Superstition: The Power of Basil

"The Creole sauntered across to the counter and nipped the herb which still lay there.

          'Mr. Frowenfeld, you know what some very excellent people do with this? 
          They rub it on the sill  of the door to make the money come into the house.'

Joseph stopped aghast with the drawer half drawn.

          'Not persons of intelligence and-----'

          'All kinds.  It is only some of the foolishness which they take from the slaves. Many of your best people consult the voudou horses.' "

This quote is taken from George Washington Cable's The Grandisssimes (1880) a novel set in New Orleans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.  In this scene, Agricola Fusilier instructs the newest apothecary, the northern born Joseph Frowenfeld, in the local practice of voudou.  The herb in question is basil or basilic and it has been requested of Frowenfeld by the major female character of the novel, Aurore Nancanou, who does not have enough money to make rent.  Frowenfeld, who is the naif for most of this novel, is surprised by the citizenry's superstitious beliefs. 

For Cable, superstition is but one outer manifestations of a society that is weak and rotten--economically, politically, and racially. Seemingly exotic--much like the landscape, flora and fauna---Creole superstitions are nevertheless part of a system of beliefs that is irrational and that relocates agency in spirits rather than in human effort or worthiness.  I've written about the power of herbs before.  And while this is not the most significant passage in Cable's novel, it is interesting to think about the strong hold that superstition has on the imagination--even in contemporary times.  The idea that charms can safeguard us, or that supernatural beings can work to our advantage is a persistent one.  If Cable's assessment is historically specific in some ways, it also underscores something about human fears about the essential insecurity of life and the way we look to the material world for reassurance of our good fortune.

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

On the alchemy of composition

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

--Michel de Montaigne, Essais, "Of the education of children."