Mugwort | Spinner of Dreams
From late October through late November—Scorpio season—what we are seeing outside in Nature is so clearly reflecting the internal landscape that we’re navigating: the leaves have been turning from the bright reds, yellows, and oranges to the seemingly dead brown color. The trees are letting all the excess go and being stripped to their bare-bones core essence. Even for those not geographically situated in a place that is experiencing this shift, the transformative energy that is present on the Earth at this time may still be felt especially if there are strong connections to the places where Fall is in fully underway.
In the medicine wheel Autumn is the West, the place of sunset. It’s the end of the day when we can put all of the activity to rest and reflect. It is also the Water Element; the element of flow, of cleansing, dissolving, merging, letting go; the element of the womb and creation, our emotions, the blood, and the majority of our bodies. We’re made up of 70% water, so it’s truly our essence or our soul. And when you think about the essence of water, it is to descend and penetrate to the the deepest layers of the Earth.
By closely following the Elements in Herbalism our learning becomes so much more grounded and embodied as opposed to purely intellectual, which is important in this age where we are drowning in information while starving of wisdom.
Scorpio is fixed water, which you can envision as a lake or a frozen pond. When you peer into these fixed waters, you see your reflection and what’s beneath that is hidden. We have to dive into the mystery to see what’s there. And that makes us really uncomfortable because of our inability to control the non-linear wildness of this space. Releasing control actually requires us to face death.
While the Sun is in Scorpio—sign of death and rebirth, the Moon is in the opposite sign of Taurus—the heart of Spring, which brings forth birth, abundance, and growth. On a physical level, these are also opposite sides of the same coin. Taurus is the throat, where we intake food. Scorpio is the area of the Sacral, or the second chakra which contains the colon, where we let go of the waste, as well as the reproductive system where we release blood each month and create new life.
As much as Western culture would like to convince us that constant growth is possible, Nature shows us that this is not the case. If the plants never let go of their leaves and just continued to grow and expand non-stop, they would get so cluttered that they’d eventually start to decay from this excess build up. But by letting go, they are nourishing the soil so that they can rebirth stronger each year.
The same goes for the body – unchecked growth is a huge risk factor in all disease because of the major stagnation that results in the waters of the body.
So the trees must eliminate their leaves, our bodies must eliminate excess nutrition and toxins, and on an energetic level we have to give death to or eliminate old habits, thought forms, emotions in order to move forward on our path. Just as if one came to a temperate climate from the tropics or from another planet it might look like the trees are dying, when we let go of old paradigms it might also feel like we’re dying. But in both instances this death is ultimately in service to evolution.
A major part of what makes this letting go so hard is how far removed from death we are in the Western World: it’s avoided at all costs and sterilized with formaldehyde + toxic chemicals. In its place we are sold a false ideal of endless youth.
But as we can see just by looking out the window, the death of one thing is always the birth of another.All new life is conceived and nourished in this dark, fertile womb of creation and it’s within this darkness that we can peel away the layers of illusions and familiar patterns that are keeping us trapped and dream into being our higher purpose—what we came here for.
This is where our November Plant Ally, Mugwort comes in. Mugwort carries the Crone Spirit, that old wise woman who is so rich with strength and wisdom which has been deemed useless and essentially discarded by our culture. We are incentivized to remain in the archetype of the helpless wounded girl rather than rising into our full power as women.
In fact, most people actually see Mugwort as an invasive species and want to eradicate her, which is not only erasing so much wisdom that is really needed as we are in this death/transformation process as a species but is also the ultimate human arrogance to believe we can understand what is and is not beneficial for the Earth without asking and listening to her. So, like the divine feminine, Mugwort has been suppressed, and I feel her making a comeback as both men and women are reconnecting with the goddess.
Mugwort has this gift of dissolving the veil between the conscious and unconscious, giving us major insights through meditation or the dreamworld. Dreams are the messengers of our soul, revealing what’s buried deep in the subconscious, under all the layers of our conditioning. In this way, our dreams show us where we’ve veered off course and how to get back on track, which is ultimately how we heal ourselves.
We’re supported by the Full Moon Lunar Eclipse in Taurus in observing where we are stagnating beneath all the patterns we’ve accumulated throughout our life and through our ancestral lineage and past lives.
In Chinese Medicine, anything we are holding onto, outdated beliefs, ancestral patterns, societal conditioning, traumas, were considered to be “Ghosts.” The Chinese word for ghosts is “Gui” which also translates as “excess phlegm.” Phlegm causes the blood to become thick and congealed, which blocks the heart, distracts the mind, scatters the spirit and weakens the will, leading to self-destructive behavior.
The medicine of Mugwort really shines in clearing these ghosts because its main action is to break up stagnation, promoting the flow of qi. Mugwort clears out energies that are not ours both physically and energetically and through this clearing brings out our deepest desires through the dream world.
This looks like bringing warmth, or the Fire Element, to the womb to stimulate our flow when we are having missing or late cycles from stagnancy in our womb space. The impact of increased movement in the body is an aid to terminating an unwanted pregnancy (do not attempt this on your own), and brings healing to uterine prolapse and scar tissue or adhesions in the womb after a c-section or abortion.
Mugwort also clears excess testosterone, which is a physical manifestation of the hyper-masculine societal conditioning many of us are subject to, making it very beneficial in healing PCOS.
It moves a stuck liver or the flow of bile so that we can digest + process our food as well as our emotions + experiences and then release the waste or what doesn’t serve. By getting things moving, it shifts our inner ecology so that bacteria and parasites can no longer thrive—this includes energetic parasites as well, anything draining our energy. Mugwort is also directly antibacterial and antiparasitic. Some say Mugwort is anti-anxiety but I see her more as a teacher that relaxes the nervous system just enough that it brings up suppressed memories that need to be faced so that they can be processed + released, cultivating greater calm in the long-run but presenting a challenge in the short-term.
The theme that you may notice weaving throughout the Astroherbalism of Mugwort, Scorpio season, and this Full Moon is that all of the symptoms in the body are reflections of the emotional and energetic symptoms and that’s a major aspect of the Scorpio/Taurus axis: Scorpio is the feelings and Taurus is how we experience them in the body and vice versa. You can’t have one without the other. The reason that we have this discomfort around breaking the patterns is because we feel the letting go in our body as pain, a racing heart, or upset stomach. And when we have super powerful emotions we can feel like we’re literally going to die.
But the only way through is through, so rather than resisting, we can face this shedding head-on with Mugwort as an ally.