Garlic: Magical Properties & Uses

Garlic is the great protector: it wards against malice, ill-wishing, evil spirits, and psychic attack with a forthrightness that more subtle herbs cannot match. Hang it in the kitchen for household protection; wear it on the body for personal protection in unsafe situations; bury it at the boundary of your property for territorial protection. Its smell is itself the magic: pungent, unmissable, impossible to ignore. In healing workings it banishes illness and the spirits of disease. It is also used in uncrossing workings where something needs to be driven out rather than dissolved. Do not use it in subtle workings; it is not a subtle herb.

Garlic (Allium sativum) has more clinical research behind it than almost any other herb. Its cardiovascular benefits (reducing blood pressure, lowering LDL cholesterol, inhibiting platelet aggregation) have been demonstrated in multiple trials. The active compound allicin, released when garlic is crushed, is powerfully antimicrobial and antifungal. Culpeper recommended it for virtually every complaint including coughs, hardness of the spleen, and as an antidote to all poisons. It has been used medicinally for at least five thousand years across every culture that could grow it.

Hecate, Mars

Garlic is the most universal protective herb on earth: known in every culture, named in every grimoire, hung in every kitchen from the Mediterranean to Korea. The ancient Egyptians placed garlic in the tombs of pharaohs; it was found with Tutankhamun. Greek athletes ate it before games for strength; Roman soldiers planted it around their camps. In the Odyssey, Hermes gives Odysseus a garlic-like herb to protect him from Circe's magic. The vampire-repelling tradition is a later European folk development of the herb's universal anti-evil reputation. The Bulgarian peasant who hung garlic above the door and the Korean shaman who burned it were working from the same deep understanding.