Witches' potions were believed to contain all sorts of disgusting ingredients. A recent trend has attempted to reinterpret these as 'secret names for herbs', an assertion for which there is of course no evidence, and which focuses exclusively on Shakespeare. #FolkloreThursday

It is only possible to pretend that Shakespeare's list of ingredients (e.g. 'eye of newt') was a secret code because they are rattled off with little context. Compare with the Witches' Song in Jonson's Masque of Queens, which gives much more lurid detail. #FolkloreThursday

'A murderer yonder was hung in chains;
The sun and the wind had shrunk his veins:
I bit off a sinew; I clipped his hair;
I brought off his rags, that danced in the air.'

Good luck ascribing a spurious 'secret herb code' meaning to THAT. #FolkloreThursday

The suggestion that 'eye of newt' really meant 'mustard seed' or what not is completely risible; it would have meant disguising innocent names for herbs with a dodgy-sounding substitute, which would have invited trouble. #FolkloreThursday

It is, however, characteristic of modern attempts to bowdlerize historical beliefs concerning witchcraft and rebrand them in accordance with a Witches Really Existed And They Were All Nice Goddess Worshipping Healers Honest outlook. #FolkloreThursday

So far as I can tell, the nonsense about the secret herb code begins with Scott Cunningham's 'Magical Herbalism: The Secret Craft of the Wise' in 1985. It's a Llewellyn book. (I'm not sure I need to say any more than that.)

It's worth noting, though, that the appeal of having access to a 'secret' interpretation is part of the point of the thing. The 'code' doesn't make a shred of goddamn sense, but it enables people to claim they know the real truth behind something evocative and witchy.

Eye of newt doesn't mean mustard seed, it means eye of sodding newt, in line with the prevalent beliefs of the time. Animal body parts were believed to have magical properties - see Agrippa, for example. 'The right eye of a frog helps the soreness of a man's right eye.'

Agrippa again: 'If any shall carry the heart of a crow or a bat about him, he shall not sleep till he cast it away from him.' Yes, it's disgusting. Yes, it's obviously superstitious nonsense. But people in the past believed these things, and it does no good to whitewash that.

Endnote: to the best of my research, the witches' chant in Macbeth is the only example *anywhere* of 'eye of newt' being used as a spell ingredient back then. Pushing the 'mustard seed' explanation implies that 'eye of newt' was commonplace in actual potions or spells. It wasn't.

Shakespeare made the witches' chant up. (He was good at that sort of thing.) The idea was to create the impression of something uncanny, devilish, terrifying, blasphemous and laborious. Which also rhymes.

The 'laborious' part needs a bit of explanation. Magic as depicted in folklore often seems to draw a parallel between the difficulty of obtaining a thing & its potency. So you can't just use any old bits of wood; they had to be 'yew, sliver'd in the moon's eclipse', for example.

Now, you can take the view that these modern 'oh it was all just herbs' interpretations, false though they are, are nonetheless an attempt to create a new and living folklore; and while there's something to that, there's a big BUT.

And the BUT is that the horrifying, frightening side of the folklore is sometimes the *point*. We create monsters and tell stories about them in order to communicate something important, from Beowulf to Alien. Things like the 'mustard seed' interpretation throw all that away.

You might be wondering what explanation the advocates of the 'herb code' give for why the code was put there in the first place. Most of them don't, nowadays; they just pass it on as a did-you-know factlet. But there used to be an explanation, of sorts.

As I mentioned, the 'secret herb code' appears to originate with Scott Cunningham in 1985ish. He claims that the reason ye olde witches wrote 'eye of newt' instead of the plant names was because the magic of the plants was just so powerful, they had to keep it a secret.

So yeah. People claimed they were mixing up bits of amphibian instead of innocuous plants because they had a responsibility to keep the true devastating magical power of mustard seed a closely guarded secret, at least until 1985.

And the band played 'believe it if you like'.

BONUS POST-CREDIT SCENE:

If mustard seed really had ever been named after newt's eye, then that's how it would have been written - as 'newt's eye', not 'eye of newt'. Compare: hound's tongue, baby's breath, coltsfoot, lady's bedstraw, and of course crab's eye.

But the whole point of the 'herbal code' exercise was to suborn the most famous malefic witches' incantation in all of literature to the service of a modern revisionist agenda, so clearly it was important to retain the phrasing people would recognise.

If you feel like researching these matters for yourself, dear reader, why not while away a few hours with the Dictionary Of English Plant-Names? https://archive.org/details/adictionaryengl01hollgoog

(Oddly, the only folk name it gives for mustard seed is 'synewey'. Eye of newt doesn't appear anywhere. Oh well. I guess it must have been a really SUPER SECRET witchy-woo tradition.)