red amaranth
Amaranth will gladly volunteer itself to take over your yard, I’ve been told. The reason I planted it in the first place was so I’d have alternate pecking material for the girls as sunflower heads were drying in the garage. This was before I’d hit upon the idea of sorghum seed heads as suitable pecking material for them. Anyway, I had a grand total of TWO plants mature last year after working it in as instructed. And now it is growing out of Lucy’s ear, damn near, between cracks in the path, between vegetables.
Imagine my surprise to have dreams about it, in the wee hours this morning. The dreams were strange enough that I got up at 2am to consult some books on the off-chance a New World seed/pseudo-grain was used in magic at all. Turns out it is. Protection, and invisibility. If, for example, (this came out of Cunningham’s Encyclopedia…) you uproot an entire plant, and wrap that in a white cloth and carry it on your person, it is a protective charm. So, you can use it as a poppet of sorts, is what that tells me. The seed heads are heads of hair, the branches and leaves arms, and I suppose the roots are lower limbs. Talk about all kinds of arms to hold you! Secondarily, a wreath of the blooms will render one invisible. Well, it would certainly obscure one’s face and head, as the seed heads get quite bushy.
Huitzilopochtli
So, I am a bit puzzled. The cultivar I am growing is indeed from Mexico. Now that I get so much from Native Seeds, it opens up that pathway to the New World crops in a way that is kind of like a homecoming. Such as w/ the corns and beans. I do not know much Mesoamerican folklore or mythology, but always planned to learn more. My mom specialized in that area when she majored in archaeology eons ago, so it would be wise to start with the few books she left behind. For now, I am chalking up amaranth as a genus loci crop in my yard. It is something very very Mexico and California and Southwest states, and I can add it to the list of things I have to grow alongside all the corn varieties and sunflowers.
Invisibility though… The initial dream was of the plant popping up under every single window in the house. I’d be going outside in the morning to open the coop and be surprised with a half-grown amaranth waving its seed head at me, practically. I’d move a bag of growmulch out of the way and find a small amaranth growing. It was growing around the coop as well. And around the raised beds. Not like a weed so much as a sentry, if that is possible.
I looked up the reference info in Cunningham, found nothing in yronwode, and didn’t have the wherewithal to look in all my other plant books or go online, so I just went back to sleep. And then had this long and involved dream about people I’ve yet to meet, but who have it growing around their house as a protective invisibility cloak, of sorts. Interrupted by the alarm, of course.
It would not be completely far-fetched to say the Mother Garden might be protecting herself and the hens, and that this might spread to the house if I am even-handed in my tending of this plant. Amaranth is one of the summer season guardians, along with the sunflowers we sowed and the ones which volunteered. The gold of the sun, and the red of blood. The late winter and early spring guardian is stinging nettle, etc. Food for thought. If I keep having the dream I’ll consult with ye olde mugwort.
8 Responses to “Amaranth?”
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Wow, is this ever neat!
I think Cunningham is talking about globe amaranth (Gomphrena globosa), which is a European flower. I’m not sure if the amaranth referred to in ancient Greek folklore is an Amaranthus or the globe amaranth flower. But it looks like there are amaranthus species growing all over the world.
According to the Native American Ethnobotanical Database (http://herb.umd.umich.edu/herb/search.pl) ooks like the Hopi and the Zuni used it to color ceremonial bread. Navajo made the stalk into a snake figure for “snake infection.” They also mixed it with corn to make a ceremonial food for Nightway. It’s interesting too that various tribes figured out the same way to store the leaves for long-term use, by cooking them, rolling them into a ball, and then baking them. They must dry out pretty good that way. Interesting!
Maybe this would be a good ingredient in Hekate suppers?
Cunningham’s talking about Amaranthus
The longer I work at this, the more often I am pleasantly surprised when I refer to that book, because he has tons of hoodoo and ethnobotanical info outside of Europe in it.
There’s a red cultivar used as a dye, in fact.
Someone else this careens towards, because of the Hopi, Zuni and Dineh references, is Spider Grandmother. There’s a Spider Woman in mythology from the Mayans, as well, which brings Mexico into the fold. I happened upon this, and it was a little too prescient.
This is definitely Hekate-related. And it is turning into another post… I ordered Anasazi corn from Horizon, and a red cultivar that produces red stalks and husks. I wonder if Hekate would like tamales de elote, with honey and poppyseeds. Red from the husks used for steaming ‘em. Whenever I have to clear spiders out of a portion of the patio for planting things, I apologize for taking that space and promise to plant corn, and so it has gone. And I leave the black widows alone when I see them. Live and let live. If I can get a third and fourth planting of corn in, that would be really really good. The Anasazi cultivar takes 65 days to mature, and apparently is descended from seed which was sealed up in a clay vessel at Mesa Verde until archaeologists found it. We’ll be warm into October so I figure I can swing this. Just need to clear more space for corn.
It does indeed sound like Hekate. It says that Spider Woman is thought to have been a goddess of creation itself. This connects with something I was reading about Hekate at the time I had my eye surgery and haven’t yet gone back to (it was a tough book). This is “Hekate Soteira,” part of which is about Hekate as the ancient Greek concept of “world soul.” This sounds very similar to the Spider Woman thing.
Yeah, plant that corn! There’s a red husked/red kerneled variety I would love to grow here if I had the place for it called Seneca Red. The people who were here before us developed it here. I love the red corns. “Bloody Butcher” is one of my all-time favorite veggie names.
Tasted my first black nighshade berry today. And lived to tell about it.:) The taste was surprisingly delicate. For some reason I expected them to be more like a black currant.
Hekate Soteira is on my list of books to try to read. The world soul thought overwhelms me, really. Spider Woman’s enough of a creatrix to overwhelm me. But the idea of singing and storytelling the world into existence really makes my tail wag, too.
I really really wanted the red corn husks for the Christmas tamalada last year, but none of the markets have husks from heirloom varieties. Now I know why I was so driven.
Those nightshade berries have a very strange vibe to them. I was harvesting for that batch of mead, catching about 8 ripe ones, last week, and licked my finger. I think one of them was not quite ripe enough because my throat felt weird for a half hour. Not closing but irritated and phlegmy. They actually remind me of blueberry.
Hmm. My throat also felt weird after eating that one, but I was drying the spearmint and it was really in the air, so I thought it was from that. I tried to choose a berry that came easily off the branch to make sure it was truly ripe. It was slightly sweet, not sour or bitter at all, and a little crunchy from seeds. It reminded me of blueberries too. I will keep checking them.
It makes me want to juice these to remove the seeds, and ferment, or at least juice to remove the seeds, and cook. The seeds are where it is really wild and crazy, apparently, although in these they are not supposed to be anything other than faintly hot-tasting, per Thayer.
Checking in Wikipedia, it looks like a burning throat is a side-effect of solanine. I would not go so far as to say my throat burned. It just felt weird. It went away in about half an hour, which is about how soon I got it after eating the berry. Yesterday I also felt very sluggish, but that is not unusual for a Monday for me.:) Last night’s dreams were very weird, but I was not sure if the berry had anything to do with that.
I had another berry this morning but checked more thoroughly to be sure it was ripe. My throat feels a little bit scratchy. I think I will not have any more raw. Some people I guess are a lot more sensitive to solanine than others. Looking around today, I found that some people get psoriasis from eating tomatoes. I had a weird rash on my forearms for the past several years, worse in the winter but wouldn’t go away completely in the summer. Tried everything to get rid of it. My doctor told me it was a food allergy, but I could not figure out from what. I tried quitting dairy and it made no difference. Qutting grains helped, but I still had it. It was like hives. I quit eating tomatoes because of high blood sugar, and it is gone as of this spring, when I went on the low-carb diet. I didn’t connect the two until today.
I too was thinking of juicing these berries and then making either jelly or wine from that. I bought a wonderful Oxo food mill to make cauliflower “mashed potatoes.” It was expensive, but I’m glad I got it. I tried it with some oranges the other day. It made wonderful pulpy orange juice that I froze for canning recipes (I was making zest from oranges and didn’t want the juice to go to waste). It has three grates, and one of them is for removing seeds and skins from tomatoes or berries. If they were milled before cooking and the seeds are where most of the solanine is, that should work.
Solanine, eh. Well, the solanums will act on one’s liver a bit, but that is generally with chronic overconsumption. Like say you went on The Eggplant Diet for a month. Baked eggplant bread sandwiches with fried eggplant in between, garnished with pickled eggplant. Or every day was Roasted Pepper Day, all day.
Thanks for the info on that food mill. I have one of those standard hand-crank mill things that one places over the saucepan and cranks, and the juice and some pulp comes out leaving seeds and skin. And it occured to me I’d probably be picking and freezing these berries for a couple years to get sufficient quantity to fill the damn thing! I might try pressing through a strainer with the back of a spoon, initially. The little suckers are very juicy.