Two herbs long held sacred in the traditions of women, witches, and wise folk.

Use it to create a layer of discernment and protection around yourself, as support during your bleeding time or other ceremonial or liminal moments, to relax the muscles and soothe the nerves, and as an invocation to reclaim the old stories and medicine ways.

Ingredients: mugwort leaves & flowers (Artemesia douglasiana) and yarrow leaves & flowers (Achillea millefolium), a small amount of potentizing, preservative cane alcohol, and olive oil- all organic.

The name of this medicine was inspired by a passage from a medieval text that was uncovered by women's historian Max Dashú and written about in her phenomenal book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion:

Swa wiccan tæca∂

"as the witches teach"

This was the contextualization provided by an Anglo-Saxon translator to a Frankish priestly denunciation of people who “bring their offerings to earth­fast stone and trees and wellsprings." By adding the explanatory phrase "as the witches teach,” he demonstrated that in his time "witch" encompassed animist ceremony at natural sanctuaries, not harmdoers.

In other words, though the male Christian conquerers at the time tried to impose their patriarchal and monotheistic view of the world on to old Europe, their own texts and writings frequently allude to the fact that the people still seek the help of women, witches, and wise folk, whose teachings show a relationship with and reverence for the living earth.

As herbalist Asia Suler writes in her wonderful essay Real Witches See Possibility:

"Witch is a term as shifting and volatile as mercury. Over time it has been an accusation, a slur, a fear, a story, a fairytale, and a costume. But in the beginning, a witch was someone who was recognized as working with healing. A person who had a direct relationship to the medicine of those things we cannot immediately see."

Mugwort and yarrow have a long tradition of use in Europe and everywhere else they grow, and working with (and smelling!) these plants invokes in my mind the many many ancestral wise folk throughout the millennia who have done as we still do today- turn to the earth and her medicine plants for ceremony, healing, and enchantment.

I highly recommend Max's book, her website Suppressed Histories, and her fabulous Facebook page (updated daily with images and information "restoring women to cultural memory,").

Organically grown by us

4oz

For more mugwort medicine, check out our Redwood + Mugwort body oil and our Bedtime Bear Sleep Elixir.

If you’d like to learn to make your own super potent, shelf stable, whole plant infused herbal body oils from the wise woman who taught me, check out my teacher Kami McBride’s beautiful & brilliant online course Handcrafted Healing Herbal Oils.