Gardening Ideas Hecate

While scrolling through my Facebook on Wednesday, I got an idea. I'm creating a new garden this year. A "Hecate" garden. She's most popularly known as the Cthonic Goddess of Crossroads, Sorcery and Ghosts, but she's also associated with medicine. She's been known to rule over the "brewing of concoctions, medicines and poisons".

She was said to favor offerings of Garlic. Since I grew up in an Italian culture, garlic is already sacrosanct.

A number of other plants (often poisonous, medicinal and/or psychoactive) are associated with Hecate. These include aconite (also called hecateis), belladonna, dittany, and mandrake.

The use of dogs for digging up mandrake is further corroboration of the association of this plant with Hecate; indeed, since at least as early as the first century CE, there are a number of attestations to the apparently widespread practice of using dogs to dig up plants associated with magic.*

In "dog digging" the soil would be loosened around the base of a plant associated with magic, then a string would be tied around the plant, and then to the dog. The dog would be called away and thus, would tear up the plant, roots and all.

In the case of mandrake (named of the person like appearance of the roots) it was thought that the "man" who lived in the roots would scream and deafen you if you dug it up. It was believed that if the spirit of the plant wanted to exact revenge for the digging of the plant, the harm would fall on the dog, and leave the person, intact. There are even legends that say it has to be a black dog that does the digging, since black dogs are heavily associated with Hecate.

Many other herbs and plants are associated with Hecate, including almonds, lavender, myrrh, mugwort, cardamon, Henbane, mint, dandelion, hellebore, and lesser celandine. Several poisons and hallucinogens are linked to Hecate, including hemlock, mandrake, and opium poppy. Many of Hecate's plants were those that can be used shamanistically to achieve varying states of consciousness. (This is not an endorsement or recommendation.)

I don't know what is on my list to grow yet, but I'm really excited about this!



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*Frederick J. Simoons, Plants of Life, Plants of Death, University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, pp. 121-124.