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Sage, the herb of the European tradition, ruled by Jupiter in Culpeper's herbalism and named for its own claim to heal, carries three contested facts. This is a different page from Sage the incense, the bundled white sage of the North American smoke cleansing trade, which the atlas already treats and describes on its own page. Read closely, this plant's own three facts reduce to two findings: a caution against confusing the two, and a debunked theory behind an old dating claim.

Two Different Plants Called Sage

"The sage of the European herbal tradition is Salvia officinalis. The bundled white sage of the North American smoke cleansing trade is Salvia apiana, a different species with a native range from San Luis Obispo County to northern Baja California, and the two are routinely conflated in correspondence tables that do not say which they mean." The atlas's own contested use fact folds the botanical caution together with a living objection: "Describing Salvia apiana as though it were an ancient European herb, or as though its ceremonial use were freely available, gets both the botany and the provenance wrong," and separately, "Native nations and Native scholars object to the sale of smoke cleansing as a consumer product and to commercial harvesting of the white sage stands their communities gather from. This is a current position of living communities."

A Debunked Theory Behind an Old Date

The other two facts, a start year and an end year for the plant's own dated attribution, are debunked for the identical reason. "The doctrine of signatures holds that the form, colour or habit of a plant declares its use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon. It is a theory of resemblance and not of evidence, and it is not a botanical or pharmacological method." Where a signature plant genuinely does something, the atlas notes, "the activity is a matter of its chemistry and has no relation to its appearance," and the attributions the doctrine produces "are not stable between authors, which is why the same plant is given different planets by different compilers," a reading traced to Culpeper's Complete Herbal of 1653.

Where To Read More

• SageHerbsTwo separate findings: a conflation and appropriation caution distinct from the unrelated Salvia apiana, and a debunked doctrine of signatures dating