Plantcestor: Elecampane

Freedom for the oracles, ancient feminine mythology, the grief of the mother, and what to do when we get lost

(Want to give your eyes a break? Listen to the transcript below!)

I've wanted to start a plantcestor series for quite some time. I share plants primarily with my apprentices and in-person clients, but many plants wish to be shared!

Elecampane is one of those plants I wish every woman could meet. This plantcestor, native to Europe and Northern Asia, first came to me in a dream in 2019. I had never seen this plant before, so I didn't know who it was! The dream was very potent, and I knew I had to find out who this plant was.

I messaged a sister in herbalism school and described the plant to her, "It was yellow and tall like a sunflower, but kind of resembled an aster daisy…" 

"That's elecampane!" she replied. 

When I heard its name for the first time, I felt effervescent. I had just moved to Mendocino a few months prior, and we didn't have a local apothecary, so I immediately ordered a massive bag from Starwest Botanicals and patiently waited for it to reach me on the lost coast. 

When it arrived, I decocted it on the stove as instructed and ran a bath on the deck to soak and meet my new plant friend. When meeting a new plant for the first time, I prefer to meet it blindly and not do any research or intellectual learning that may condition my experience. The only thing I knew about this plant was what my friend told me: that it connects the throat to the solar plexus and has ties to Helen of Troy. I wanted to gather my own first impression, introduce my senses to it, and then learn as I become more and more curious. 

In an age where social media and the internet make us think we know everything about a person and where so much information is at our fingertips, I still deeply value old-fashioned, present connection and experiential learning in all my relationships, plant, human, spirit, and otherwise.

As soon as I took my first sip, I felt like I had just met a soulmate friend for the first time. I broke out in a smile and squeal—I was already in love. I had never had an experience like this with a plant before. I loved the taste, the smell, and how it felt in my body, and I just wanted to drink it endlessly. I told my friend this, and she was shocked. She told me she couldn't stomach the taste at all!

I sat with Elecampane just a few more times more consciously, still getting to know its energy, but delighted by this new budding relationship. But then I became pregnant, and I could no longer drink it. The bag sat in my tea drawer for months while I moved through one of the biggest portals of initiation of my life so far. 

The portal of my miscarriage activated a tsunami of ancestral feminine grief. While losing another baby was hard, I had such a deep connection to my spirit baby and spirit in general, and deep down, I knew I was with the wrong person to bring a child through, the grief I felt was much deeper and older. 

This grief was connected to the lineages of women that ran through my bloodlines and the ley lines of the Earth that were denied their right to create the world they desired. It was connected to the witches who were burned for knowing how to heal and the women who the church tamed to obey the rules that buried the religions of the mother and the ways of the feminine. It was connected to the women whose wombs and creative power were violated, controlled, shamed, used, and abused. It was connected to the women who left their homes to birth families with men who then left them to go to war. Ultimately, it was connected to the oracles who weren't believed and never got to bring their visions through. All storylines I felt active in my marriage and life at the time.

My early birth was a profoundly shamanic and powerful experience for me, but it opened up a well of ancestral grief I didn't know how to work with (queue ancestralization training). I would be walking through my house or sitting in meditation and feel and see a harem of feminine ancestors clawing at my side in desperation to be fed. I didn't understand what they wanted, and frankly, I didn't have the capacity always to figure it out. I did a lot of clearing, ancestral offerings, and heart-tending that summer and tried to move on. 

We eventually had to move out of our house because our landlady was getting a divorce (the irony!). This was an excellent, divine opportunity to leave my marriage, but I felt unprepared. I didn't yet trust myself fully to make this leap on my own. I tried to suggest that we move to the desert, which had been calling me so strongly, but my partner didn’t want to move. Finding another house on the coast during COVID-19 was hard. Many people were leaving the city from the Bay Area and snatching any available homes. I continued to feel more and more uneasy as we looked at our options, each home making me feel nauseous upon entering (I am sacral/gut authority in HD).

My partner fell ill with Covid the week we were due to move, and I had to look at our final option by myself while he self-isolated. Upon entering the house, I felt instantly depressed and heavy. I couldn't put my finger on it, but something in the house felt dark. I telephoned my partner and told him I had a bad feeling and didn't want to take this house, even though we only had two days before moving. He responded by saying that he felt I was trying to teach him a lesson by using my "intuition."

I was confused and hurt. This was the same response I had received from my family since I was young for being a sensitive person who sees what others do not—my reality denied by those who could not see or sense, like many oracles before me and within me. So, instead of leaving him right then and there because I knew he needed to learn to let go of control and we wouldn't work if he denied my knowing, I denied what I felt, claimed the house, and we moved in.

Within days, I felt crazy. My moods were all over the place, and I started getting rashes, hives, and cystic acne, all symptoms that I had never experienced before. We pulled the old 1970s wallpaper off the wall in the living room to paint it, and beneath the paper was a massive black hole of black mold. I instantly started crying and feeling fear. This was one of the dark energies I felt in the home, but one I was susceptible to. He did his best to try to convince me that my symptoms weren't from the mold, that it was all in my head, but growing up in the swamp, I had a lot of experience with mold, along with a clear knowing of my body's oracular messages. Ironically, this is the wall where we would place our ancestor altar.

The grief would continue to come in waves, now reaching the point of rage at times. I spent most of the time outside the house in the garden or my studio working on the final edits of my oracle deck, Messages from the Heart of the Divine. I grew Elecampane from seed there, but I mostly avoided drinking it. I was stressed as I navigated balancing more mysterious symptoms and ailments that manifested since we moved in, along with how to leave my marriage, the coast, and the life I had been building with someone who didn't really want to build a life with a woman like me (an oracle).

When I left California and moved to the high desert, I craved Elecampane and picked up our relationship again. I didn't fully understand how it wanted to support me, but my connection to this plant was strong.

I started to explore the myths surrounding the plant and study Helen of Troy's story more deeply. Helen was the daughter of Zeus and Leda, a princess turned queen of Sparta. It was said that Zeus seduced Leda by becoming a swan and seeking refuge in her arms after being chased by an eagle.

How often has a woman been seduced by a man who needs saving? Or, how often has a man pretended to be something he is not, in Zeus' case, a graceful and peaceful swan, to land the woman? 

After they mated, Leda laid two eggs from which four children were born: Helen, her sister Clytemnestra, and her brothers, the twins Castor and Pollux. It was said that Leda also slept with her husband that night, so two children are of divine blood from Zeus, one of whom is Helen, and two are from her husband, who was the King of Sparta and are mortal. 

Zeus commemorated Helen's birth by creating the constellation Cygnus in the sky, which means swan. This constellation has been a curiosity of mine for some time, as it sits right next to Lyra, a constellation with soul-home memories. Both rise over Delphi and are connected to Apollo and the ancient oracles there. Around the time of my miscarriage, I had my second meeting with a starry ancient grandmother from Lyra, who always appears with swans.

Helen, the most beautiful woman in the Ancient Greek world, was a sought-after prize. When she was just a child, a suitor kidnapped her. There were so many suitors in competition for her hand that each was required to swear an oath promising to provide military assistance to the winning suitor if Helen was ever abducted again. 

She went on to marry Menelaus, the King of Sparta. In the King's absence, the story goes that Helen was either abducted by Paris, Prince of Troy, or was seduced and fled with him, similar to Persephone's myth with Hades. This is where Elecampane comes in, which gets its Latin name, Inula helenium, from Helen. 

It is said that Elecampane sprang up from her tears as she left Sparta. Other versions say that she was holding Elecampane in her arms as she left or that she was harvesting Elecampane when she was kidnapped, but Elecampane was very present in her story in every way it has been told.

Paris, Helen's kidnapper/lover (and brother to Cassandra—more about her later), has an interesting story that deepens our understanding of this myth and Elecampane's medicine. Just before his birth, his mother had a dream that she gave birth to a flaming torch. A seer interpreted this dream as the prophecy of the fall of Troy. It was declared that Paris would be the fall of his homelands. When Paris was born, he had to be killed to spare his kingdom, but no one could bring themselves to use a weapon on him. He was left to perish on a mountain but was found and nursed by a bear and then raised as a shepherd until his identity as Prince was revealed, and he returned home. 

At one point, the Gods chose him to determine which of the three primary Goddesses was most beautiful. Hera offered him a bribe of kingly power, and Athena offered him a bribe of military might, but Aphrodite bribed him by helping him win the most beautiful woman alive, Helen. He chose Aphrodite and seduced and stole Helen from her home with Aphrodite's help. 

Paris represents the ego of the young masculine. He's naive, unskilled, fixated on beauty, wants to claim it, and was about to cause the fall of his kingdom as a result. He was rejected and abandoned at birth, so he carries a big wound around the loss of his home and his mother. We can trace all conflicts and dis-ease back to the motherwound, now and in ancient times.

After Helen's husband, the King of Sparta, discovers she is missing, he sends all her suitors after them, who swore the oath to protect her. This is how the Trojan War began. In the Odyssey, Homer says that Helen circled the Trojan horse three times while imitating the voices of all the Greek women left behind at home. This tortured the men as they remembered their heart's home in the women they loved whom they left to fight for another. 

In these myths, Helen is painted in two contrasting roles: a woman who inspires lust and evil, and a lonely, helpless woman searching for sanctuary and safety. Her beauty caused the men to compete and then go to war, and they made it her fault. She was taken from her home just as Paris was rejected from his, in this never-ending loop of separation from the mother/home that causes significant harm to all. 

Helen is seen as the equivalent of Eve, whose lust for the forbidden fruit is said to cause the fall of man. Her story reflects how great power (desire) and beauty are often weaponized and blamed, causing more separation for the man as he seeks to conquer and more grief for the woman as she longs for the safe sanctuary of love's arms. She is also the other side of the woman coin to Cassandra, Paris’ sister (pictured above). Cassandra is the infamous oracle and devotee to Apollo who was cursed by him (after refusing to mate with him, of course) to utter accurate prophecies, but to never be believed. She, too, warned Paris not to bring Helen back to Troy, but he didn’t believe her.

Though I didn’t know what storylines were coming when I met Elecampane, I became Helen AND Cassandra in my own life, the woman stricken with grief and homesickness and the woman shamed and not believed. I know so many women can relate. This story, written long, long ago, continues to repeat itself today as the woman is prized for her beauty but cursed for her knowing. I, too, in the absence of my King, was seduced by a prince without a tether to his original home. I was a shiny, beautiful, mystical prize to be conquered, and the more my light was devoured, or the more my desires were denied, the more I left the home within myself and the more life I lost. And that is the most enormous grief of all. Like Helen, I lost who I was when I followed the wrong man to the wrong lands. like Cassandra, the more I expressed my power and my knowing, the crazier and angrier I became and the more I was oppressed. Like Helen, Elecampane sprung up from my tears, arriving in the night like a solar flare to guide my way back when I was ready. Like all the women who grieved and sang through me, I just wanted who I was to belong.

There is an old saying, "Enula Campana Reddit Praecordia Sana," which translates to "Elecampane will the spirits sustain." Another translation says, "The ring bell makes the heart sing," and that's exactly how I feel about this plant. Elecampane restores the heart and spirit and opens the lungs, where we hold grief, and it arrived into my life right on time. 

I didn't know Elecampane specifically worked on grief or the separation wound in women when it originally came to me in my dream, nor did I know I was about to walk through years of immense grief clearing along with the collective—Covid, BLM, hate crimes, mass deaths, divorces, job loses, miscarriages, wildfires, floods, war, dying children, and more right in our faces and our homes as triggers to awaken and heal unprocessed ancestral trauma and grief. 

I got COVID right when I landed in Santa Fe, a week after signing my divorce papers. In my intense fever daze, I saw the virus activating two particular threads in my DNA. One was connected to my maternal grandmother and her father, and one was a thread of the sisterhood wound that connected back to ancient oracular times.

My case was intense in the fact that along with wild, long-lasting fatigue from the depletion of all my starlight/minerals, I had a gnarly cough for over a year and lost about a third of my hair. A friend sent me the late herbalist Steven Buhner's COVID protocol, and I worked with all the plants recommended. But nothing relieved my symptoms. I was frustrated over not being able to breathe and scaring already fearful other people away with my cough, even though I wasn’t contagious. I asked for support from my higher guidance, and Elecampane returned. 

This is when my work with this plant deepened. I did a plant dieta, drank it daily, and started introducing new forms of its medicine (flower essence, tincture, compress, steam, etc.). I have continued to drink it off and on ever since, as my relationship with it grew and my understanding of its medicine deepened. 

Elecampane helped me move through a big underworld journey to come back to myself after death, loss of home, trauma, and immense ancestral, collective, and personal grief. Elecampane was a friend and heart-mender when I felt lonely, homesick, and separated from a sense of family/community/village, which has always been a big wound for me. Over time, Elecampane helped me feel safer as a sensitive seer after receiving so much negativity from sharing what I saw or knew.

In a vision with Elecampane last year, I saw myself stirring a massive cauldron of the brew in a temple and pouring cup after cup for a line of oracles. I then heard "freedom for the oracles."

This is when my work was massively shifting, and I had this spark lit within me to help other women connect to their own channel of truth rather than seek it from anyone else. I started introducing this plant to more and more of my clients, most of who work with the voice/sound through speaking, writing, channeling new information, singing, the oracular arts, and so on, or who were ready to free their voices and cast their visions through their word.

Though working with plants is subtle and can take time, I started to see shifts in the women I worked with when they would connect to this plant more intimately. As my friend told me when I first saw Elecampane, it connects the solar plexus to the throat through the heart. In other words, it brings courage to one's expression by igniting the spirit that lies within the heart of a woman. This is how it can provide freedom for the oracles.

In guiding us back home, Elecampane teaches us to have unshakable faith in ourselves and trust the fire of truth and vision guiding us forward. It dispels voices of doubt and confusion as we learn to trust our decisions and root into our knowing. It magnetizes our ability to receive and transmit spiritual forces and spiritual voices, connecting us to a clear channel of purity and attunement to our divine light and awakening our lines of communication with the otherworlds. It connects us to our personal power as voices for the feminine here to lead the collective home.

I love introducing this plant to my clients, as most of them are working with me to support them in anchoring new expressions of their divine artistry, dreams, and healing gifts. Elecampane is an immense support in helping to trust the new wisdom, downloads, and expressions of soul streaming through! In my plant grimoire, I found a note about Elecampane that I don't remember writing that said: "When the throat is attuned to our soul, the heavens serve us." This is the path Elecampane guides.

Elecampane has helped me clear out the voices of grief from the women who were taken away from their homes and hearts by the hands of the patriarchy. It brought me back to myself after so much death. It helped me clear out my lungs so I could expand my capacity for life and birth. It helped me reach a deeper place in my body to pull up my voice to declare my desires, needs, and visions. It strengthened my discernment as an oracle, teaching me not to deny what I know and see because it is hard to digest for others, may ruffle some feathers, or oppose their beliefs. It helped me bring my gifts back online after being told they were a lie, a weapon of manipulation and resulted in many others projecting their unhealed wounds with poisonous daggers aimed at my throat.

Sitting in my favorite cafe in Santa Fe with another sister, who, oddly enough, was in the same herbalism school as the friend who connected me to Elecampane in the first place, I told her Elecampane was my favorite plant ally, and if I were a plant, I would want to be her.

She said that didn't surprise her because Elecampane is a threshold plant, and I am a threshold guide. Elecampane is for those at the threshold of birthing new life but must clear out the old to breathe in it. It is for the edge walkers, the wild ones who see, and the oracle mothers here to bring new realities into form. It is for the sensitive ones who don't feel at home or sometimes have difficulty resettling in their bodies through so much change and evolution. It processes undigested physical, emotional, and spiritual decay in the system to move from a space of wallowing to true fulfillment.

If it weren't for this plant, I couldn't have processed the pain, grief, and karmic untangling of the last five years. I couldn't have moved through and collapsed so many past and ancestral timelines of betrayal, limitation, and fear. I couldn’t have learned to reclaim and trust my knowing and truth. I couldn't have done the inner child work I needed to find a deep home and belonging within myself again, not seek it in another person, place, or thing. I couldn't have come back home after being taken far away from it. And I still don’t move through any big life threshold/change without it!

This is why Elecampane is a primary plant I bring into my mentorship containers and 1:1 work with women. Elecampane offers grounded support for evolutionary feminine work, helping to clear out old stuck energy from denser timelines that limit the expression, truth, knowing, and belonging of the sensitive seers, oracles, mystics, witches, artists, mothers, and sisters.

I am so excited to continue to share this plant to help activate freedom for those who see, know, hear, and feel so much as we walk back home to the primordial mother song and truth of our souls.

With solar flares of elecampane visions, devotion, and oracular liberation!

x Ashley River