[CYCLE II] Foxglove: heart charm + the trickster
A favourite from the archive for the spring equinox 🌗
This essay was originally posted in September 2021. I saw a fox a couple of weeks ago, and I thought of it.
It is by far one of the most read articles in the archive, so I thought it deserved to be recycled in time for the equinox - around 5pm on Sept 23 (AEST).
Equinox: equal night. The idea speaks of light and darkness having equal duration, which is roughly the case at this point on the seasonal wheel. All parts of the cycle have their own magic and medicine, their own unique ratio of day to night, and a critical place in the structure of cyclic rhythm. They also have an inverted counterpart on the flipside of the Earth. On a planetary level, then, the balance of day and night hours may be thought of as constant. Though the relative quantities change, they are balanced across the system as a whole.
Now I want to spin some yarns about foxglove.
It was the spring equinox of 2019 when I first met with foxglove in the form of a fairly unassuming basal rosette, which I was strangely charmed by. No flower stalks had been sent up yet. I mistook its identity, and I came close to making a (possibly quite grave, and foolish) folk medicinal error.
This was before I had heard the music of foxglove, which tinkles like little bells - cheery and mercurial, a tone buoyed on the airy poetry of its distinctive flowers. It is a tone that shifts the perceptual field, inverts and rearranges, spirits away threads of the world and drops them out again, perhaps a few centimetres to the left, the same yet somehow changed. Time stops and swells and grows in new directions, filling out newly expanded spaces growing on the underside of a parallel world.Â
Heart medicine (i)
A year on, when the flower stalks went up, I heard it: the music, unsolicited yet welcome. By then, I had learned of foxglove’s toxic properties. I marvelled at how this plant of such cheerful disposition could have the power to change the rhythms of the heart (for example, alter heart rate and strength of contractions). Looking at its profusely blooming spikes of thimble-like, sweetie-coloured flowers, it’s all too easy to imagine children taking these into their mouths, or poking curious fingers into the blooms. I could even see myself, crafty yet uninitiated, obliviously ingesting foxglove’s poison.Â
In a way, this was my introduction to the medicinal properties of poisonous plants. It was an electric shock, this meeting with a plant that could end me, that looks so innocent, that is so innocent. Indeed, foxglove gives new definition to the concept of innocence. It is not predatory. It is the definition of charming, its blooms lavish and exuberant - indeed, downright gorgeous - and the bearer of potentially deadly compounds.
Botanically, foxglove is Digitalis purpurea/. Medically, its cardioactive compounds have formed the basis of contemporary drugs designed to control the heart rate in specific ways. These drugs are made using pharmaceutical processes that standardise the potency of the extracts present in a therapeutic dose. Apparently, it was a Scottish physician/doctor working in England in the later part of the 1700s who first recorded medical applications of the plant in medical literature. Accounts vary regarding how his discovery took place, with some saying he learned of its medicinal properties from a sorceress or a midwife (let’s be real: at the time, these occupations were probably not considered vastly dissimilar).
I have heard that functional usage of foxglove goes back as far back as the dark ages, when it is said to have been used in the now-infamous ‘trial by ordeal’ judicial process. If this is true, it seems likely that at least a few accused persons (guilty or not) died a fairly unpleasant death. Let’s not pin that on the plant, though.
Heart medicine (ii)
Facing the truth of the fact that each of our physical hearts will eventually stop is a powerful opener for the subtle heart. For this reason, foxglove is a heart-opening medicine for the times, in which many of us are shocked to suddenly find ourselves confronting the possibility of the End, whether by fire, flood or infectious disease.Â
Its blooms bring good cheer wherever they springs up, while viscerally alerting us to our priorities. Foxglove has archetypal Trickster properties, organic and uncontrived, snapping us out of linear time with ebullient charm and making light - real, genuine light - of the dance with death that we must somehow contend with, one way or another. Its magic is in enabling us to meet that front-on, cheerfully and with heart, and thereby more truthfully.Â
Foxglove shows us that we need not keep Death in the grey storeroom of our background anxieties, fuzzing like a dodgy fluorescent light that goes undealt with and interrupts the circadian rhythms of our psyche. We can instead bring it into the daylight of waking awareness, and make a place for it in Life. What’s more, we can do so with a cheerful heart. Death need not be a feared or hateful opponent to Life. Death can be seen as what lies beyond Life’s edge, and vice versa.Â
Foxglove promotes an attitude of sweet merriment by showing us the threshold of Death, providing us with insight into the finality of crossing it, as well as the golden wonder that abounds on this side of that crossing, in Life. We cannot carry our animal energies over that threshold; it is the boundary of Life, and so too the boundary of Death. We are alive. Taking that into our hearts, allowing it to unfurl there, we may breathe more easily, openly, gracefully.Â
This is the power of the threshold, the boundary that is at once permeable and at which some things must be sacrificed - in this case, the beating of our hearts, the circulation of our blood, and the entirely unique worldview that is attached to those treasures. There is no doubt that we will all, at some point, step over this dividing line. Until that time comes, we will know the wonder of where we are, on this side.
In leading us to contemplate this boundary, foxglove points to what Luce Irigaray has called ‘the between-us’: loosely, the space between beings wherein the other is on some level differentiated from the self, and which is wholeness-inducing rather than fragmenting in this action. By leading us to really and truly witness the presence of others (other species, other ways), foxglove brings us into a real relationship to the web of life that surrounds each of our individual beings.Â
The Trickster
We can’t look at foxglove without exploring fox lore. To the best of my knowledge, the words ‘fox’ and ‘glove’ are both of Anglo-Saxon origin, together with the legend of Reynard the fox. In one tale, helpful faeries supply Reynard with foxglove blossoms to wear on his paws so that he may approach his prey softly. The plant is also associated with foxes in Scandinavian/Norse lore, which sees foxes wearing the flowers as bells that offer protection from hunters.Â
There it is: that light tinkling, the sound of an immaterial stirring, lifting and shifting. How can I describe this? It is reminiscent of the music that can only be heard while pressing one’s cheek into the earth or a decaying log, trying to glimpse the underside of a mushroom’s cap. That’s a woodier tone, like gnomes playing pipes, but it plays well with foxglove’s ethereal bells.
Even today, foxes are symbolic of cunning, guile and a certain kind of self-serving smarts. We can read this as both animal intuition and as the Trickster, an archetype common to many cultures. Taking foxgloves as linked with foxes sheds light on Victorian-era interpretations of traditional flower symbolism, which saw the plant as conveying insincerity. In earlier times, foxglove has been said to symbolise riddles, conundrums and secrets.Â
Trickery can be protective, useful, creative, positive, life-affirming. I have found it to be the most hearty tonic for flatness caused by overthinking. One of its functions is to pull the rug out from under us, so to speak, in order for us to pay attention with our living bodies, to wake up. It is compelling in the way that logic commands our agreement simply by being. It is not necessarily logical, or not conventionally so; yet, like logic, is undeniable once we have come face to face with it. It is, perhaps, the logic of a Lewis Carroll, or a maverick like Einstein, or the lesser known Roman goddess Laverna.Â
It is the rug pulled out from under one’s feet, the slapstick of slipping on a banana peel, the ever-surprising findings in physics that point to things being at once not what they seem and everything they seem. It is the minor injury that yields awareness of the tender yet robust and resilient nature of the animal-bodied being, the contradictions that turn out to be two sides of the same coin.
And here we are, back where we started: at the wholesome balance brought about by contrast and opposition.
Merry equinox! Niki x
Note: To be really clear, I have not ingested foxglove, and I definitely don’t recommend doing so. The medicine I speak of is imaginal, relational and playful, not chemical.
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