Plant and Fungus Totems by Lupa

Author:Lupa
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: totem, totem plant, plant totems, plant totem, fungus, find your totem, pagan, ecology
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2014-03-24T04:00:00+00:00

[contents]

10 Kareiva, 2011.

Four

The Correspondences Model

When I was a newbie Pagan in the 1990s, one of my first purchases was a shiny new copy of Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, by the late but ever-awesome Scott Cunningham. I was in a voracious stage of information absorption, reading about herbs, animals, stones, deities, and rituals, and so forth. Cunningham’s work was nicely inviting, and set things up in an organized manner, just the sort of “here, try this out!” sampler that goes over so well with newcomers.

His particular set of magical meanings for each fungus and plant never quite stuck with me other than as an occasional reference when I was first putting together little amulet pouches of herbs and stones and such. But the overall structure of that and a few of his other books introduced the concept of correspondences, which has had a much greater effect on my practice over the years.

What are correspondences? In short, they’re a collection of related qualities that are associated with a given thing, concept, etc., to include plants and fungi (often lumped together as “herbs.”) These are generally symbolic, spiritual, and magical qualities, as opposed to physical ones like “Beargrass grows in mountain regions in the western United States and Canada, and produces many tiny white flowers in the spring and summer. Its leaves have been used by Native people to weave baskets.” So, for example, Cunningham says that wood sorrel is a feminine plant associated astrologically with the planet Venus, as well as with the element of Earth, and further connected to health and healing. Most of these qualities have little connection to the physical plant itself, and the health and healing aspect seems to be extrapolated from wood sorrel’s supposed medicinal qualities.

Sometimes the sources of correspondences appear to be almost entirely the projection of the human imagination. Few, if any, people actually believe that a mandrake root will scream or emit any other noise when pulled, or indeed act in any other behavior unbecoming to a self-respecting plant lacking vocal cords. But the humanoid shape of some of the forked roots has been the source of much anthropocentric speculation and mythologizing.

Regardless of their origins, correspondences exist as a quick shorthand of a given fungus or plant’s nonphysical qualities. I promised at the beginning of this book that I wasn’t going to stuff it full of a dictionary of fungus and plant totem “meanings,” and I’m holding to that. This chapter is going to be more about working with the totems to create your own systems of meaning, both while making use of existing correspondence structures, and creating your own correspondences organically. If you’d like some existing systems of plant and fungus correspondences to look at, Cunningham’s book is a good start. You can also use the many and varied tables in Aleister Crowley’s 777 and Other Qabalistic Writings to see how a small handful of plants are associated with everything from tarot symbolism to Goetic demons and even “typical” diseases like Insanity, full Insanity (also known as Death), Syphilis, and even the dreaded Indigestion.

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