materialsHerb and rootcima di ruta

Southern Italy named a silver charm after a plant. The cimaruta — Neapolitan cima di ruta, sprig of rue, after the flowering medicinal herb — is worn at the neck or hung over an infant's bed against the malocchio, and is usually made of silver. From a central stalk of rue, branches sprout into small charms: a rose, a hand holding a wand or a sword, a flaming heart, a fish, a crescent moon, a snake, an owl, a plumed helmet, a vervain blossom, a dolphin, a cock, an eagle. One might carry a key, a dagger, a blossom and a moon together. Most are double-sided and some are almost four inches across. The plant is the armature; the metal is the survival strategy.

The same region hangs the plant itself. Dried chili peppers are hung in some southern Italian homes against the malocchio, and the cited account is careful about the chronology: chili reached Europe only after the Columbian exchange, so a red cornicello's resemblance to a chili postdates the amulet, whose horn shape is far older.

England put herbs in the bottle. Later witch bottles were filled with rosemary, needles and pins, and red wine, and the account states what each component does: the bottle captures evil that is impaled on the pins and needles, drowned by the wine, and sent away by the rosemary. Other bottles held sand, stones, knotted threads, feathers, shells, herbs, flowers, salt, vinegar, oil, coins or ashes.

Mexico City sells the material by the kilo, and the supply routes are on the record: medicinal herbs at the Mercado de Sonora come from Puebla, Morelos and the State of Mexico. Avocado leaves are sold for inflammations, chiranthodendron for the heart, jacaranda flowers for the stomach. The magical aisles carry chains of garlic to ward off evil, crosses of ocote wood for good luck, and a seed called deer's eye against the evil eye. During the H1N1 scare in 2009, when business at the market fell about fifty per cent, a ten-herb blend designed to prevent and treat the flu — eucalyptus, bougainvillea and tejocote fruit among them — kept herb sellers solvent at 80 pesos per kilo.

West Africa bags them with scripture. Gris-gris were usually made as small sacks holding Qur'anic verses written on paper together with herbs, worn at the neck. In the American South the same bagging carried on: mojo ingredients include graveyard dirt, roots, herbs, animal parts, minerals, coins and crystals, with African religious preparation applied to North American plants and Native American herbal knowledge; the lucky hand root was favoured by gamblers, and a goofer bag takes goofer-root. Islamic practice approved by strict conservatives includes water to which have been added "salt, rose essence, oil of black caraway, or the leaves of the lote tree".

Inference — there is no herb in a museum tray. The record for this material is written, spoken and photographed, and the one time the contents of a herbal charm in this atlas were identified by a laboratory, it was because somebody had corked them in glass. Every date in this record is the date somebody wrote something down.

Dried, bundled, hung, strung, stuffed into a bag or a bottle, or brewed. The Highland taboo around the rowan shows how carefully the rules can be drawn: no part of the tree was to be used save the berries, except for ritual purposes — a threshing tool of rowan called a buaitean was used on grain meant for rituals and celebrations.

Herb sellers work at the edge of the law in two of the places this atlas names, and both cases involve women with no other option. Around Quiapo Church in Manila, peddlers sell unsafe abortifacients, gastric irritants and untested herbal remedies from stalls surrounding the basilica and Plaza Miranda; abortion is illegal in the Philippines, and people who cannot afford a surgical procedure go to these vendors. At the Mercado de Sonora, as late as the 1990s and before medical abortion was legalised in Mexico City, an herbal abortifacient was sought there; the sellers did not administer it but told the client what to use and how, leaving her to carry the medical and legal risk, and the treatment always led to haemorrhaging that required medical attention. Both accounts are printed here as they stand.