We proudly present the fifth volume in the Viridis Genii Editions series. Since 2015, a community of practitioners and students have gathered yearly to convene, commune, and focus their intentions on the ethnobotany of magic. The Viridis Genii Symposium continues to offer a weekend rich in verdant gnosis, with lectures and optional hands-on intensive workshops balanced by a witches’ market offering services and rare wares. The crossover of valuable practical knowledge, innovations in magical practice and tools, as well as new books on magical ethnobotany continue to spill forth from the important contacts formed during the symposium.

This year, the symposium takes place at the base of Mount Rainier in the state of Washington. The Center for Sustainable Forestry’s Pack Forest Conference Center is nestled in a 4,300 acre Douglas-fir forest. It is among these trees that our community will connect with the Viridis Arcanum and with each other. These pages you hold are a small record of the many conversations and connections that emerge throughout the event; it is through them that this work may continue to spread into the world beyond this time and place, and perhaps one day encourage you to attend in person.

This anthology, for the second time composed of articles from all of the speakers at this year’s symposium, gives voice to the Viridis Genii itself—a spirit of diverse form that has many secrets and many more faces. The humble messengers of the green spirit have again expressed themselves here through the continued traditions and practices of masters, explorers, its guardians, and garden tenders. With this fifth volume, we continue our aim to give the Viridis Genii voice and share in its mysteries, so that those mysteries may perpetuate.

Our collection begins once again with our keynote speaker, Karin DiGiacomo. In her second appearance in our pages, DiGiacomo unveils an occult pedagogy of Hermetic herbalism through the example of Mugwort. Her piece is accompanied by original artwork from K. Lenore Siner depicting Mugwort distillation. After this extended meditation, Ella von Cosel embalms us in the funerary lore of ancient Greece, giving us a hint of the scented magic that took place there. Carrying the theme of perfume into the modern lived environment, Day Host-Jablonski immerses us in a first-person life world of Querencia. Her contribution demonstrates how to operate much more mindfully in our own bioregions.

Midway through the volume, Professor Charles Porterfield illuminates the herbal links to working with conjure lamps, providing precise recipes to follow, should one desire to adopt this magical method. Then, Brandon Weston, takes us deep into the neglected world of Ozark magic. Few folklorists have done justice to the myriad forms of magic that linger in these hills. Weston draws out insights and presents a call to future researchers to mindfully document the hidden facets of this region before it is lost to the ravages of time.

Corinne Boyer then presents us with an exploration of the virid allies to the gift of second sight as they appear in northern and western European traditions, imploring us, at the end, to critically examine our relationships to tradition, as we employ our knowledge in practice. Then, Vex Blòðstjarna chases down verdant components of shapeshifting, offering a plethora of avenues through which shapeshifting has been effected through encounters with plants and fungi. After these two intoxicating contributions, Júlia Semproniana pricks us back to our senses with her masterful article on the thorn magic of the Pyrenees.

Our volume concludes with a definitive contribution from Daniel A. Schulke on the axioms of “phytognosis” a neologism he coined in the 1990s. Schulke’s own occult pedagogy brings us full circle, mirroring, in some respects, DiGiacomo’s opening article. Thus we have a complete circuit of plantlore, theory, and practice, rounding out the fifth year of the Viridis Genii Symposium, and the fifth volume of Verdant Gnosis.

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It is with continued humble pride and reverence to this great green work that we transcribe and transmit the voices of those who work with the Viridis Genii. With each volume of this anthology and each year that the symposium grows, it is our hope that the green mysterium tremendom grows, as do those who seek to perpetuate it in their own garden of dreams and magic.

Bloom true,
Catamara Rosarium,
Marcus McCoy,
& Jenn Zahrt, PhD

Shelton, Washington
May 5, 2019