A member of my household is possessed by demons and I wish to exorcise them by using this salve:
“Take hop plant, wormwood, bishopwort, lupine, ash-throat, henbane, harewort, viper’s bugloss, heathberry plant, cropleek, garlic, grains of hedgerife, githrife, and fennel. Put these worts into a vessel, set them under the altar, sing over them nine masses, boil them in butter and sheep’s grease, add much holy salt, strain through a cloth, throw the worts into running water. If any ill tempting occur to a man, or an elf or goblin night visitors come, smear his body with this salve, and put it on his eyes, and cense him with incense, and sign him frequently with the sign of the cross. His condition will soon be better.”
I can get most of these ingredients but a few are eluding me. For instance, what’s the botanical (Latin) name for githrife, and where do I find it?
In this context, it’s probably the plant Nigella sativa, which was sometimes called “gith”. but is usually known as black caraway or fennel flower, or black cumin. It was a popular medicinal herb in medieval Europe and the middle east. You can probably find it in a health food store or an Indian grocery under the name Kalonji.
As a mystical-leaning Catholic, I HIGHLY suggest you dont do this yourself. Please contact a priest, or at the very least some kind of experienced spiritual guru. You really are risking a lot by messing around with this kind of thing, even if your intentions are completely pure.
I appreciate your concern, Autolycus, but I have been reading up on exorcism and think our chances are good. I have a small stock of mandrake root in the garden and was planning to tether the dog to it, so as to pull it up (for salve-making) without risk. Well, not as far as the dog is concerned, but we think it’s worth it.
Of course, if you’re sincere about this, I’d suggest you not do it for purely secular reasons, because some of the ingredients, like wormwood and hensbane are toxic, and not really to be fooled around with.
This is a joke, right? (It’s GQ, and hard to tell.) You’re not seriously considering the possibility that a member of your household is possessed by a demon, and may get elf or goblin visitors in the night? Are you?
I realize that I may be treading a line here with respect to other’s beliefs, but the OP is talking about a stressful and toxic procedure, so I’m willing to go so far as to say this: there’s no such thing as demonic possession.
Hey, my post is true! But, yeah, I didn’t notice this was in GQ. Solidly a MPSIMS thread as presented. GQ if the OP wasn’t playing and only wanted to know what the Latin binomial for githrife is. I’ll be the spoilsport and report it for movin’.
The OP contains a perfectly reasonable, and factually answerable question:
Yet gith is also corn cockle, Agrostemma githago.
Ohh, I see, the corncockle meaning is new, while the ancient refs to gith are to fennel.
And rife would be a suffix meaning ‘common’.
Count me as one of the people who now think you are kidding around.
If you aren’t, well, in my faith, demons are not something you mess around with, especially after just reading a few books and concocting some ‘magic’ potion. As somebody earlier said: “you may end up merely exercising them.” I know that was a joke post, but it could be closer to the truth than what you’re expecting to happen.
In any case, this thread gives me the heeby-jeebys.
So you hang a guy in your own backyard, he proceeds to possess your family, and now you 're trying to exorcise him with the very mandrake spawned from his own dripping semen?
