A Halloween herbarium of human-shaped roots, ancient remedies, and tales of transformation.
When a Plant Wears Two Faces
As Halloween approaches, let us open a herbarium whose pages promise more than comfort. Some plants appear there as riddles: alluring and fearsome, sought after for their properties, and surrounded by stories whose roots seem to extend into the invisible.
Belladonna (Atropa belladonna), mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), and black henbane (Hyoscyamus niger) belong to the nightshade family. They contain tropane alkaloids, a family of substances including atropine, hyoscyamine, and scopolamine, which can act powerfully on the nervous system. [1]
These plants raise a question that reaches beyond the cauldron: how can the same substance produce such opposing effects? We would like the garden to separate clearly what heals from what destroys. Yet its boundaries do not always follow ours.
A plant’s power does not yet tell us what we should do with it.
Belladonna: Beauty and the Thread
Belladonna carries its contradiction even in its name. Bella donna means “beautiful woman” in Italian, while Atropa refers to Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread of life in Greek mythology. The cosmetic story associated with the plant tells of Renaissance women using it to dilate their pupils. Beneath the alluring appearance of its black berries, however, lies a highly toxic plant. [2]
Beauty and severance are thus joined in a single name. What attracts the eye also bears the name of what can extinguish it.
In this herbarium, belladonna becomes the plant of insufficient appearances. A gleaming berry does not reveal its nature to the one who contemplates it. Seeing its shape, knowing its name, recognizing its shine: none of these encounters exhausts what it is.
Its connection with the pupils lends this image another depth. The plant is no longer merely looked at: it acts on the very organ that looks upon it. The outer world touches the conditions of our perception.
Before it, the question turns back on us: what do we know of what we see when we know so little about what allows us to see?
Vervain — The Herbarium of Mysterious Plants
Learn to recognize what the garden conceals.
Continue discovering plants, their properties, and their preparations with Vervain’s herbalism quizzes.
Mandrake: The Face Beneath the Earth
In the medieval manuscripts presented by the British Library, the mandrake takes on an almost human form. Its root becomes a body, sometimes drawn with arms and legs. Stories attribute to it a scream capable of driving mad whoever pulls it from the ground; some illustrations show a dog tied to the plant so it can perform the harvest in place of a human being. [3]
Long before these images, Pliny the Elder had already mentioned in his Natural History mandrake preparations administered before incisions to dull pain. He also warned of the fatal effects of an excessive amount. This account belongs to the history of remedies, not to a method that should be reproduced. [4]
A strange correspondence appears: the root asked to silence pain is given, in legend, an unbearable scream.
We may hear this scream as resistance. What the hand intended to grasp as mere matter suddenly presents itself as a being. The plant has a face; uprooting it becomes a disturbing encounter with our own form.
Mandrake thus reverses our gaze upon the earth. We sought a remedy there and discovered a resemblance. The human body no longer seems entirely separate from the garden: something of it appears to be waiting beneath the surface.
What we thought we held before us begins to look back at us.
Black Henbane: The Thread of Consciousness
Black henbane extends this encounter between the plant and inner experience. It is one of the plants whose poisoning can cause confusion, hallucinations, and memory disturbances. Here, altered perception may become a profound loss of bearings. [1]
When Pliny describes henbane, he already dwells on its ambiguity: he marvels that a substance for which remedies against poisoning are sought should itself be prescribed as a remedy. The paradox is therefore not a recent invention; it lies at the heart of his observation of the plant. [4]
In our herbarium, henbane gives form to the delicate bond between body and consciousness. We may imagine our thoughts as a realm separate from the flesh. Yet matter from outside is enough to disturb the order in which sensations, memories, and presences appear to us.
The invisible is no longer merely what might lie hidden behind the world. It is also this ordinarily imperceptible relationship that allows us to inhabit it.
Henbane reveals its fragility: the thread that connects us to ourselves also belongs to the living world.
Flying Ointments: Matter and the Journey
Witches’ ointments occupy precisely this boundary between substance and transformation. Historical texts assign them a role in experiences of flight. The hypothesis that plant-based ointments caused visions remains disputed, however: Michael Ostling points to the weakness of the evidence for their use by people accused of witchcraft, while Tom Hatsis argues that some practices were likely. Not every tale of flight can therefore be reduced to a proven hallucinogenic recipe. [5] [6]
This uncertainty takes nothing away from the power of the image.
In the story, a small amount of matter accompanies the crossing of an immense distance. The body leaves its ordinary condition; home, roads, and familiar boundaries cease to contain the journey.
The plant becomes the meeting point of two opposing movements: it belongs to the earth, yet it is credited with the power to detach its user from it. The root descends; the imagination rises.
Beneath the image of the body taking flight appears another transformation: that of the relationship between a being and the world it inhabits.
From Poison to Remedy: The Art of Measure
Atropine has medical uses today, particularly for dilating the pupils in ophthalmology. Scopolamine, administered as a transdermal medication, is used to prevent nausea and vomiting associated with motion sickness or certain surgical procedures. [7] [8]
These uses do not make raw plants interchangeable with medicines. Their alkaloid content varies, including among different parts of the same plant. [1]
The passage from poison to remedy does not simply consist in discovering a hidden power. It requires understanding it, measuring it, and giving it precise conditions.
This transformation offers a final reading of our herbarium: a force does not become beneficial simply because we wish it to be. It must find the right relationship with what receives it.
These three plants are toxic and are not suitable for home preparations.
Their presence here is an invitation to study, not to experiment. [1]
What the Nocturnal Garden Keeps
Belladonna questions the gaze. Mandrake brings our likeness forth from beneath the earth. Henbane reveals the subtle thread connecting matter and consciousness.
At Halloween, this herbarium can be read as something other than a catalogue of poisons or a collection of superstitions. It places us before plants whose properties and stories do not merge, but answer one another.
Herbalism begins here with attentiveness: looking long enough to move beyond first appearances, learning precisely enough not to confuse power with mastery.
The true secret of these plants may not be to give us power over the world, but to teach us what place we can take within it.