Molly's Astrology

I think I have the flu. Maybe the Swine Flu? I am not sure.

John got it first. Thanksgiving morning, he woke up with a headache, cold sweat, and very strange noises coming from his guts. Does this sound like the flu to you? It does to me.

We were 200 miles from home, where I have a modest apothecary of plant medicines at my disposal. But I dry herbs in the car, and I just happened to have a paper grocery bag of dried elderberries, an herb specific to fevers and flu, in there. I have my laziness to thank. I can’t tell you how many times I thought of decluttering the car, bringing the elderberries inside to start making my yearly batch of herbal cough syrup. But someone must have been looking out for us. I never got around to it, and there was his medicine, right when we needed it.

So I fetched the bag, made a cup of tea in the B&B kitchen, and a couple of hours later, he felt better.

Monday morning, I woke up with the same headache, cold sweats, and gut weirdness. John made me a cup of elderberry tea, and by mid-day, I felt better.

Did the Elder heal us, or were we just not that sick to begin with? That question comes up a lot with herbal medicine. Often the herbs don’t get the credit, because it is hard to believe they work so well.

We have an elder bush in our back yard. I planted her right next to the house, in the bed just behind the back porch. This is the view from the porch in the early spring, looking out over the Elder and into the back yard. She is huge, at least 10 feet tall and just as wide. A sprawling behemoth of a bush. My friend Chin brought her over as a tiny baby a few years ago. I thought Elder was supposed to be a slow grower. Not this one!

Elder is an herb of Venus, cooling the fires of fever and restoring a balanced flow to the body by opening up clogged channels of circulation so that heat and fluids can move out. It is used for edema, congested lungs, for infants with poor circulation (blue babies), the leaves are used for ulcers, wounds, swelling, and injuries, the inner bark is a powerful purgative, dried flowers may be used for eye and ear pain. And more¹.

Venus: cooling, softening, relaxing, balancing, feminine.

Elder has a powerful presence and makes a strong showing in folk legends, fairy tales, and mystical traditions. She appears in the old folklore as home to fairies and dryads. The elder was said to be home to the elder tree mother, Hylde Moer. If you cut the elder tree without consulting her first, she might haunt you. (I confess, I am a little afraid to prune because of this.) The twigs and blossoms were used to ward off evil spirits and robbers, and bring good luck². In more recent folklore, we have Harry Potter’s powerful Elder wand, one of the Deathly Hallows in Book 7³.

Here is a charming video of herbalist Susun Weed showing us her Elder tree.

¹ See Matthew Wood’s Book of Herbal Wisdom for more information.

² Elisabeth Brooke, An Astrological Herbal for Women.

³ J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.