Doctrine of Signatures... an Introduction

Ever wondered how people first discovered the highly specific uses of particular plants and herbs??? 🌿 Looking closely at plants, we can learn a lot – about local habitat, climate, hydrology, wildlife, and soils. On the more mysterious side of herbalism, plants have their own language and way of existing with us on Earth. Doctrine of Signatures is known among scholars of ethnobotany and practitioners of herbal medicine and holds that plants have a “signature” — color, texture, shape, scent, the environment in which they grow — that resembles the organs and diseases they heal. It is a hallmark of traditional Chinese medicine, Native American herbalism, Indian Ayurveda and African herbalism.

This doctrine has probably existed as long as people have looked at plants. ⏳ Pliny the Elder and other early scholars allude to the theory. Dioscorides, who practiced and wrote about medicine in ancient Rome, was one of the first to describe a plant signature in the year 65 AD. Paracelsus touted it during the Middle Ages. German philosopher, mystic, and theologian Jakob Böhme and English herbalists Nicholas Culpeper and William Cole were among its strongest proponents. The name is believed to have been taken from Böhme’s 1621 book “The Signature of All Things.” 📘 R.H. True, a plant physiologist and historian, wrote, "… every plant having useful medicinal properties bears somewhere about it the likeness of the organ or of the part of the body upon which it exerts a healing action." Indeed, herbalists today still subscribe to the concept, as many of the plants are effective in precisely the way their signatures indicate!!

Pictured is Ginkgo biloba, a tree often used as a fine example of the Doctrine of Signatures, and is said to support memory and concentration. If you look at the leaf you will notice something called dichotomous venation, where the veins of the plant are continuously branching off of each other to the outer edges of the leaf. It also has two hemispheres as the name bi-loba suggests! 🤯

As part of an ongoing episodic series, we will be taking in-depth looks at many examples of this doctrine, starting with another great brain food… walnuts. 🧠 Stay tuned!!