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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
    Rumex

    Dock

    Dock is the name given to a widespread group of broad-leaved wayside weeds in the genus Rumex, which also holds the sorrels, and in the family Polygonaceae, to which rhubarb belongs. Older botanists put the docks in a genus of their own, Lapathum, from a Greek word for cleansing, after their use as purges. A dock plant has large leaves at its base and smaller ones up branching flower stalks about three feet tall, which carry dense whorls of drooping flowers, light green to pinkish. Each flower ripens into a papery, heart-shaped, rusty-brown pod holding a single seed. Like rhubarb, the docks are rich in tannin and have astringent roots, and the young leaves and shoots of several species can be cooked as a pot-herb, though they taste poor and are slightly laxative. Their lore is crowded with the fair folk: the Anglo-Saxons used dock against elf shot, the unseen weapon by which elves were thought to bring disease; in Scotland bitter dock went into charms to undo faery spells laid on children; and the trows of Orkney were said to ride its stems like horses. In Ireland a woman who wanted a child wore a bag of dock seeds tied to her left arm, a charm Cunningham repeats, and young Irish women used dooryard dock to divine whom they would marry. Culpeper, quoted by Grieve, put all the docks under Jupiter.

    Caution

    Cunningham advises against taking dock internally for anyone with kidney stones, and AHPA likewise urges caution for people with a history of them. Yellow dock contains oxalic acid: a man died of oxalate poisoning after eating about a kilogram of yellow dock, and sheep grazing on its leaves have been poisoned. Its safety in pregnancy and while nursing has not been conclusively established.

    The Root form carries its own caution; the ingredient's page shows it.

    Forms

    • Leaf
    • Root
    • Seed
    • Stem

    Correspondences

    Elements
    Air
    Celestial Bodies
    Jupiter

    Categories

    • Divination
    • Fertility
    • Healing
    • Love
    • Prosperity
    • Protection
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