Yesterday I wrote about a group of plants called the Mother-Die flowers because it was widely held that if you picked them you would cause the death of your mother (or someone close to you.) This was a common tradition right across the UK, often involving spring plants with white flowers. (Remember that in the East, white is the traditional colour of death and mourning, not black.)

Now at first sight it's easy to take this belief at face value. Certain plants = bad luck. But there's a lot more to it than that. You'd expect that any unlucky plant would have no other use, wouldn't you? Because obviously if it has some beneficial use, people are going to go on picking it.

But in fact many of these Mother-Die plants are extremely powerful, magically speaking. One good example is the Elder. Another is the Hawthorn.

So why is the same plant thought of as extremely powerful on the one hand and extremely unlucky on the other?

The answer lies, I believe, in the way the early Church tackled the problem of paganism. Without going into a long and rambling tirade, basically the Church either:
(a) Christianised the plant, so that a plant with links to say, the Goddess Brigid was instead linked to the Christian St. Brigid (to all intents and purposes exactly the same person.)
(b) If Christianisation didn't work, the next stage was to demonise the plant. In other words you gave it nicknames such as 'Old Man's Beard' linking it to the Devil ('Old Man' as part of a plant nickname always shows evidence of demonisation) and tell people it's extremely dangerous.

You might be surprised just how persistent Pagan beliefs were (and in some cases, still are.)

The Mother Die plants, on closer examination were virtually all very powerful magical plants within the Pagan tradition. By inventing the myth of causing bad luck,the Church tried hard to suppress the earlier Pagan beliefs so that nobody in their right mind would use the plant any more.

But as we now know - it didn't turn out quite like that.....