Thirteen Pathways of Occult Herbalism. Daniel A Schulke

contradict both scientific and occult orthodoxy. This revelation of the nature of the patterns of place is in fact a partial portrait of the genius loci, or spirit of place.

      The nature of phenology is inherently pure—it cannot be capitalized upon in a broad way, because it deals inherently with locality, and thereby intimacy: as an art it renders up secrets that will be of direct benefit to the scribe. Its greatest importance is thus to the practitioner who creates it, the land of its immediate documentation, and the local community of plants, animal, and mankind.

      Περιπλάνηση • Periplánisi

      THE PATH OF PEREGRINATION

      The Path of Peregrination, or Wandering, involves physical movement between locations, both physical and spiritual, for the gaining of magical knowledge. It may be considered opposite, yet also complimentary, to the Path of Witness. Its power lies in diversity of locality, and in the gnosis gained by movement. This way of learning arises from the exposure to that which one has never seen, but also gaining understanding of the locations themselves, and how plant power manifests there.

      It is a fact of botany that plants vary in their attributes by location, and there are countless examples of this. A conifer growing at the timberline may be stunted to an almost impossibly small size; the same tree at lower elevations will be tall and stately, though they are the same species. The stately California Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia), usually a tree of grand bearing, becomes stunted and wizened along the central coast fog belts, earning the name ‘pygmy oak.’ A medicinal plant, such as Salvia divinorum may have differing concentrations of medicinal principles based on whether it grows in a sunny location or a shady one. The Pathway of Peregrination allows the seeker perspective on the diversity of plant species, affording a kind of intimacy that textual education cannot.

      Similarly, the traditions of plant magic and medicine will vary by location, in accord with the history of the human culture situated there. The solanaceous plant Pitchuri (Duboisia hopwoodii) used in its Indigenous Australian context, will draw directly from its reservoir of power in the land and the people, while the same plant grown in a botanical garden in England will not. Likewise, one plant may be used for completely different magical purposes, sometimes as divergent as spells of healing and cursing, in geographically proximal areas. This phenomenon is one that has yet to be addressed in books of magical plant correspondences, as the human mind is trained to seek simple, singular answers, rather than complexities. The Path of Wandering thus affords us the opportunity to transcend simplistic models of understanding plants and their power, forsaking the insular world of the library for the real world.

      This leads us to the study of plant communities, a subject of incredible importance, not only to ecology, the discipline whence it emerged, but also to esoteric botany. Each plant not only has favored conditions for growth, such as soil type, climate, and amount of light, but also those plants it prefers to grow near. These botanical alliances may serve, through the doctrine of correspondences, to indicate unusual spirit-presences and/or to potentiate the powers of each plant in the community. Illustrative of this concept is a place I have often walked to, its sole plant inhabitants are Blue Elder (Sambucus cerulea), Poison Hemlock (Conium maculatum), Stinging Nettle (Urtica dioica) and Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum). Such an aggregation of poisonous, witching and ‘hostile’ species serves not only as a shrine of contemplations of the great Circe and her powers, it also affords privacy against the intrusions of humanity.