Month: February 2023

Plants and Herbs, Witchcraft

Crocus Folklore & Magical Uses

J.

It’s spring (kind of)!

At least, it’s getting spring-y here. Granted, I think we maybe had about four days of actual “winter,” but it’s been t-shirt weather for the past few days, and looks like it’s going to stay that way for at least another week.

Since things were warming up, I stepped out back to take a look at the yard. The elderberry bushed that I planted last year have some new leaves coming in, the bulbs I planted are starting to poke up through the mulch, and the apples are both looking good.

There’s also a large patch of surprise crocuses that seem to have popped up overnight next to my shed.

A group of pale purple crocuses.

These are either Crocus vernus, the spring crocus, or Crocus tommasinianus, the woodland crocus. They’re beautiful, but decidedly not native to this area. (Crocus vernus and C. tommasinianus are related to C. sativus, the saffron crocus. However, these crocuses are definitely not a way to make rice more delicious.) Still, I am determined to enjoy them before it’s time to remove the bulbs and put in some native coralberry bushes. I’ll probably keep the bulbs and move them to somewhere where they’re less likely to spread.

If you’re also experiencing a flush of these tiny colorful flowers, here’s some old folklore and a few ways to make them magically useful.

Crocus Folklore

In ancient Greek legend, Crocus was a human man. The nymph Smilax was in love with him, but, ever the fuckboy, Crocus was dissatisfied with the affair. The gods turned him into a saffron crocus.

Another version of this story claims that Crocus was a companion of Hermes. Unfortunately, he stood up at an inopportune time during a discus throwing match, and Hermes accidentally killed him. As Crocus’ blood fell on the soil, saffron crocuses sprang up.

Spring crocuses are associated with Persephone, Aphrodite, and Venus. Mythology would also appear to tie this flower to Hermes.

A London source claimed that picking crocuses tended to “draw away the strength.” Therefore, only strong men or healthy young women should attempt to.

A field of purple and white crocuses at the base of a mountain.

According to Pliny, wearing crocus around the neck would prevent drunkenness. Interestingly, Swiss parents would place saffron around their children’s necks as a protective charm (presumably not against drunkenness, or else they’ve got some explaining to do).

In the Victorian language of flowers, crocuses represented cheer and youthful gladness.

This flower is associated with the planets Venus and Mercury, and the element of Water.

Crocus Magical Properties

Historic mentions of crocus as a protective charm typically refer to saffron crocus, not the spring crocuses. It can be hard to tease out folklore and uses attributed to spring crocuses, since the autumn-blooming saffron crocuses were generally considered more useful. For our purposes, I’m going to focus on spring crocuses here.

Spring blooming crocuses are used in charms for love, including platonic love or love of the self.

As an early spring-blooming flower, spring crocuses are also useful for spells for new beginnings.

These flowers are common altar decorations for Imbolc and Ostara. However, use caution if you bring spring crocuses indoors — all varieties of crocus other than C. sativus are toxic. Spring-blooming crocuses can cause diarrhea, vomiting, and digestive upset, while autumn-blooming crocuses can cause liver and kidney damage.

Simple Crocus Spells

You can include crocuses in charm bags for love. Add the dried flowers to a pink or red pouch along with rose petals, lavender flowers, and a bit of cinnamon bark. If you like, add a piece of rose quartz. Dress it with your favorite love-drawing oil (in a pinch, infuse some cinnamon, basil, and rose in grapeseed or sunflower seed oil, and use that) and keep it on you.

You can also use crocuses as a form of sympathetic magic. Plant a bulb along with a slip of paper with your name, and the name of your partner. Declare that as the plant grows, your love will flourish with it. When the flower is at its peak, pick it and save it for a love charm.

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Neodruidry, Plants and Herbs, Witchcraft

It’s Imbolc season. Get the bucket.

J.

I think a big part of what kept me from really connecting with a lot of Wiccan-based Paganism when I was younger was that, at the time, the available source material was pretty prescriptive. Sabbats were on specific days, with specific traditions attached, and there was an onus the follower to do things “right.”

Having lived in a pretty big range of climates, I can say that that’s had an impact, too. It’s hard to feel in the harvest or growing seasons when they just don’t line up with the harvest and growing seasons where these traditions were based. If the wheel of the year is supposed to reconnect humanity to nature and its cycles, a strict interpretation is the opposite of helpful. When I lived in California, for example, it felt like observing the traditional sacred days was sometimes counterproductive — spring didn’t look like it did in Europe, or even in the Eastern US. Neither did winter. It made things feel rote, which robbed them of meaning.

That’s why I’m a big proponent of celebrating the High Days when and how it makes sense to do so. If your growing zone means that you’re not going to see the first signs of spring until March, or won’t ever experience cold and snowfall, then so be it.

All of this is to say that the vast majority of my High Day traditions are pragmatic (perhaps to a fault).

Imbolc passed recently, amid surgeries (one for me, one for the Certified Lap Loaf. We’re both doing well!), falling down the stairs (just me. That part of me is not doing well.), and probably other stuff that I’m forgetting because of the first two things. A lot of ADF members celebrate the High Days on the nearest weekend, which is nice. Less pressure that way when your most-of-you isn’t working correctly.

A picture of the face of a small gray tabby cat. She looks very angry, probably about the blue nylon cone surrounding her head like some kind of fucked-up satellite dish.
Don’t let the barely concealed rage fool you. She’s purring here.

To me, Imbolc is refreshment. It’s deep cleaning, washing my front door, doing repairs, and making food. (This year, it’s also starting plans for home improvements that we won’t be able to do until later spring and early summer, like replacing the roof.) It’s also almost never actually on the first of February.

I don’t set up an Imbolc altar. I follow the same basic ritual structure that I do for any other day. For me, the main difference is the feeling of lightness and renewal that I carry through doing things like scrubbing grout, cleaning out garden beds, de-scaling the dishwasher, and chucking Affresh tablets down the garbage disposal.

When you’re re-learning lost, buried, or reinvented cultural traditions, it’s easy to get caught up in the need for accuracy and correctness. It’s also easy to forget why the High Days existed in the first place — to mark significant occasions throughout the year, largely based on what people who grew crops and raised animals considered significant.
When you get too invested in following the letter of a tradition, you can lose the spirit of it.

From my house to yours, here’s a small thing that I like to do each spring. It works equally well whenever you need to feel that sense of newness and freshness that only spring can bring.

Imbolc Home Cleansing

You’ll want to have:

  • A white candle. (The golden beige of natural beeswax is fine, too.)
  • Dried vervain.
  • Water.
  • A bowl.

First, steep the vervain in some hot water, as if you were going to make a tea. (I like to put vervain and water in a clear jar, then stick it in the sun for a while to infuse. If it’s cloudy where you are, a kettle of boiling water is fine.)

Vervain flowers.

Once the infusion cools, strain out the leaves and pour the resulting liquid into the bowl.

Next, light the candle. Declare, either out loud or to yourself, that this flame represents the return of the sun — whether that’s the literal return of longer daylight hours, or a metaphorical return of warmth and light is up to you.

Carry the bowl and candle to each room of your home, moving in a clockwise direction. Set the candle down in a safe spot and use your fingers to flick the vervain infusion around the perimeter of the room (be sure to get the corners). If you have prayers or chants that feel appropriate here, use them. I usually fall into a kind of stream-of-consciousness monologue about the objective of the working. It’s less important that your words sound nice than it is that they mean something to you and help you focus on what you’re doing.

When you’re through cleansing your entire home, offer the rest of the vervain infusion to your yard, garden, or nearest patch of green stuff. If your candle is small, you can let it burn completely and dispose of the remnants. If it’s a big one, snuff it and re-use it for a cleansing or purification ritual another day.

crystals

Howlite, Magnesite, and White Buffalo Turquoise: Are you being scammed?

J.

Sometimes I feel like howlite and magnesite have a bit of a bad rap. They’re kind of like the flour of the gemstone world — pretty basic, of no offense to anyone, and able to be turned into all kinds of things that most people think are much more interesting. White howlite and magnesite get dyed and turned into imitation “turquoise,” “sodalite,” “lapis,” and just about any other opaque stone you can imagine.

It’s particularly good at imitating turquoise, to the point that there are standard operating procedures used for telling genuine turquoise from the faked howlite and magnesite stuff.

Unfortunately, that’s what makes it easy to pass off as rare, beautiful white buffalo turquoise to an unwary observer.

When a Turquoise Isn’t a Turquoise

This part might get a little confusing but hear me out: Howlite isn’t the same as white buffalo turquoise. Neither is magnesite. However, white buffalo turquoise also isn’t actually turquoise. For this reason, people prefer the term “white buffalo stone.”

A necklace made of blue-green turquoise nuggets.
Photo by Mahmoud Alaydi on Pexels.com

Turquoise is a phosphate of copper and aluminum (CuAl6(PO4)4(OH)8·4H2O). It’s usually a robin’s egg blue to blue green, but can also tend toward a more yellowish green color. Many specimens also exhibit spots, flecks, or spider web-like patterns of black, gray, or brown matrix material.

True turquoise has a pale bluish- or greenish-white streak when subjected to a streak test. It’s also about a 5-6 on the Mohs hardness scale, but it’s a fairly porous stone. Expensive, high-quality specimens are usually at the harder end of the scale, but softer, cheaper specimens are typically stabilized to improve durability. This stone has some other unique physical characteristics, but these are the ones that are most relevant to this subject.

A polished howlite stone showing gray veining.
Ra’ike (see also: de:Benutzer:Ra’ike), CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Howlite is a borate mineral, specifically a calcium borosilicate hydroxide (Ca2B5SiO9(OH)5). It’s a white, cream, or pale gray color, with dark gray to black veins that somewhat resemble matrix inclusions in turquoise. Rarely, howlite forms beautiful flowerlike formations of translucent crystals.

Howlite produces a white streak. It’s about a 3.5 on the Mohs scale, so it’s much softer than turquoise.

A dyed magnesite heart surrounded by a string of dyed magnesite beads.
Becritical, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Magnesite is a magnesium carbonate mineral (MgCO3). It’s typically white, grayish, yellowish, or brownish, with gray veining.

Magnesite produces a white streak. It has a hardness of 3.5-5.0 on the Mohs scale.

White buffalo stone is a calcite mineral, akin to dolomite, with quartz. It’s found near turquoise and forms under similar conditions. The term “white buffalo” is actually a trade name and refers specifically to stones sourced from the Tonopah, Nevada mine owned by the Otteson family. This type of stone is also sometimes sold as white turquoise or sacred buffalo stone.

This stone is a cream to white color with black or brown veins of chert. Some specimens may show faint hints of blue or green from the iron and copper content of the surrounding rock. It’s a pretty soft stone at about 3.5 on the Mohs scale, and also exhibits a white streak.

How Do You Tell Them Apart?

So, we’ve got three white minerals that all exhibit a white streak when you rub them on an unglazed ceramic plate. How do you tell which is which?

It’s not easy, especially since white buffalo stone is pretty rare. The trade name refers to stone that’s found in only one mine in the world, so it’s not like a lot of samples have undergone the kind of testing that would simplify the identification process. (Honestly, I had a hard time even finding images of it because looking for “white buffalo stone” or “white turquoise” tends to return either nothing, or page after page of howlite!) In most cases, you’ll probably have to use a process of elimination.

The most reliable way is to go by hardness. While all of these stones are pretty soft, white buffalo stone is generally the softest.

You can also perform a visual comparison. Howlite and magnesite usually don’t polish up as well as turquoise or white buffalo stone, so they won’t look as shiny.

Magnesite also tends to have more diffuse veining that makes it resemble marble. The veining in howlite and white buffalo stone is more distinct.

If you have a black light, you can look at the stone’s fluorescence. Howlite gives off a sort of brownish yellow color, while magnesite gives off a bluish green.

If you’re willing to invest in a bit of equipment, you may want to pick up a refractometer. Refractive index testing is a reliable way to tell the difference between very similar minerals. Magnesite has a refractive index of 1.509 to 1.700, while howlite is 1.586 to 1.605. Turquoise falls between 1.610 – 1.650, but I have not found any measurements for white buffalo stone itself.

For most people, the easiest way to tell if they’ve duped is the price and location of the stone they’re buying. The cheaper it is, and the farther it is from Nevada, the more likely it is to be howlite or magnesite instead of genuine white buffalo stone. I always recommend that people buy mine- or miner-direct if at all possible, because it reduces the likelihood that you’ll be stuck dealing with unscrupulous middlemen and mislabeled stones.