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Reference

Compendium

Ingredients for spellwork: their formal and folk names, categories, deities and forms, with the sources behind them.

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    313 ingredients

    313 ingredients

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    Botanical Name
    Piper cubeba

    Cubeb

    Cubeb is a vine of the pepper genus, grown mainly on Java and Sumatra for its fruit and for the oil distilled from it. The fruits are picked before they ripen and then dried, and they look much like black peppercorns except that each keeps a short stalk, the reason the spice is also sold as tailed pepper. The wrinkled dried skin ranges from greyish brown to black around a hard, white, oily seed, and the flavour is pungent, bitter and lingering, often compared with allspice. The name came into English from Arabic by way of Old French. Arab trade carried cubeb to Europe through India, and in the Middle Ages it seasoned meat and sauces and was candied whole as a sweet; its use in the kitchen fell away after the king of Portugal banned its sale around 1640 to favour black pepper. Europeans came to think that demons found it repellent, and a seventeenth-century priest writing on exorcism included it in an incense meant to drive away an incubus. From the 1880s it was smoked in medicated cigarettes, and it still flavours at least one gin. In magical practice Cunningham assigns it to Mars and to fire, with the single power of love: the berries are put into love sachets and spells.

    Caution

    AHPA places cubeb in safety class 1, herbs that can be safely consumed when used appropriately, but advises caution for anyone with inflamed kidneys, and Cunningham warns against taking the unripe fruit internally with nephritis. In large doses it has occasionally caused nausea and vomiting, burning pain, griping or purging, and some people have developed skin rashes. It contains piperine, which has been shown to increase the absorption of certain drugs. Its safety in pregnancy and while nursing has not been established.

    Forms

    • Berry
    • Oil

    Correspondences

    Elements
    Fire
    Celestial Bodies
    Mars

    Folk Names

    • Java Pepper
    • Tailed Pepper

    Categories

    • Love
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