Mugwort

Mugwort is Artemisia vulgaris, a tall, weedy, silver-backed perennial of roadsides and waste ground across Europe and Asia. The genus is named for Artemis and includes wormwood, tarragon and the sagebrushes; the family resemblance is in the bitter, aromatic, often thujone-bearing foliage rather than in anything showy. Mugwort is not a striking plant and has never been cultivated for beauty.

Its most substantial use is one that English-language sources routinely omit. Moxibustion (the burning of compressed dried plant material on or above acupuncture points, practised across China, Japan and Korea for many centuries), uses mugwort. The Chinese ai, the Japanese yomogi, and the moxa of the word moxibustion are this genus, generally Artemisia argyi or Artemisia princeps rather than vulgaris proper, but the same plant group. This is a continuous, documented, institutionally transmitted therapeutic tradition with a literature of its own, and it dwarfs anything in the European folklore in scale and continuity.

The plant is also eaten. Japanese kusamochi and Korean ssuk preparations use young mugwort leaves as a food colouring and flavouring, and the spring shoots are a seasonal vegetable in several cuisines.

The name is unresolved. The derivation from the drinking mug, on the basis of use in flavouring beer before hops, is often repeated and is not secure; a derivation from Old English mycg, a midge, on the basis of use as an insect repellent, is equally possible and equally unproven.

Mugwort has one genuinely early European attestation, and it is worth separating from the mass of later material.

The Nine Herbs Charm is an Old English metrical charm preserved in the tenth-century medical compilation known as the Lacnunga. It names nine plants and addresses them directly, and mugwort is the first: Gemyne du, mugwyrt, hwaet pu ameldodest: remember, mugwort, what you made known. The charm calls it una, the oldest of herbs. That is a real Anglo-Saxon text giving mugwort priority among healing plants, and it is the source of the epithet mother of herbs that later writers repeat without citation.

Culpeper in 1653 assigns mugwort to Venus, and his ground is the standard one in his scheme: he uses it for complaints of the womb and the menstrual cycle, and in the Complete Herbal that class of use puts a plant under Venus almost automatically. The reasoning is systematic rather than observational. It is worth noticing that Culpeper's Venus category is doing a lot of work across many unrelated plants, which is a general weakness of the method.

Later occult compilers frequently move mugwort to the Moon, on the strength of its reputation for divination and dreaming. That reassignment is modern and it is not an emendation of Culpeper; it is a different tradition reaching a different answer for different reasons, and sources that print the Moon attribution as though it were the herbal's are simply in error.

The charm itself should not be over-read in the other direction either. It is a Christianised text, it invokes Christ and the nine glories, and it sits in a manuscript alongside Latin liturgical material, so it is not a window onto pre-Christian Germanic religion, whatever it may preserve. What it does establish, securely, is that mugwort held first place in a list of healing plants in tenth-century England, and that is a genuinely early attestation of the plant's standing.

The strongest modern association of mugwort is with dreaming, scrying and the opening of vision, usually as a pillow stuffing, a tea or a smoking herb. This is the claim most worth examining, because it is asserted everywhere and sourced almost nowhere.

What can be documented is thin. The Anglo-Saxon charm credits mugwort with power against poison and infection, not with visions. Culpeper says nothing about dreams. The dream and scrying literature in English is essentially twentieth century, consolidated in the herbal handbooks of the modern magical revival, and it should be described as such rather than projected backwards. That is not an argument that the practice is worthless; it is an argument about its age.

There is one older and more precise link, and it belongs to a different scheme entirely. Agrippa's list of the fifteen Behenian fixed stars pairs each star with a stone and a plant for talismanic use, and the plant assigned to Regulus is mugwort. That is a documented Renaissance correspondence with a named source, and it is far better evidence than the unattributed dream lore, though it says nothing about dreams.

The plant contains thujone, as its close relative wormwood does, in smaller quantity. Thujone is a neurotoxin at sufficient dose. Ordinary culinary and tea quantities of mugwort are not regarded as hazardous, but the plant is not inert, and the traditional caution against use in pregnancy has a real basis in its emmenagogue action.

Mugwort is also a significant cause of hay fever in late summer across Europe, and its pollen cross-reacts with birch and with several foods including celery and carrot in what allergists call the mugwort-celery-spice syndrome. A plant credited with opening the senses is, for a measurable fraction of the population, chiefly an irritant of them.