Wormwood

Wormwood is Artemisia absinthium, and it is the source of one of the more persistent pieces of misinformation in popular herbalism.

The plant is intensely bitter, the bitterness coming chiefly from absinthin. It flavours vermouth, the word is a French borrowing of German Wermut, wormwood, and it is the defining botanical of absinthe, alongside anise and fennel. Absinthe was banned across much of Europe and in the United States in the years around 1910, after a campaign attributing insanity, convulsions and violence to a supposed poison in the drink.

That poison was identified as thujone, and the identification has not held up. Thujone is genuinely a neurotoxin at high dose, and it is genuinely present in wormwood. But chemical analysis of sealed pre-ban bottles, carried out from the 1990s onward, found thujone concentrations far below what the campaign assumed and generally within the limits now permitted in the European Union. The most economical explanation of absinthe's effects is that it was an extremely strong spirit, frequently around 70 percent alcohol, drunk heavily, and in the cheaper grades adulterated with substances including copper salts and antimony. The ban rested on bad chemistry and on a temperance politics looking for a target.

The plant is bitter enough to be self-limiting in most preparations, and it is a traditional anthelmintic, the English name records the use against intestinal worms, and this is one of the cases where the folk name and the folk use agree.

Culpeper places wormwood under Mars, and reads its extreme bitterness as the martial signature. That much is ordinary. What is not ordinary is the entry itself.

The wormwood article in the Complete Herbal is the longest and by some distance the oddest in the book. Culpeper abandons the format he uses everywhere else (description, place, time, government and virtues), and writes several pages of first-person argument about martial sympathy, addressed partly to the reader and partly to his critics, ranging over the wars of the planets, the doctrine of sympathy and antipathy, and a good deal of self-defence. It reads as a manifesto that happens to have been filed under a herb.

This matters for how the book should be used. Culpeper was not compiling a neutral reference. He was a radical who published in English, deliberately, to break the Latin monopoly of the College of Physicians, and the Complete Herbal is a polemical work as well as a practical one. The planetary rulerships in it are his own systematisation, applied consistently but from a theory he was arguing for rather than reporting.

The consequence is that a phrase like Culpeper assigns this herb to Mars means something narrower than it sounds. It means one seventeenth-century English astrologer-physician placed it there, in a scheme he was actively promoting, for reasons he sets out and which can be examined. It does not mean the attribution is traditional, and it certainly does not mean it is ancient.

Wormwood appears in the Hebrew Bible as la'anah, always as a figure for bitterness and its consequences, the bitter end of the strange woman in Proverbs, justice turned to wormwood in Amos, the wormwood and the gall of Lamentations. It is a metaphor of bitterness and poisoning, not a pharmacological reference.

The famous passage is Revelation 8:10-11, where a great star falls burning, and the name of the star is called Wormwood, and a third of the waters become wormwood and many die of them. The Greek is apsinthos, which is the absinthium of the Latin and the botanical name.

From the 1986 reactor accident onward this verse has been offered as a prophecy of Chernobyl, on the ground that the Ukrainian place name means wormwood. The etymology is roughly right and the identification is wrong. Ukrainian chornobyl denotes Artemisia vulgaris, mugwort, the common dark-stemmed roadside species, and not Artemisia absinthium, which is the plant of Revelation. The two are relatives in one genus, not the same plant, and Ukrainian distinguishes them, using polyn for absinthe wormwood. The reading requires the two to be treated as one word in a language that does not treat them as one word.

It is a good example of a general pattern in this material: a claim that is almost checkable, that survives because almost nobody checks it, and that dissolves on contact with the vocabulary of the language it depends on.

The town, in any case, was named centuries before the reactor, and the reactor was named for the town. For the verse to be a prophecy, the prophecy would have to be about a place name rather than about an event, a much weaker claim than the one usually being made.