Herbalism (Wortcunning)

Herbalism, known in older English usage as wortcunning, "the craft of the worts (herbs)", is the traditional knowledge and use of plants for healing, protection, and magic. It spans a practical and a symbolic dimension that were, for most of history, inseparable. On the practical side it is the ancient art of preparing plants as medicine: teas and infusions, tinctures, salves, oils, and poultices, drawing on an accumulated empirical knowledge of which plants soothe, purge, stimulate, or calm, a body of lore recorded from the ancient herbals of Dioscorides and Pliny through the medieval monastic physic gardens and the early modern herbalists like Culpeper, and preserved in countless folk traditions and, in living form, in systems such as Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.

On the magical and religious side, herbs carried symbolic and protective virtues: particular plants were gathered at particular times, hung, carried, or burned to ward off evil, attract love or luck, or aid in ritual, the domain of the cunning-folk and, in modern usage, of Wiccan and Pagan practice, where wortcunning names the witch's knowledge of the powers of herbs. The two dimensions overlap in the real pharmacology of many "magical" plants, including the potent and dangerous psychoactives (henbane, belladonna, mandrake) long associated with witchcraft. Herbalism is historically significant as the ancestor of modern pharmacology, many drugs derive from plants long used by herbalists, while surviving as both a complementary health practice and a magical-religious craft.

Western herbal knowledge ran through a chain of books for a very long time. Dioscorides compiled his account of medicinal substances in the first century AD, and it remained the standard reference in Greek, Arabic and Latin for something like fifteen hundred years, copied, translated and illustrated but rarely challenged. Monastic and vernacular traditions added to it; the Anglo-Saxon leechbooks preserve a distinct northern layer.

Nicholas Culpeper broke a different kind of authority. In 1649 he published an English translation of the London physicians' pharmacopoeia, which had been kept in Latin, and followed it with a herbal that assigned each plant a planetary ruler. The astrology was traditional. The politics were not: putting the material in English put it in the hands of people who could not afford a physician, and the College of Physicians was furious.

Alongside all this ran the doctrine of signatures, the principle that a plant's appearance indicates its use, so that a yellow flower treats jaundice and a walnut the brain. It is a memorable system and it is not a method of discovery, since the resemblances are found after the use is known.

The parting came with isolation. Once morphine was separated from opium at the start of the nineteenth century, and salicylate and quinine followed, it became possible to give a known quantity of a single compound. Pharmacology went that way and herbal practice did not, and the argument between whole plant and isolated constituent is still live.