Doctrine of signatures

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This article is about a philosophy regarding plants. Doctrine of signatures is also used in the occult to refer to the idea that the arrangement of magical signatures has certain powers.

The doctrine of signatures is an ancient European philosophy that held that plants bearing parts that resembled human body parts, animals, or other objects, had useful relevancy to those parts, animals or objects. It could also refer to the environments or specific sites in which plants grew. Many of the plants that were so regarded today still carry the word root "wort", an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "plant" or "herb", as part of their modern name.

1 In Christianity
2 In modern medicine
3 Some "wort" plants and their signatures
4 External links

[edit] In Christianity

Christian European metaphysics expanded this philosophy in theology. According to the Christian version, the Creator had so set his mark upon Creation, that by careful observation one could find all right doctrine represented (see the detailed application to the Passionflower) and even learn the uses of a plant from some aspect of its form or place of growing.

For the late medieval viewer, the natural world was vibrant with the numinous images of the Deity: "as above, so below," an expression of the relationship between macrocosm and microcosm; the principle is rendered sicut in terra. Michel Foucault expressed the wider usage of the doctrine of signatures, which rendered allegory more real and more cogent than it appears to a modern eye:

"Up to the end of the sixteenth century, resemblance played a constructive role in the knowledge of Western culture. It was resemblance that largely guided exegesis and the interpretation of texts; it was resemblance that organized the play of symbols, made possible knowledge of things visible and invisible, and controlled the art of representing them." (The Order of Things , p. 17)

The radical visionary Jakob Böhme (1575-1624), a master shoemaker of Görlitz, had a profound mystical vision as a young man, in which he saw the relationship between God and man signalled in all things. Inspired, he wrote Signatura Rerum (1621), soon Englished as The Signature of all Things and the spiritual doctrine was applied even to the medicinal uses that plants' forms advertised.

[edit] In modern medicine

The doctrine of signatures was given renewed thrust in the writings of the Swiss physician Paracelsus von Hohenheim (1493-1541) and continued to be embraced until the 17th century.

The 17th century botanist and herbalist William Coles (1626-1662), author of The Art of Simpling and Adam in Eden, found that walnuts were good for curing head ailments because "they Have the perfect Signatures of the Head", and as for Hypericum "The little holes whereof the leaves of Saint Johns wort are full, doe resemble all the pores of the skin and therefore it is profitable for all hurts and wounds that can happen thereunto." Nicholas Culpeper's often reprinted herbal takes the doctrine of signatures as common knowledge, and its influence can be detected still in modern herbal lore.

The doctrine of signatures was expounded in mainstream medical texts into the 19th century and has remained a working principle of homeopathic medicine.