Myth, Magic, & Green Medicine: From my herbal notebook

Lightning Protectors

My research notebooks are crammed with intriguing bits of plant history and lore that I’d love to share with you. This is the first in an occasional Herbal Notebook series.

A natural meanes to preserve your house in safety from thunder and lightening:
If the herb housleek do grow on the house top, the same house is never
stricken with lightening or thunder. —Thomas Hill, 1572

We think of herbs as tasty green bits we use to give our food a little extra flavor. But that’s only part of the story. For the Ancestors, every plant was gifted with a particular power. The trick for people: figuring out how and when to use it.

For instance, people began to feel pretty safe after Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod. But before then, they used plants to protect them from this unpredictable and much-feared hazard.

• Houseleeks (Hen-and-chicks, Sempervivum tectorum). In Roman mythology, houseleeks were sacred to the god Jupiter; in Norse mythology, to Thor the Thunderer. Both gods were associated with storms and lightning so people reasoned that houseleeks on the roof would keep the god from hurling his lightning bolts. The emperor Charlemagne was so persuaded of this that he decreed that these plants should be grown on the roofs of all the structures in his empire. To this day, you’ll see houseleeks growing on roofs throughout Europe.

  

  Houseleeks (Sempervivum tectorum)

• Holly (Ilex sp.) and hazel (Corylus avellana). In Norse mythology, holly and hazel also belonged to Thor, and were planted around the dwelling to protect against his thunderbolts. In Christian times, the holly taken into the church for Christmas celebration (or the hazel for Easter) was carried home and hung above the door to ward off lightning the rest of the year.

• Hawthorn (Crataegus oxyacantha) was a sacred tree in the Celtic tradition and was later assimilated into Christian legend as Jesus’ crown of thorns. In Normandy, it was said that lightning (seen as the devil’s doing) could not strike the plant that Jesus wore, so people used it to protect their homes. Hawthorn wood was sometimes employed in house construction specifically as a protector against lightning.

• Mistletoe (Viscum album) was believed by the Druids to have been planted in trees by bolts of lightning. In an interesting twist, it was said that mistletoe over the doors and windows would protect against lightning.

In a fascinating 2023 book about the possibilities of plant cognition, Paco Calvo writes:

For most of us, our personal universe is an animal one, filled with rapid comings and goings, especially the electric social hum of human existence. We all but ignore the photosynthetic creatures that make up much of our environment. Most of us, we could say, are “plant blind.” We can see plants, of course, but we don’t notice them, except if they are doing something spectacular with their flowers, or getting irritatingly entangled with our bedding plants.—Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence

Note to self: Look a little more closely at houseleeks, holly, hawthorn, and mistletoe the next time you see them. And reflect on Calvo’s comment about our human “plant blindness” and what that means—to us, to plants, to the planet.