A single, miniature sprig of Mugwort has reimagined as a skeleton key, its root twisting around its barrel, connecting plant and tool forever. 

Mugwort is perhaps best known for its use as a potent aid in both divinatory and dreaming states. It can be burned to sanctify spaces and tools, before trance, divination or other altered states; in lieu or in tandem with other forms of smoke cleansing and fumigation. It can also be used as a wash for crystal balls and other reflective divinatory objects. The leaves and flowers can be used around or beneath these objects during scrying or during divination sessions to amplify and aid psychic states. Using the juice/oil pressed from the leaves for use in oils or salves have been used to aid in divinatory states or on divinatory objects as well.

For sleep and dreaming: Mugwort has historically been utilized as a sleep and dream aid. It can be smoked, used as a fumigation or applied topically as well sewed into little sachets and put under the pillow before sleep to "bring forth dreams". These dreams, due to the herb's potency, could be vivid, lucid and prophetic. Due to the calming effect of Mugwort, this herb has been used for healing as well as for sleep and dreaming.  

Mugwort has been an important herb to many cultures throughout the world and across time. One of the 9 sacred medieval herbs from an Old English folk magic charm for healing from the God Woden, it also appears as an herb of protection from the Romans who also grew it on roadsides to be placed in the bottom of shoes to help travelers endure long journeys. 

Associated with both the Goddess Diana ( its genus name being Artemisia vulgaris ) for the moon colored underside of the leaves, as well as Venus, for Mugwort’s historic use for uterine health issues, including regulating lunar cycles.

In China, it was used in traditional Chinese Medicine for utilization in moxibustion, which is burned close to the skin to stimulate meridian points which causes blood and qi to flow smoother in the body. This technique is still utilized today, often in tandem with acupuncture. 

Mugwort is one of my personal favorite herbs to work with, I admire its tenacity: it grows "wild" in the parking lot next to my Victorian era building between cracks in the asphalt as well as on the edges of busy sidewalks. It seems at home in the liminal spaces of the city as it does in the forest. I also appreciate its potency without fear of being poisoned ~ as well as feeling tethered to the past and undoubtedly ancestors who used and relied on this herb. Wear this as a sleeping/dreaming amulet or in honor of your shared love for this ubiquitous but powerful plant. 

Keys: 

Skeleton keys have long been an obsession of mine. My godmother is an auctioneer and took me along to auctions and estate sales. Treasure for me were always the wooden boxes filled with greasy and dirt caked keys, beautiful with their time earned patina, with their memories and silent stories. As a kid, I imagined every beautiful key I came across no matter how small or large, belonged to a haunted house. Even the tiny keys that came with my school fair diary were special to me. Keys have that sort of resiliency that many other sorts of old objects don’t, they survive the wear and tear of misuse, they surface like relics from the muck of time. 

Keys are an ancient tool, created first by the Ancient Egyptians in wood and modified by the Romans in metal and made small enough to be kept on a person, coined as the first ‘skeleton keys’. These were used, as now, to lock doors and boxes or 'safes', to protect precious objects and people. Thusly one of the mundane and ubiquitous tool has also come to garner potent symbolism over time and has been woven into a current everyday object that even digital technology can’t seem to make obsolete. At the time of my writing this, I still use metal keys to gain entrance to my apartment and studio; I moved out of a house in Philadelphia in 2020 in one of the oldest parts of the city that still employed the use of skeleton keys. Perhaps the key is an object where the old world and the new continually shoulder up against each other, no matter how much modern technology tries to replace them.

As a talismanic jewel the key is a liminal object representing a potent tension and duality as it can both lock and unlock, making the person who holds the key, one on a threshold.

*For locking: Being able to lock something behind you will always give the power and feeling of protection, therefore keys will always have the symbolism of protection embedded in them. The first key I can remember owning was a tiny key that fit to a tiny lock that latched onto a diary I owned in elementary school where I kept all of my secrets. This consisted of all of the titles of the books I’d write, but they sounded like spells, things I desperately wanted to change about myself; revenge I’d like to take on bullies. These days, protecting my loved ones, my heart, and extending protection to those I can feels most important to me. Feeling safe and helping others feel safe in my presence is something I'm always thinking about, and the presence of a key against my body helps remind me of these tenants and makes me feel safe.

*For unlocking: Keys as objects that can 'unlock' show up as symbols across cultures. It’s a symbol of gaining access: for some it's about knowledge and wisdom or about gaining access to higher or unearthly realms: Saint Peter was known to hold the keys to heaven while Hecate is known to hold the keys to the unseen world/ the gates of death. As an initiatory symbol, it suggests garnering levels of knowledge that lead upwards on your path, or crossing thresholds of the unconscious. It also suggests the ability of survival, of being able to find 'a way out', of reaching a place where you are able to unlock or solve an obstacle that was complex or troubling, such as a Sphinx's riddle.  

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