Here is a question that ought to bother anybody who buys magickal supplies, and mostly does not. When you order a herb by its magickal name rather than its botanical one, what actually arrives?

The answer, historically and frequently, is: something else. Something that looked right, was available, cost less, or was easier to import. And once enough people had used the substitute, the substitute became the tradition.

This is not a scandal and it is not a scam, or at least it is not only a scam. It is one of the fundamental mechanisms by which folk botany actually works, and understanding it will make you a considerably better practitioner.

The case study: High John the Conqueror

The clearest documented example we have is High John the Conqueror root, and it is worth setting out carefully because the story contains every element of the problem.

  • The figure. High John the Conqueror is a legendary trickster of African American folklore, recorded by Zora Neale Hurston in her 1931 study in the Journal of American Folklore. He came over with the enslaved but was not himself in chains; he brought wit, laughter and endurance where they were needed; and when slavery ended he returned to Africa, leaving his power behind in a root. Diedre Badejo's comparative study places him in relation to Esu, the Yoruba trickster and guardian of the crossroads, noting the structural parallel and the difference: Esu operates within a sacred cosmological framework, while High John operates within the specific and secular conditions of the New World.
  • The evidence of use. This is not abstract. Frederick Douglass, in his 1845 Narrative, recounts an enslaved man named Sandy giving him a root to carry, telling him it would prevent the overseer from striking him, and Douglass records that he found himself emboldened to resist. Henry Bibb's narrative contains a comparable account. By 1899, The Southern Workman was describing the root in terms that treated it as the sovereign of the forest.
  • The botanical problem. What plant is it? The two serious candidates are Ipomoea pandurata, a morning glory native to the south eastern United States, and Ipomoea purga, the Mexican jalap. Note that Ipomoea jalapa is a synonym for Ipomoea purga, the same plant under a different name; a great deal of writing on this subject treats them as two separate candidates, which they are not.
  • The substitution. Varro Tyler's work in Pharmacy in History traces what happened commercially. Jalap root became the version most commonly sold in shops, largely because it was readily available through the existing pharmaceutical trade, and because it had the right size and shape to carry the reputation. Beyond jalap, suppliers substituted further: galangal (Alpinia galanga), sold as Chewing John, and beth root (Trillium species), sold as Low John. These are not morning glories. They are not even remotely related. They came to occupy the same magickal position because they were in the catalogue.
  • A necessary safety note. Ipomoea purga contains a resin, jalap, that is a powerful cathartic. It causes severe vomiting and diarrhoea and has in rare cases been fatal. High John is carried, not consumed. Do not ingest it, and be careful about what you are sold under that name.

Why substitution is not simply fraud

The instinct is to treat this as adulteration, and sometimes it is. But there is a stronger reading available, and Carolyn Morrow Long's work points towards it.

Hoodoo, like every folk tradition operating under conditions of scarcity and displacement, works with what is to hand. That is not a compromise of the tradition, that is a defining feature of it. A tradition built by people who were denied access to their own materia and their own land developed as a tradition of substitution by necessity.

So the question is not "which one is the real High John". The question is "what was the working actually doing, and did the substitute do it".

If the root's function was to be a carried token of unbreakable personal power, then size, shape, weight in the pocket and endurance without rotting are functional properties. Jalap has them. Galangal has them. And the working, by the accounts of the people doing it, worked.

The wider pattern

Once you know to look for this, you see it everywhere.

  • Dragon's blood is not one substance. It is a red resin obtained variously from Daemonorops rattan palms, Dracaena species including the Socotra dragon tree, Croton species and Pterocarpus. Which one you have depends entirely on the supply chain. The magickal literature treats it as a single item.
  • Frankincense covers several Boswellia species with genuinely different chemistry and aroma, and Boswellia sacra populations are under serious harvesting pressure.
  • Sandalwood is routinely substituted, because Santalum album is CITES-restricted and expensive. Amyris is frequently sold as West Indian sandalwood and is not sandalwood.
  • Mandrake. In British and American shops, "mandrake root" has for over a century very often been American mayapple (Podophyllum peltatum) or white bryony (Bryonia dioica) rather than Mandragora officinarum. All three are toxic, in different ways.
  • Rose absolute versus rose otto are different products by different processes with different chemistry and vastly different price points, and are sold interchangeably by the careless.
  • Gardenia. There is no steam-distilled gardenia essential oil. It does not exist. Gardenia is only available as an absolute or by enfleurage. Anything sold as gardenia essential oil is a synthetic fragrance or a blend.

What this means for your practice

  • Buy by botanical name. This is the single most useful habit you can adopt. Not "High John root" but Ipomoea purga. Not "dragon's blood" but Daemonorops draco. If a supplier will not give you a botanical name, that tells you something about the supplier.
  • Understand that the correspondence lists you use may describe a substitute. If a twentieth century book tells you the magickal properties of mandrake, and the author was working with material bought from a shop, there is a reasonable chance they were describing mayapple. The properties are then real properties of a real practice, attached to the wrong Latin name.
  • Substitute deliberately, and record it. Substitution is legitimate. Silent substitution is what creates the confusion. If you use rowan where a source says elder, note it. Your own notebook is a primary source for your own practice, and future-you will want to know.
  • Substitute by function, not by name. Ask what the original was doing. Size and shape in the pocket? Aroma? Colour? Toxicity? Rarity? Local availability? Match that. Matching the name achieves nothing.
  • Prefer what grows where you are. This is the deeper point, and it is where the Scottish material has an enormous advantage. A tradition that draws on rowan, juniper, elder, hawthorn, bog myrtle, meadowsweet and heather is a tradition you can source honestly, seasonally, and without a supply chain that runs through a threatened wild population on the other side of the world.

The cultural note

High John the Conqueror belongs to Hoodoo, a living African American tradition rooted in the specific history of enslavement, survival and resistance in the American South.

I have included it here because it is the best documented case of the substitution problem in the literature, and because Hurston, Long and Tyler did the scholarship that makes it visible. I have not included a working, and I would not. If you want to learn about this material, go to Black practitioners and Black scholars: Hurston, Carolyn Morrow Long, Yvonne Chireau, Katrina Hazzard-Donald.

There is a difference between studying a tradition with attribution and helping yourself to it. This article is the first.

Sources

  • Hurston, Z. N. (1931). Hoodoo in America. Journal of American Folklore, 44(174), 317–417. JSTOR
  • Long, C. M. (1997). John the Conqueror: From Root-Charm to Commercial Product. Pharmacy in History, 39(2), 47–53. JSTOR
  • Long, C. M. (2001). Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce. University of Tennessee Press.
  • Tyler, V. E. (1991). The Elusive History of High John the Conqueror Root. Pharmacy in History, 33(4), 164–166. JSTOR
  • Badejo, D. L. (1988). The Yoruba and Afro-American Trickster: A Contextual Comparison. Présence Africaine, 147, 3–17. JSTOR
  • Douglass, F. (1845). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Full text: Project Gutenberg · Documenting the American South
  • Bibb, H. (1849). Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave. Full text: Documenting the American South
  • Chireau, Y. (2003). Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. University of California Press.
  • Ipomoea purga and John the Conqueror — Wikipedia, for the taxonomy and the synonymy of I. jalapa and I. purga.
  • Botanical verification: Plants of the World Online, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. The single best free tool for checking whether two Latin names are the same plant.
  • Trade restrictions on sandalwood, agarwood and related species: CITES species database

Related: [How to Read an Esoteric Claim]; [Liminal Plants: Growing Nowhere, Belonging to Thresholds]