Welcome, witches.
Wormwood tastes like crushed aspirin. There’s really no other way to describe it. Even for me - a person who generally likes bitter tastes - it tasted intolerable. In an interview with Jennifer McLagan about her book Bitter, the chef described bitter flavors this way:
I think bitter is the most interesting taste, as we can’t seem to agree on it. Only acids signal sour, but thousands of different chemicals elicit a “bitter” response. This makes bitter an elusive flavor that is hard to pin down. It encompasses such a wide range, from subtly bitter celery leaves through to extremely bitter melon. What I find bitter you may not and vice versa. We easily agree on what is salty, sweet, acidic, and probably even umami, however bitter is much harder to define. Bitter is not simply a reaction on our tongue—a taste in the strict sense—but also includes many different signals that register as bitterness in our brain.
Artemisia absinthium (wormwood) is the quintessential emperor of bitterness, and is absolutely not a complex, elusive, or subtle flavor. It is very blunt and to the point: it tastes like being poisoned.
Despite this, our primordial witch-ancestors loved wormwood, along with many actually poisonous herbs like henbane, for their healing and psychotropic properties. One chemical compound famed for this is thujone, frequently associated with wormwood, but plenty of other common plants contain amounts of thujone including mugwort, oregano, and common sage.
It is the perfect topic for this Worm Moon: welcome to the world of wormwood.
Pick Your Poison
The Grimoire Babylon guide to witches’ favorite weeds. While wormwood only tastes like poison, some of these will actually kill you.
Poisons: Hemlock, Henbane, Deadly Nightshade, Wolfsbane, Moonflower
Not poisons: Wormwood, Mugwort, Mandrake, Enchanter’s Nightshade
Absinthe Makes the Heart Grow Fonder
The neurotoxic properties of wormwood were made infamous by the use of the plant in absinthe - flavored with the trinity of wormwood, anise, and fennel, which helps to make the liquid more palatable. Absinthe was beloved by 19th century dilettantes, boulevardiers, and flaneurs who gave it the epithet The Green Fairy (although to some it was the Green Devil) and who said things like:
But, my child, what a sweet, sweet death to die! We are all dying, you know, from one cause or another -- we are all, in this orchid-decked room, slowly moving toward our graves. So how much better to go with this exquisite poison in our veins, with the taste of it on our lips, and the flavor of it in our hearts!
Absintheur Ernest Hemingway was famously a fan of the elixir, describing it as “tongue-numbing, brain-warming, idea-changing, liquid alchemy”, and gave a recipe for a cocktail called Death in the Afternoon: “Pour 1 jigger of absinthe into a champagne glass. Add iced champagne until it attains the proper opalescent milkiness. Drink three to five of these slowly.”
Of all of the spiritus that have influenced art and literature, absinthe has the most devilish reputation. Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud had their famous romantic entanglement under the influence of la fée verte - culminating in Verlaine shooting Rimbaud with a small gun. It left Rimbaud so embittered by the experience he retired from poetry at the decrepit age of 20 to become a heterosexual coffee merchant. Toulouse-Lautrec made his famous paintings of Paris’ demimondes while imbibing absinthe that he stored in a “tippling stick” - a hollowed cane with room for glass phials.
Occultist Aleister Crowley (formerly “the wickedest man in the world,” now mostly known as a old dead racist) wrote an essay about absinthe (under the name of one of the dancers painted by Toulouse-Lautrec, no less), entitled The Green Goddess: “But I can taste souls without the aid of absinthe; and besides, this is magic of absinthe! The spirit of the house has entered into it; it is an elixir, the masterpiece of an old alchemist, no common wine.”
Perhaps the passage most interesting to the witch is this:
The word is from the Greek apsinthion. It means “undrinkable” or, according to some authorities, “undelightful.” In either case, strange paradox! No: for the wormwood draught itself were bitter beyond human endurance; it must be aromatized and mellowed with other herbs.
Chief among these is the gracious Melissa [Lemon Balm], of which the great Paracelsus thought so highly that he incorporated it as the preparation of his Ens Melissa Vitae, which he expected to be an elixir of life and a cure for all diseases, but which in his hands never came to perfection.Then also there are added mint, anise, fennel and hyssop, all holy herbs familiar to all from the Treasury of Hebrew Scripture. And there is even the sacred marjoram which renders man both chaste and passionate; the tender green angelica stalks also infused in this most mystic of concoctions; for like the artemisia absinthium itself it is a plant of Diana, and gives the purity and lucidity, with a touch of the madness, of the Moon; and above all there is the Dittany of Crete of which the eastern Sages say that one flower hath more puissance in high magic than all the other gifts of all the gardens of the world. It is as if the first diviner of absinthe had been indeed a magician intent upon a combination of sacred drugs which should cleanse, fortify and perfume the human soul.
Besides being the poison of choice for Pablo Picasso, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Émile Zola, absinthe is still beloved today by sophisticated, cosmopolitan, astronomically-pretentious-dark-academia types like myself. Goths do love bitterness, and absinthe is the perfect complement to a diet of vermouth, black coffee, and obsessively re-reading The Secret History.
Speaking of, wormwood is also an essential ingredient of vermouth - a velvety beverage where the pungent herb is macerated in wine. If you squint you can see that vermouth and wormwood have a shared etymological root (wormwood in German is Wermut). Wine and wormwood was a common medieval alchemical potion and elixir to cure diseases such as the Plague.
Even in the 1600s, Nicholas Culpeper devoted a particularly bizarre, rambling entry to wormwood in his Complete Herbal - unlike any other description in the book.
Mars eradicates all diseases in the throat by his herbs (for wormwood is one) and sends them to Egypt on an errand never to return more, this done by antipathy. The eyes are under the Luminaries; the right eye of a man, and the left eye of a woman the Sun claims dominion over: the left eye of a man, and the right eye of a woman, are privileges of the Moon, Wormwood, an herb of Mars cures both; what belongs to the Sun by sympathy, because he is exalted in his house; but what belongs to the Moon by antipathy, because he hath his fall in hers.
Which… whaaaa?
My first brush with wormwood came in the form of true absinthe at Bar Marsella in Barcelona, which has not been cleaned since the early 19th century and has piles of dust high enough to prove it. It was one of the more magical and enchanted nights of my life (maybe in a less witchy sense of those words.)
Wormwood encounter number two came when I bought packets of wormwood tea for use in love divination. I made a cup of the stuff in my favorite mug which I promptly knocked off the table - spilling the tea, and shattering the mug. Maybe a sign that wormwood is not to be used lightly. More recently I made some again, tempering it with lemon and letting the drink cool enough that I could chug it. It had no particularly intoxicating effects, but did enhance my creativity a great deal.
Maybe it’s a placebo… or maybe it’s the spiritual culmination of centuries of history - the atavistic rituals, the maddened duels, and refined palate of people who appreciate the taste of crushed aspirin.
The Undrinkable Potion
Despite the name, this tea blend makes wormwood more palatable (although maybe not if you dislike the flavor of black licorice.) This tea is particularly potent for divination, creativity, and bacchanal nights of wild abandon under a full moon.
Ingredients:
Two tablespoons wormwood
One tablespoon dried lemon balm
One tablespoon fennel seeds
One tablespoon aniseed
For a cup of tea, pour boiling water over 1 tablespoon of the tea blend. Steep for 10-20 minutes. Strain and sweeten with honey, if desired.
Ciao (for now),
GB