as a few plants do, it doesn’t especially need rain, and is likewise not hindered by it.  So that can’t be the connection. The only thing I could think of is that the berries are black, like a heavy storm cloud.

But more interesting is the other mention of black nightshade, as the primary ingredient in a poisonous ink for communicating with the dead:

A Venomous Ink, for Writing Messages to the Dead, Or Raising their Shades

The Ink is made from plants which are strong in the Medicine of the Grave, and is poisonous to the touch. Take two hundred ripe berries of Black Nightshade and gather them up in a cloth of black silk, after making blood offerings to the Herb. You may also use the berries of Blue Witch, another Solnum whose virtue is like unto our Nightshade. These shall be covered with one and one half litres of water and set on the boil. When the decoction has turned purple, add a pinch of powdered Alum, or, if you have none, some dregs of Red Wine. Add the leaves of dark and well-cured Tobacco, in several pinches, along with the same amount of the outer bark of the Yew tree, one oak gall, Bixa [or dried Madder if you cannot find it], and human ashes. Let this be stirred over a low fire until the entirety of the wort is reduced to one-half litre. The mixture is removed from the fire and strained, reserving the liquid. The darkness of the ink should be tested on paper. If it is insufficient, add more Tobacco. This shall be returned to the fire and cook’d until only fifty millilitres of dark liquid remain. Remove it from the fire, let it cool, and then add ten mililitres Tincture of Myrrh and fifteen mililitres of wood alcohol, mixing slowly. Filter again into a dark bottle. It is used to ask questions of the Mighty Dead, scribed upon paper and burned in the crypt, before their grave, or in the columbarium*. Then one waits in silent meditation until an answer is received. (p. 303)

This is indeed a pretty poisonous ink, especially with the addition of the yew bark, although liquid tobacco is no picnic either. Given this info, since the black nightshade is used as a wash for an effigy that is involved in raising storms, I wonder if the effigy represents or is connected to the dead or if the rite it is involved in calls upon the dead to cause the rain. We’re not told.

The thing that strikes me most is the blood offering given to the black nightshade plant. I don’t recall him recommending this with many plants.

I have been mulling over the experiences I and others have had now with this plant. I think that it is necessary for me to further explore it. This is kind of an extension of my experience with Datura Spirit. About that, I have read in various places that it is an angry or dangerous spirit because it has been jilted by more than one people. For instance, the Tarahumara used to consider it an important figure but turned it into a demon, basically, when they discovered peyote. ‘Course, maybe datura was just naturally always a bit of a jerk. But that made me think that given the absence of writing or folklore about black nightshade, perhaps it too had been thrown over in some way. It had been turned into a “mere” food plant and so it had become completely inept in its dealings with humans who could “hear” its spirit, people who were attuned to plants. Just feeling my way here, but I don’t want to make the same mistake I made with Datura–to just leave it by the side of the road because it was so intimidating, only to come back to it later.

Btw, I am often asked to recommend a book on plant magic. Viridarium Umbris is so far above anything else out there that I can’t really put it into words. However, it is also a very tough book, not least of all because of its cost. And although a lot of information is freely given, a lot more is hidden, and there is no way to ferret it out. For instance, recipes for various items are given but not how they are used. The most important thing I learned from it, though, was that I have to work out my own practice through my own direct communication with plant spirits and not rely on anyone else’s practice to tell me how to do magic. This book certainly gives a person many, many pointers and ideas, but I think the individual magic worker still has to write his/her own book.

Some people complain about the language of VU, but I love that.

*place for the storage of funerary urns of human ashes

Collecting Dew in Mutus Liber

Something interesting re the Sun card I got the other day–Luther Burbank, developer (or discoverer or promoter, take your pick) of the Wonderberry, named it the Sunberry. A black sun. Also, the sunflowers I planted? Black ones. One conception of the black sun is that there is a double of the golden sun that is always directly opposite from it. This might apply to the actual physical sun and some kind of nemesis sun in the Sun’s orbit, but more interestingly, it can be about spirituality vs. matter or perhaps, materialism. But the black sun is also equal to the black crow, the Nigredo in the Great Work. Putrefaction, without which no growth can occur. Still, I’d like to think that after all these years I’d gotten past the Nigredo.

OTOH, there is nice sort of resonance with Nigredo and putrefaction and compost (and Saturn). I’m not just being silly–Armand Barbault, a modern practical alchemist (“Scientist or witch?”), considered that the Prima Materia was precisely good rich dirt. This is what he started with to make his alchemical medicines–that, and dew, and plant materials. I have been meaning to read his book, Gold of a Thousand Mornings, for a long time.

Barbault & friend collecting dew

He very much based his work on Mutus Liber (the most famous illustration from that book shown here) on the one hand and intution on the other–and his partnership with his wife, like Nicolas and Perenelle Flamel.

A vegan agiculture newsletter from the UK that I signed up for a few months ago asked if I wanted to write an article about my garden this year, since I am trying to use no animal inputs (this is my second year not using any). I said yes and that I was experimenting with black nightshade as a food plant (they are seriously into food plants). That evoked some hesitation, but they are still game. It should be fun. I got interested in stock-free growing after I began reading about the use of green manures (talk about your Nigredo). That’s an old method that was tossed aside when synthetic fertilizers came in. It’s basically the rotation of a field with soil building plants like legumes and grasses and then the harvested crop. I was attracted to this method for a number of reasons. Partly it’s the lack of necessity for animal manure, which cuts one ball of complexity out of the planting loop.  Another is that it is closer to a closed loop–it’s possible to grow the seeds of your green manure crops. I haven’t gotten anywhere near that point, but it’s out there. Talk about sustainability. It does still mean tilling, and tilling means gasoline or electricity. Still, I have been having good luck using white clover in this way and would like to do more of it. In the UK, they are way ahead of us in terms of green manuring. There is a certification a food producer can get to be stock-free, sort of like certified organic. They have a book outlining this type of growing called Growing Green: Animal-Free Organic Techniques. It is UK focused and a bit on the dry side, but it gave me plenty to think about.

Datura outpacing black nightshade

After taking some time to think it over, I went out today and began uprooting black nightshade plants that had grown in places other than where I planted them. For one thing, I  don’t want it taking over my entire yard. I have a lot of other herbs out there, and they need their growing space too. For another, I don’t like the way this plant has acted towards me and others. I am not sure whether I will even leave the species plant in the area where I planted them. I don’t really want black nightshade all over the place there, either. I have a big plot of the species in the shade area, so it’s not like I won’t have any of those. I did indeed take those out, plus all the black nightshade volunteers all over the garden. I kept the volunteers in the shade patch and put a soaker hose there. But I also took out most of the black jimsonweed volunteers and made room in the datura patch for some sunflowers, since one has volunteered there).

That said, it looks like the heat is more to the daturas’ liking than the black nighthsade’s. The daturas are forming a massive canopy over their section of the garden, even beginning to overtake the black nightshade, which is looking a little more skeletal as it forms tons of berries in preparation for attempting to carpetbomb that part of the garden with its children.

Toloache flower 071810

I have to say that I love the toloache leaves. They are so beautifully thick, almost blueish, and untouched by bug chomping. In comparison, bugs just love to eat that jimsonweed, but it grows on undaunted; that’s something I really like about that plant: its toughness and ability to persist. It shrugs off threat. My unmatta (D. fastuosa) are the laggards of the datura patch. They are much smaller, but looking closely yesterday, I saw that one is forming buds. Next time, they are going out front, because I suspect they would like more sun.

The calendulas that are out front look fine but they are a bit tame for my tastes. I think they would do better as a big bed instead of as single plantings. Next year I will try that. The blood-drop emlets just could not compete with the grass. The one in the pot on the patio is doing great, but the ones in the ground have been smothered by it.

The wild tobacco (Nicotiana rustica) is starting to flower, but the lower leaves are yellowing, and I’m not sure if it’s because of dryness or what.

The variegated nicandra is growing like a house on fire and I will definitely be getting seeds from it, but after all this effort, I don’t think it was worth the wait. It is just so-so to look at, it cannot be used for anything, and it does not have a good smell. The leaves were very nicely variegated at first, but now they are shading more into green. I think in partial shade it would be more attractively variegated. That is usually the case with variegated plants.

Jasmine tobacco

The good smell is all in the jasmine tobacco (Nicotiana alata, which I obtained as Nicotiana affinis). This ought to be called gardenia tobacco, as far as I’m concerned, because that’s what it smells like. Those plants have put on a bunch of flowers and it has gotten to the point now where in the early evening, you can smell them at the end of the driveway. Papa Legba must like them. I hope I can collect some seeds from those. The flowers look a bit ragged in the daytime, but at dust they perk up and are very nice in the morning. The scent is very strong and changes. During the day it is almost absent. Sometimes it can smell strongly soapy. It’s a very interesting plant, and one I will definitely grow again. It looks like they have changed the nomenclature for this plant and it is in fact a parent for a lot of the scented nicotianas out there right now, especially the “Perfume” series.

I have jasmine tobacco’s cousin, woodland tobacco (N. sylvestris), growing in the back, but it is quite stunted in comparison. Not much light back gets there, and the soil is much drier. The front has more runoff from the roof and the driveway.

I gave the peppers much larger pots this year, trading the one-gallon for five-gallon (although these five-gallons are on the small side). They seem to also like the position I gave them against the western wall of the house, where a lot of light and warmth is reflected on them. The Bull Nose peppers are beginning to form fruits, and the Aleppo peppers are just beginning to get buds. I am hoping for a much better pepper harvest this year, as I am paying them a great deal more attention and they are in much bigger pots.

Finally, the wild purple petunia (Petunia integrifolia) that volunteered en masse in a pot from last year, does have a nice smell after all. Last year I am sure the smell was either absent or unpleasant. It was on that basis I decided not to harvest the seeds, in fact. So this year I will definitely be harvesting seeds from this and, if it ever gets flowers, the wild white petunia (P. axillaris). Those are really dragging their feet. One pot full was eaten almost to nubbins by something (ants?). The other pot is only now beginning to take off. We still have plenty of summer left, but I hope they get their butts in gear.

That night I had dreams about pirates–not in ships, but simple criminals and thugs on land who went about in organized groups attacking others. They invaded a village I was living in as a number of people–yes, I was multiple characters in that dream. I don’t remember much of it except that it was unpleasant. I slept poorly, I do remember that. Couldn’t seem to stay asleep.

Tuesday I decided to try another berry from the black nightshade.  I examined it before I ate it to be sure it was completely ripe. It was. It tasted pretty much the same as the one I had the previous day–maybe even more insipid.  A little later I again noticed a slightly scratchy throat, less than the previous day. The spearmint had finished drying earlier, so I knew it wasn’t that. But I had also been having a lot of allergic reactions to something in the air, mold, I guess. Sneezing, itchy eyes, etc. So I chalked it up to that. I was still grouchy, but I figured it was the allergies.

Then I read the Scullery Maid’s comments about black nightshade. And I started thinking maybe something was going on with this plant, something not so good. I began to wonder if maybe black nightshade acted like datura–abusive, IOW. Like it’s some kind of joke to fuck with people. And I thought, oh no. One plant like that is enough. I’m not going to deal with another. I don’t care what the possible rewards could be.

That afternoon my cats got into a bit of a tussle. Nothing unusual. A typical cat “You looking at me?” kind of thing. But my reaction wasn’t typical. I became enraged. I didn’t yell, just stomped into the living room, steaming, and they both ran and hid. Bolts of black energy must have been coming out of me. Seeing Crazyface’s tail sticking out from under the chair made me so furious that I knew I had to get out of there. I went into my workroom and slammed the door.

I sat at my desk and tried to figure out why I was so angry and just generally grouchy. I sometimes get pissed with the cats, but this was way beyond that. It bothered me a lot. They were just doing their usual screw-you thing. Nobody got hurt. Nothing got trashed. It involved the same two cats as always, and the other cats didn’t  even pay any attention to it. My old cat didn’t even raise his head to check it out. I thought my blood sugar must be way off, so I tested it. It was actually in the normal range: 112. So it wasn’t that. I couldn’t understand it, but it bothered me. A lot.

That night I was very restless. I felt very vigilant and unable to really fall asleep. I found myself listening for sounds (it felt silly because it reminded me of an HP Lovecraft story), yet I had not been thinking or doing anything before going to bed that would make me nervous or afraid. In fact, I had been reading a book about Victorian kitchen gardens. You can hardly get any more soothing than that. What the heck.

Wednesday I decided that I would not eat any more berries. I would just gather them and freeze them and cook them into jelly when I had enough. I felt somewhat disappointed, because I had thought this berry was safe to eat raw. Hadn’t Thayer said so in Nature’s Garden? And I finally found the black nightshade article I had been looking for that started me down the path to this plant in the first place a few years ago, and sure enough, people all over the world were eating these berries raw and even the leaves raw. Wtf.

I went out to check the plant(s) for berries. The large black nightshade had some ripe ones. Oddly, I did not really want to touch the plant. This was weird, because I have been growing this plant for several years now and have had no such compunction. I have touched them and even yanked out some of them last year without any gloves on. I didn’t feel any more concerned then than I would about pulling up a tomato. But it didn’t feel good harvesting these berries. I took them inside and put them in the freezer.

Then I read Scullery Maid’s post about Nightshade. It really gave me pause.

Wednesday night I took out the tarot to see what it had to say about things, because it seemed like black nightshade was behaving like a grade-A jackass. And why? I could not see any reason for it. In the past, I might expect this kind of bullying from Datura, but not black nightshade. And Datura has been fine this year, pitching none of the terrifying visions it threw at me last year.

I did two small spreads. The first was a “What should I do?” spread. It showed my situation as the Queen of Swords (I wasn’t sure how to read this in this context) and gave me two choices. The choice it recommended against was the Three of Swords (Sorrow in my deck). A very Saturnian card that implied despairing, giving up. It recommended The Sun instead–optimism, striving to achieve goals, and said this would lead to The Wheel of Fortune. The Sun turning up was interesting to me in light of recent thoughts about solar vs chthonic work. I had noticed over the past few days something growing up in the datura area that looks like a sunflower (and a wild sunflower sprang up in the artemisia patch–I forgot how much I like those things). This makes me wonder if I am being counseled to turn away from the pretty much exclusively Saturnian work I have been doing and incorporate more Solar work.

I then asked “What’s up with black nightshade?” I thought of Lady Scylla, because the first card I turned up was Death, and she had remarked that the Thoth deck, which is what I use, seemed like it was always giving her Death or the Tower, etc. It’s a card that isn’t that alien to me, because it is ruled by Scorpio, in which I have four planets. In this layout, Death signified the situation I was in, and the way I read it, it told me that something was coming to an end, a relationship was ending, there was something I had to give up.

The spread recommended that I strive for the Knight of Disks. This is a card of great fertility, attachment to the earth, and being responsible, professional and stable. To me, that said my love for gardening and attachment to the earth should be my guide in this matter and that I should not engage in risk-taking or recklessness. I noticed that the knight’s armor is black, a Saturnian color (so maintaining Saturnian work?), but he is looking at the (setting?) sun. Oh, and he’s a black knight(shade). The layout indicated that if I followed the guidance of that card, it would lead to the Queen of Wands. I’ve gotten that card before as a goal card, and it’s interesting to me that it’s very fiery (and thus fit with the Sun in the previous reading), yet it’s a controlled fire–turning passion into spirit might be one way to look at it. In the picture, the queen rests her hand on the head of a leopard. To me this represents the gentle, easy control of passion (and was perhaps a reference to my relationship with my cats). It certainly fit with the temper thing.

Outside of not eating anymore raw berries from this plant, I haven’t decided what to do, whether I am going to remove it from my garden or go ahead as planned or simply forcus on the named varieties that have been developed specifically for eating–the chichiquelite and the Wonderberry–and just gather the species berries for the sake of acquiring fresh seeds. I do think, though, that I am going to plant a bunch of sunflowers just to balance things out a bit.

I can’t think of any rational reason why the berries of the plant I harvested from should be any more potent than those of any other black nightshade. The plant isn’t stressed (stress can cause alkaloid levels to greatly increase). I don’t think it’s getting too much sun or too little water (which also increase alkaloid levels). It’s got plenty of fertility from the peas that were there before, so I haven’t given it any fertilizer; excessive fertilizer, esp. synthetic, which I don’t use, can sometimes cause buildups of dangerous nitrates in plant leaves, and those are toxic.  It is planted next to the patio, and I make a practice of not planting anything I will be consuming the leaves of there, because I am sure there is lead paint in the soil there. Lead and other heavy metals are taken up by various plants, but they are concentrated in leaves, not fruits, in terms of the nightshade family. Ditto with other toxins, like PCBs. So it can’t be that. I made sure the berries were ripe, so that’s not the issue. I can’t think of any rational reason why the berries off this particular plant should be problematic. Maybe it is just the genetic makeup of the seeds I planted. That’s the only rational explanation, but it flies in the face of everything Thayer says about eating this plant, since the berries were in no way bitter.

One thing that occurred to me this morning was the question of the relationship between datura and black nightshade for me. The black nightshade seems to be trying to push the datura aside in the garden. Black nightshade has appeared all over the place, but datura has pretty much stuck to its patch. It is like a chess board where one side has gotten a piece all the way over to the other side of the board. It seems aggressive.

After writing this, I went out to look at the plants and realized that the plant I picked berries from, the volunteer in the datura patch, is in pretty much full sun. That WOULD increase the alkaloids. Normally, that spot would be partial shade because there would be stuff growing on the trellis. But right now the trellis is bare. I planted cukes there, but they are just coming up. And even so, this black nightshade chose to grow there. The ones I planted are all in shade. The sunniness of the spot also made me think immediately of The Sun card in the tarot reading I did. Hmm.

I also harvested spearmint today. The plants are beautiful, big and healthy, with fat shining leaves thickly quilted. I kept the leaves whole, just removed them from the stalks, and am drying them at a very low temperature so they keep their max potency. Spearmint tea is one of my favorites. It’s great for the digestion when one indulges in too much Fire food.:) Peppermint, in contrast to spearmint, has always seemed Fiery to me. It’s usually the mint recommended for digestion, but I cannot use it that way. It’s got to be spearmint instead.

I rarely write about my dreams here, but I had a dream the night before last that has not left me yet. It was long and involved, but the part I remember now involved me being in a sort of underground bar. I didn’t know the other people there, who were carousing, but not in an obnoxious way. A huge mirror hung on the wall–round and Moon-like, with a frame that gave it a shape similar to that of a mantel clock. It had black painted designs along its edges that meant something. No one else noticed the mirror, which I thought was odd. I grasped the edge of the mirror and tore off the first layer, which came away as a transparent membrane covered with black writing and symbols–it represented a door into another place. Below that membrane was another, with different symbols, to yet another place. I tore that one off too. I tore off more and more layers. The people in the bar mostly ignored me, although I was announcing to them what I was doing. Finally I was tearing off multiple layers at a time. And I got down to bare, plain Moon/mirror. It was no longer glass shiny but had become duller, almost metallic, like a sheet of polished, hammered aluminum. I decided that this would be the door I would go through–the door to the unknown, to what I thought was the quintessence of Moon. I announced this to everyone in the bar like they cared and then jumped up at the mirror, feet first. But I didn’t go through. I just banged into the mirror and fell to the floor. I tried it a few more times, but no dice. I had removed so many layers that getting through was no longer possible. It was just a mirror now, no longer the Moon or a door. I felt disappointed that I would have to remain in that world until I found another portal through which to leave it–IF I found one. I promised myself I would not be such a show-off if I did. By foolishly tearing off those layers, I had lost my chances to get out of that world.

No one even noticed my defeat. They had better things to do, like chatting and drinking and fooling around.

I left the bar to wander dejectedly in the crooked streets of that dark city.