Bay Laurel

The bay is Laurus nobilis, and its attribution to the Sun is one of the few that genuinely predates the herbals, because the tree is Apollo's in Greek cult and Apollo was identified with the Sun.

The myth is set out most fully by Ovid in the Metamorphoses: Apollo, struck by Eros's arrow, pursues the nymph Daphne, who prays to be delivered and is transformed into a laurel; the god, unable to have her, takes the tree as his own and wears its leaves. Daphne is simply the Greek word for the laurel, so the story is an etymological myth, it exists to explain a name and a cultic fact rather than to report an event.

The crown follows from the cult. Laurel wreaths were awarded at the Pythian Games at Delphi, which were Apollo's festival, and the practice spread: to victorious generals in Rome, to poets, and eventually into the academic and civic vocabulary of Europe. The English word laureate is this wreath, and baccalaureate is usually derived from bacca lauri, laurel berry, though that derivation is contested and may be a learned reworking of an unrelated word.

Culpeper in 1653 calls the bay a herb of the Sun and of Leo, which is consistent, Leo being the Sun's sign. He is repeating a classical attribution rather than making one, and that is unusual: most of his rulerships are his own.

Whether Apollo was originally a sun god is in fact contested among historians of Greek religion, the identification with Helios is clear in later sources and much less clear in the earliest. But by the time any astrological scheme was drawing up correspondences, Apollo and the Sun were one, and the bay came with him.

The claim that the priestess at Delphi chewed or burned laurel to induce prophetic trance is repeated constantly and is on much weaker ground than it appears.

What the ancient sources actually support is that the Pythia was associated with the laurel, she is described as holding a laurel branch, the temple was laurel-hung, and Apollo's tree was present throughout the sanctuary. Plutarch, who was a priest at Delphi and is the best-placed witness, discusses the sources of inspiration at some length in the Moralia and attributes the effect to a pneuma, a vapour or exhalation from the ground, and explicitly not to the laurel. He also records that the vapour had weakened over time.

The laurel-chewing detail appears in later and less well-placed sources and has been amplified by modern writers who wanted a pharmacological explanation. There is no known psychoactive constituent of Laurus nobilis that would produce trance at any plausible dose, and attempts to demonstrate one have failed. Chewing bay leaves does very little.

The vapour, interestingly, has partial support. Geological work from the late 1990s onward identified faults intersecting beneath the temple and traces of light hydrocarbon gases including ethylene in the local water and travertine, and ethylene at low concentration does produce a mild euphoric, disinhibited state. That work has been contested on the quantities involved and is not settled. It is a genuinely open question, which is a better description than either the confident chemical explanation or the flat dismissal.

The bay's ordinary life is culinary and it involves a real botanical trap.

Laurus nobilis is the bay of the kitchen, of Mediterranean origin, a slow-growing evergreen that will make a substantial tree but is usually kept clipped. Its leaves are used dried in stocks, stews and marinades and are removed before serving, chiefly because they stay stiff and sharp-edged rather than because they are harmful.

Several unrelated plants are also called laurel, and some are dangerous. Cherry laurel, Prunus laurocerasus, is a common hedging shrub whose leaves smell of almonds when crushed because they release hydrogen cyanide on damage; it is not a culinary herb, and it has caused poisonings. Mountain laurel, Kalmia latifolia, is a North American ericaceous shrub containing grayanotoxins and is likewise toxic. California bay, Umbellularia californica, is edible but much stronger than true bay and can cause headache. The shared common name reflects leaf shape and evergreen habit and nothing else; the plants are in three different families.

The magical uses recorded for bay (a leaf under the pillow for true dreams, a wish written on a leaf and burned, a tree by the house against lightning), are English folk practice of uncertain age, transmitted through the herbal and almanac literature. The protection against lightning is the oldest strand and is classical: Pliny reports the belief, and it is attached to the story that the emperor Tiberius wore a laurel wreath in thunderstorms.