Wolfsbane: A Poisonous Beauty

The word “wolfsbane” can conjure images of an enchanted forest, a potion, a mystery novel, or wolves howling at a full moon. Variably spelled wolf’s bane or wolfbane, wolfsbane is the common name for a poisonous plant of the genus Aconitum known to grow in alpine climates in Europe. Sometimes referred to as monkshood or helmet flower, the different species of wolfsbane produce flowers that resemble sloped hoods or helmets: for Aconitum napellus, these range from purple to blue, whereas those of Aconitum lycoctonum are yellow. A visually striking but deadly plant, the wolfsbane grown in gardens by some early nineteenth-century physician-botanists such as David Hosack facilitated the recognition of wild wolfsbane, an exercise in botanical toxicology. The message to farmers and physicians alike was clear: beware.

Descriptions of wolfsbane and its poison in the English language trace back to sixteenth-century European herbals. The first recorded use of “wolfsbane” was in William Turner’s 1548 work, The names of herbes. In Turner’s entry for “Aconitum,” he refers to a specific type, Aconitum lycoctonum, as wolfsbane. He further divides this type into two: one with leaves like the crowfoot plant and blue flowers that resemble hoods, the other with yellow flowers and leaves that resemble a plane tree. In his sixteenth-century compendium of plants, The Herball, physician and botanist John Gerard describes the Greek derivation of a type of aconite he calls thora, which signifies

corruption, poison, or death, which are the certaine effects of this pernicious plant: for this they use very much in poisons, and when they meane to infect their arrow heads, the more speedily and deadly to dispatch the wilde beastes, which greatly annoy those mountaines of the Alpes.

Like Turner before him, Gerard distinguishes among several types of wolfsbane: “Winter Wolfes-bane,” “yellow Wolfes-bane,” “Lark’s heele Woolfs-bane,” and “small blew wolfes-bane,” to name a few. Curiously, Gerard describes “Mithridate Wolfs-bane,” or “Anthora,” as an “antidote against the poison of Thora, Aconite, or Wolfes-bane” and even useful against plague, but he notes that it must be grown away from the other types of monkshood to retain its quality as an “enemy to all poisons.” Gerard allows for dissent when he writes that anthora is listed in a treaty of poisons but dismisses the notion as quickly, as “their writings do declare that they did not know well Anthora.” All types of wolfsbane are poisonous, and aconitum anthora is neither an antidote nor an exception.

Wolfsbane appears in literature and poetry from ancient times through the present and is still culturally influential. Shakespeare references aconitum in Henry IV, Part 2, citing its strength and deadliness, and per Botanical Shakespeare, the “bane” in Macbeth is thought to refer to either hensbane or wolfsbane. Nathaniel Hawthorne alludes to wolfsbane’s association with witchcraft in Young Goodman Brown, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle references infamous nineteenth-century aconite poisonings in one of Sherlock’s cases, The Adventure of the Speckled Band. In the first lines of Ode on Melancholy, John Keats writes, “No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist/ Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.” Lethe, the mythological Greek river of forgetfulness, is compared to the potent plant poison, and the speaker implores the reader to refuse both. The powerful poison has long been thought to protect against wolves and werewolves alike, and today it’s typically associated with werewolves; “Wolfsbane” is the name of a Marvel character who changes between human, wolf, and werewolf forms, and the plant is likewise featured in many modern works of fantasy fiction.

Binomials, Banes, and Worts: Plants Worth a Thousand Words

Today, scientists and gardeners alike identify plants by a system derived from Linnean taxonomy, which traces back to the eighteenth century and assigns a kingdom, class, order, genus (“generic” name) and species (a binomial name, italicized throughout this article). While we use a version of this system today, “common” or “folk” names of plants in circulation before or alongside Linnaean taxonomy can communicate histories and past plant uses.

“Bane,” which usually signifies “poison” in a plant name, dates back to Old English. Wolfsbane is part of a larger suite of banes; compounds and derivatives include ratsbane, fleabane, and cow-bane, each name signaling a different poison. Wolfsbane is such an archetypal example of a plant poison that the first usage for “bane” as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary describes aconite. Notably, however, wolfsbane also masquerades as a number of other animal-bane compounds: fox-bane is a species of monkshood (Aconitum vulparia), and hare’s bane has referred to Aconitum lagoctonum. Leopard’s bane has sometimes been linked to wolfsbane, though it now typically refers to plants from the genus Doronicum rather than Aconitum.

On the other hand, a plant with “wort” in its name historically signaled healing abilities or food qualities, though sometimes “wort” merely conveyed that something was a plant; think: bonewort, throatwort, lungwort, and bloodwort. St. John’s wort is one example of a medicinal plant whose common name persists to this day. Since common names change regionally and over time, they can give us hints about the past even while also confusing us; a single common name may signify multiple plants, and a single plant may have multiple common names.

Myth and Madness: Canine Origins and Connections

Wolfsbane has a strange history related to mythology and magic. In Greek mythology, wolfsbane grew from the saliva of Cerberus. In one translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Cerberus is said to be “delirious, enraged” and to have “sprinkled as it raved, the fields, once green—with spewing of white poison-foam.” The foam, “converted into plants, sucked up a deadly venom with the nourishment of former soils” and grew into “the noxious plant” known by locals as aconite. Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy build on historian John Blaisdell’s comparisons between the symptoms of rabies and the symptoms of aconite poisoning from wolfsbane, writing that “[i]t is not improbable that some ancient Greeks would have believed that this poison, mythically born of Cerberus’s lips, was literally the same as that to be found inside the mouth of a rabid dog.”

Long before germ theory, the identification of the causative agent of rabies, and Louis Pasteur’s life-saving invention of the vaccine and post-exposure treatment for rabies, herbalists such as Gerard described the “virtues” or medicinal properties of plants, giving us a glimpse into the history of medicine. In addition to plants known as healbyte and horehound, a number of “worts” were proposed as remedies for rabies:  moonwort, mugwort, and madwort, for instance. The word “mad” itself had an early usage in describing a rabid state, and the common name madwort suggests this.

While sometimes called madwort, the flowering plant alyssum has an etymology that points to the same purpose: the prefix “a” means “without,” and the root word “lyssa” means rabies or hydrophobia (rabies is now known as a type of “lyssavirus”). Alyssum is a genus of plants in the Mustard family (Brassicaceae Burnett) and includes species such as Alyssum wulfenianum. In several poems evocative of mystical, moonlit summer evenings, alyssum makes an appearance as if summoned by a spell. In “June Night,” poet Susan Kelly-DeWitt provides an incantatory allusion: “the murmur, murmur, murmur/ of alyssum, honey-sweet”; in “The Garden by Moonlight,” Amy Lowell portrays a carpet of alyssum among the “moonshimmer.” Unlike wolfsbane, alyssum is nontoxic, but it’s better as a poetic vision under the Moon than as a cure for rabies. Today, we have vaccines to combat rabies, though approximately 60,000 people each year still die from it—and most of these cases are linked to dogs.

Wolfsbane is far from the only plant that early herbalists linked to canines. In John Gerard’s Herball, for example, we find entries for “Dogs grasse,” “Upright Dogs grasse,” Dogs tooth,” “Dogs Mercurie,” “Horehound,” and “Dogs bane.” In Giambattista della Porta’s work Phytognomonica, “Dog’s tongue” is depicted alongside plants with leaves thought to resemble this canine feature. Some of these common names follow the tradition of the Doctrine of Signatures, which connects visually similar items to conjecture about shared qualities and the potential healing abilities of a plant, while some of these animal connections may function as mnemonics.

The common names of plants and the traditions from which they were formed can give us insight into the greenery around us. The Plant Humanities Initiative at Dumbarton Oaks emphasizes the interconnectedness between people and plants.

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