HIGH M▲GI©K

phillypagan:

As a part of my ongoing personal studies, I’m reading The Herbial Alchemist’s Handbook by Karen Harrison (find it here). I’m really interested in herbs, as you might have noticed, in part because I am a chem major, and what is herb work if not chemistry, but also because I am a firm believer that any cooking is a type of magic, and a very basic and powerful form of magic. 

But enough about why half of my posts have the #herbs tag on them. Now my notes.

Introduction

• “In this book, we explore Herbal Alchemy as practiced tin the West, through the uses of the plants and their Planetary signatures as developed by the 14th-century philosopher and Alchemist Paracelsus.” Yeah this book capitalizes many things which may or may not need capitalization. 
• Paracelsus basically wrote the Doctrine of Signatures, and based it very much on astrological correspondences. I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, you guys know what I think of astrology (fuck that shit the math isn’t there). On the other, I do use rough solar and lunar associations with herbs to remember what sort of properties they have—lavender is lunar and good for psychic/mental/emotional things, chamomile is solar and good for physical. Basically I am going to take what I can from this book, and then go back and re-test the things I care about, get my own data, and reconcile my data with this book’s data. (Yes I use the word “data” in reference to information because data is great and also I am a science major don’t you judge me)
• Something I have heard and will continually return to: early in the life of science, art, and religion, there was no difference between the three disciplines. There is a reason early priests made major scientific discoveries.