Angelica

The herb of the archangel. Legend tells that during a year of plague an angel revealed this plant to a monk in a dream, and the physicians of the Renaissance named her Angelica archangelica in that memory — the root of the Holy Ghost, as the old apothecaries wrote. She flowers, by tradition, around the feast of Michael the Archangel, and of all the great umbellifers of the northern gardens she was held the most luminous. The old herbals reached for her as a guardian and a strengthener: used to fortify the body against pestilence and exhaustion, to warm and settle the digestion and to hearten the spirit in heavy times, while her gentle, light, non-invasive nature made her a plant of pure divinity. Hermetically she belongs to the Sun. Her signature is the renewed connection with Unity — the remembering of higher worlds, and of the parts of ourselves that keep watch over us here — and she carries what the old texts call the angelic embrace of patience: a teaching offered with kindness, never imposed. Prepared with the plant's mineral salt returned to the vessel.