01/11/2026
Plant psychopomps: herbs to survive the underworld by Amanda Cain
This is taken from Amanda’s larger final project of creating and decorating a battle jacket with miniature embroideries. Though they are tiny, each individual embroidery is estimated to take 40 hours.
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Hearing stories about Persephone and Hades, Orpheus and Eurydice, and more since childhood, we know that in the underworld, we transform, or we die. To make it through the underworld, one needs guidance, a psychopomp, a spirit being to guide the journey. Hermes can tell you the back way to get into Hades; ravens will carry your message to the spirit world; and to***co will lift your prayers to the heavens.
Often understood within the larger context of birth, death, and rebirth in the spirit world, this cycle can be witnessed—and applied—in all of the rites of passages in life, in the smaller deaths and rebirths we experience, which can include so many things: a move, change of job, the end of a relationship, etc. While we often honor transition periods such as birthdays, graduations, and weddings (which are typically public and loud), we tend to shy away from the deeper, more personal transitional periods like first me**es and puberty to menopause and end-of-life. We also often completely ignore the natural cycles, the dieback of autumn, the coldness of winter, the rebirth in spring, and the sun in summer. The un-acknowledging of the rites of passages throughout our lives can leave us feeling like we are in a perpetual state of separation and liminality and not able to reincorporate back into our own lives. We can feel lost, stagnant, unable to transition back into society…
As introduced by Arnold Van Gennep in The Rites of Passages (1960), the three stages of the rites of passage are:
- separation (hawthorn): the realization you no longer belong in your previous life;
- transition (mullein, California poppy, black pepper): liminality, crossroads; decisions need to be made; and
- incorporation (ghost pipe, linden): reincorporating back into community and into the world, but now as a changed being.
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Explore her full blog, with all herbs associated with each stage ❤️🔥
