Hemlock

Hemlock is a deadly poisonous herb of the carrot family, usually living two years, native to Europe and North Africa and naturalised so widely elsewhere that it has become an invasive weed in places. Its tall, hollow stems are smooth and splashed with dark purple blotches, which the species name maculatum, meaning 'spotted', recalls, and an old English legend took for the mark set on Cain. The leaves are finely cut and lacy, the small white flowers gather in umbrella-shaped heads, and the bruised plant smells unpleasantly of mice. Mistaking it for wild carrot, parsley or another of their harmless relatives can be fatal. Ancient Greece gave its juice to condemned prisoners, and Socrates is the most famous of those it killed; Greek myth held such poisonous plants sacred to Hecate and her daughters Circe and Medea. Kynes gathers its darker lore: medieval magicians in Germany and France burned it to make spirits appear, English witches were said to use it to raise spirits and to poison enemies, and Scottish faeries were believed to tip their arrows with the dew that settled on it. Cunningham records its old use in spells to quench sexual desire, and the rubbing of its juice on magical knives and swords to empower and purify them before use. Kynes advises working with it only symbolically, through a picture of the plant laid on the altar or burned.