Mugwort: The Wisdom Keeper for Vision and Magic
“A weed is a flower that someone decides is in the wrong place.” Those places where you feel like a weed is exactly the place that needs your beauty & love the most.
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My Personal Story
I love autumn. Sometime within the first week of August, my nose pricks up and says, “oh! autumn’s here!” I know it’s not officially autumn, and there are still long, hot days ahead of us, but I can feel it coming.
I was supposed to sit in Ayahuasca ceremony in August but due to family obligations I had to forgo the trip. I was naturally disappointed, but could sense that there was something that wasn’t quite aligned, so I waited patiently.
I began to explore the archetype of the psychopomp in my Shamanic journeys, and was led to Mugwort. She just sort of appeared, and I felt the call more and more to attune with her. Interestingly enough, as I checked my mentor’s website again, she had added several plants to her list of attunements available, one of which was Mugwort!
So, I scheduled my attunement to begin in early October, which felt very aligned for the time of year, the theme I was exploring (psychopomp), and the plant.
I always end up associating each plant with some deity, master, or other type of physical being. Mugwort is, to me, another form of the Greek Goddess Hekate, the goddess of wisdom and magic, and guardian of the Underworld.
When I asked my mentor about starting the attunement, she mentioned that she was running a Rose Sisterhood circle that month, if I wanted to do that and then work with Mugwort after.
When I was exploring the decision, I went into one of the most profound shamanic journeys I’ve had to date, in which Hekate took me into the Underworld, initiated me by dismemberment, and then told me to put myself back together (this last part is different than many dismemberment stories of shamanic initiations, in which most people are somehow sewn or put back together - but this is the energy of Mugwort/Hekate, the push toward responsibility and independence).
Literally the night I began my attunement with Mugwort I found out my father may have cancer. This threw me straight into the psychopomp initiation I was so keenly looking for, although with a person much closer to home than I was expecting. (Thankfully, we found out later that my dad does not have cancer.)
Mugwort is quite a shapeshifter, and I was very grateful that in that moment she came to me as an elderly grandmother figure, the wise but very kind woman, to guide me through that initiation grieving process.
At the very beginning of the attunement, I had a dream in which I was in an overgrown garden, and I was pulling weeds. These weeds kept returning, over and over again, like the Hydra - each one I pulled, three more sprang up. Exhausted, I collapsed against the tallest weed there, who was easily six foot tall. I remembered, then, that Mugwort is often called considered a weed. When I capitulated to the weeds, and to Mugwort, I understood that the garden was me, my own soul and psyche, and that only by embracing these things I considered weeds would I ever stop fighting myself.
The heightened psychic senses were almost unbearable at times. During my attunement, we took a family vacation to Chicago (I do not recommend this!) and the overwhelm was almost debilitating. In one restaurant, I could feel there was a demonic entity somewhere close by and it was all I could do not to run screaming from the building. I didn’t eat much, and told my family we needed to leave as soon as we could. After I left the building, I started to feel like I could breathe again.
A lot of what Mugwort taught me was about “weaving,” which is a type of magic. Very similar to how spiders weave their webs, we can also weave our lives together in a certain way, although this is very difficult to explain in words. But, this is likely a tradition that harkens back to the wyrd weavers, which were the magical practitioners in Old Norse, more often refered to as seiðr. It’s also very similar to the way the Three Fates weave our destinies together.
Mugwort worked some magic for me (this felt quite literal) and I was suddenly able to go to sit in Ayahuasca ceremony in late October. The ceremony was difficult, and I will share that story another day. But the takeaway was understanding the energies of sickness and chaos we are carrying from past trauma, old habits, detrimental belief systems, and the like.
At the end of the attunement, Mugwort gave me one last teaching. She referred back to the dream of me pulling weeds, and then realizing that She herself was often considered a weed. She told me,
“‘A weed is a flower that someone decides is in the wrong place.’ Those places where you feel like a weed is exactly the place that the world needs your beauty and love the most.”
Mugwort’s Teachings
The things that Mugwort teaches have to have a high price to them because they are so extremely powerful. Being able to journey to the Underworld is not something just anyone should try, and can result in a lot of disastrous effects. She also guards her magic closely, just as Hekate does, and you must pass tests before she will teach you things.
That being said, Mugwort is a shapeshifter, as I mentioned. She can appear as a wisened old woman there to give you a hug and love you through a difficult time, or she can appear as the hag in the forest with her secrets of dark magic (I did not meet her this way, but my mentor mentioned this to me).
Mugwort comes to teach us that, although magic is real, it needs to be handled appropriately and in the wrong hands can do an immense amount of harm. This is why she guards it so closely and keeps herself shrouded much of the time.
She is also a very adept guide in dreamwork and non-physical experiences in sleep. She can help you through entire shamanic journeys and soul recalls in dreams, helping you reclaim power you have lost over your lifetimes.
She can also help you widen and expand your psychic senses, sometimes to the point of barely being able to keep your head above water. Remember that you can always ask your Plant Spirit to ease up or slow down, if you are feeling overwhelmed.
Working with Mugwort
One of the most fascinating things I found during my attunement is that there are two kinds of mugwort plants. Typically, when you buy mugwort, you get Artemesia vulgaris, which is known as common mugwort.
During my Ayahuasca ceremony, my mentor’s husband was there, and he gave me a sprig of mugwort from their property. When I smoked it, it was completely different than what I had been smoking at home. It felt sacred. It would be like the different between trying to smoke cleanse your house with sage you buy at the grocery store rather than white sage.
So I spoke with my mentor and we discovered that there is another type of Mugwort: California Mugwort, Artemisia douglasiana. It took me weeks to find anyone who could supply that type of Mugwort for me, but it was well worth the search.
When working with Mugwort, you can choose tea or smoking. I chose to smoke Mugwort, and it ended up reconnecting me to a very deep and lost part of myself.
You should know not to use Mugwort when trying to conceive, are pregnant, or breastfeeding. I’m uncertain how potent the abortifacient effect is, but it makes my mind rest easy to share that.
If you’re looking to reconnect to your magic and your power, Mugwort could be a wonderful ally for that. She can certainly open you up to more & wider worlds than we see everyday.
If you’d like to know more about working with Plant Medicine or Spirit Medicine, please make sure to visit my website, Dancing Owl Apothecary, and learn more about how to bring the wisdom of plants and Spirit into your life.
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