Doctrine of signatures

The doctrine of signatures refers to two individual though related concepts in Christian European metaphysics, whose origins lay in the ancient reading of auspices and other omens of the gods' will in Antiquity, and which similarly bears upon the meaningfulness of resemblances. The major usage is a doctrine that 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," the principle 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 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. It 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 herb, as part of their modern name.

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.

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.

Among practitioners of the occult, the doctrine of signatures has a more specific meaning, in which the arrangement of magical signatures is thought to have certain powers.

Some "wort" plants, and their signatures:

• Lousewort, Pedicularis - thought to be useful in repelling lice
• Spleenwort, Asplenium - thought to be useful in treating the spleen
• Liverwort - thought to be useful in treating the liver
• Toothwort, Dentaria - thought to be useful in treating tooth ailments

External links

• Dictionary of the History of Ideas: (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-local/DHI/ot2www-dhi?specfile=/texts/english/dhi/dhi.o2w&act=text&offset=570154&query=++signatures&tag=ANALOGY+IN+PATRISTIC+AND+MEDIEVAL+THOUGHT) Analogy in Patristic and Medieval Thought
• Tamarra S. James, "An Introduction to the Doctrine of Signatures" (http://www.holysmoke.org/wb/wb0081.htm)