Plant & Crystal Magic 7: Cardamom & Ruby

The first signs of Spring are here!  It is time to start feeling good and to bring our attention back to our bodies!  With that in mind, here are two luscious, vitality increasing gifts from our ever generous Mother.

Cardamom

Cardamom is one of my favorite spices.  Commonly used in pastries, teas, and savory dishes, especially in Indian cuisine, it’s spicy and aroma and flavor is instantly warming and uplifting.  I like to use the essential oil to make my hair fragrant, along with clove, and it’s a time tested ingredient in the art of perfumery.  Cardamom, however, is more than just pleasing.  It is a powerful carminative, meaning it supports digestion, and can be especially helpful when eating heavier meals.  This is why it is often used in recipes involving rich foods.  When the body has to work hard to digest our food, it takes a significant amount of our energy, often making us feel tired and sluggish after eating.  When used in cooking or as a sprinkle added at mealtime, Cardamom helps activate the digestive system, avoiding gastrointestinal distress, gas, bloating, or stagnation.  As with all carminative herbs, this small and flavorful addition to a meal can help your body increase the flow of oxygen and blood to your digestive system, allowing for more conversion of food into usable energy, without indigestion and elimination issues.  This simple action can have a powerful effect on your everyday vitality, and at the same time will increase the sensual pleasure of eating.  Cardamom can be purchased as a powder, but might be more potent when found in its green seed pods.  These can be opened to access the small black seeds, which can be boiled or ground, or even left whole and added to rice, soups, stews, or any dish that will be boiled or heated slowly, to release the flavor and medicinal properties.  Afterwards, the whole pods are easily removed, as they are not digestible themselves.

Cardamom is antibacterial, antispasmodic, anti-inflammatory, nervine, and expectorant.  Cardamom is also a decongestant and anti-catarrhal, and helps to move mucus from the lungs, ear, throat, and digestive track.  This can be a good medicine for coughs, especially the kind that produce phlegm, and for conditions involving dampness and cold within the body.  A simple, but effective cough medicine can be made by adding powdered cardamom to buckwheat honey, ideally allowing it to infuse for three months, turning the jar everyday so that the ingredients mix thoroughly.  If needed sooner, a simple mixture will do, and a tea can be made by adding a little hot water, or by boiling the cardamom seeds for around 40 minutes.  As we move through the transition from Winter to Spring, and the body desires to move out the stagnation and chill of the darker months, colds and flus are common, even without a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system.  It is a good idea to have effective herbal remedies at hand, and for those with children, this is an easy one to administer, as it is gentle and sweet to the taste.

In terms of magical purpose, Cardamom is all about love and sensuality.  It is a feminine plant, ruled by Venus and the element of water.  It is a very common ingredient in aphrodisiac elixirs, cooking, and baking.  It’s sweet, peppery scent and taste awakens the senses and warms the body, allowing for openness and sensual response.  The fact that it increases circulation and vitality is a key reason for its power as a love and sensuality herb.  One has to feel good in one’s own body before being truly open to the shared experience of sexuality and love.  The ground seeds have been traditionally added to wine, another warming agent, to promote lust.  Cardamom is also often paired with apples, a fruit with a magnificent amount of love magic lore, and baked into pastries.  Even without the flour, try sprinkling powdered cardamom onto apple slices and baking them in butter, or coconut oil, cinnamon, and honey.  To make this a spell, all you need is a clear intention, and to take the time to connect with and talk to your ingredients while you prepare them.  What if you also add a little of the earthy, sweet essential oil to your hair, body oil or lotion?  Enchant responsibly...

Ways of working with Cardamom:

•  Boil the seeds or pods for 40 minutes to make a strong decoction and drink as tea.

•  Add the whole pods to your rice cooker, with a touch of coconut oil, to make a fragrant, tasty and easier to digest rice dish.

•  Add essential oil of Cardamom to your body oils, lotions, perfumes or bathwater.

•  Sprinkle powdered Cardamom on foods that cause congestion, like yogurt, frozen blended drinks, ice cream, bananas, and on heavier meals.

•  Use Cardamom in cooking and baking. 

•  Make fresh chai tea, for better digestion, circulation, and to ward of colds.

•  Infuse into buckwheat honey for a natural and sweet tasting cough medicine.

•  Increase your love magic with Cardamom powder infused in warmed red wine, or use your imagination for creating sensual treats.

Ruby

There aren’t many gemstones you can wear that will make you stand taller and feel more regal than a Ruby.  A deep red, polished Ruby is a sight to behold, but what it brings the wearer is far more than beauty and a sense of nobility.  Regardless of whether you invest in an authentic gemstone or choose a natural raw Ruby, this stone is a powerful tool for embodiment, vitality, and power.  Many spiritual people struggle with embodiment.  It can be difficult to ground the higher spiritual energies that seers, empaths, light workers, and healers access.  It can make for a sense of overwhelm, spaciness, discomfort in the body, or even disdain for the physical.  Ruby empowers the root chakra, increasing life force energy, physical vitality, and grounding spiritual gifts in the strength and manifestation power of the earth plane. 

Though it sometimes gets a bad reputation as a lower chakra, one in which we don’t wish to become stuck, a healthy root chakra is critical to our health and our spiritual effectiveness.  When it is weak, we cannot hold or easily integrate the true magic of this world, our health suffers, and we don’t manifest with ease.  In the Nahualismo tradition, it is said that we cannot access higher spiritual development fully until we have taken care of our more basic needs, because otherwise our mind and energy is too occupied with the elements of survival.  It is not an area of development we can skip without consequence.  Furthermore, we live here in the earthly plane, and part of this experience is the joy of embodiment.  We deserve to access this sensual vitality, and Ruby helps to make physical life rich in this way.

Ruby activates and energizes the physical, mental, and emotional bodies.  It clears the internalized sense of hopelessness, defeat, and depression, and replaces these heavy emotions with optimism and empowerment.  Wearing or working with Ruby can help increase self confidence, lust for life, adventurousness, and courage, replacing fear, timidity, and feeling stuck with the ability to take risks and pursue dreams.  It makes what was stagnant move, enhances life force energy, and pushes one to overcome limitations, earning its reputation as a stone of courage. 

Ruby holds the activated, higher vibration of the root chakra, meaning it can initiate Kundalini awakening.  This awakening allows for the energetic flow that can empower the full chakra system, taking one towards wisdom and the ability to manifest.  With the power of the earth element, Ruby helps in the manifestation of intention and brings unseen support towards one’s goals.  When worn on the body, be conscious about your thoughts and desires, and use it carefully to channel physical, psychic and emotional power.  Direct its energy towards your highest dreams and the enchantment of your embodied life.

Ruby also offers deep healing for issues of sexual trauma, dysfunction, and the lack of self love.  In these sensitive areas, call on Ruby to help in returning to the physical body and recreating a harmonious relationship with the physical self.  It has a reputation for improving fertility and increasing circulation and sensuality, which makes sense in terms of its cultivation of physical embodiment and the joy of incarnation.  Magic is not only in the realm of spirit.  It is infused everywhere in our earthly world.  We only have to embrace it and look for it in nature, in the mundane, in our relationships, and in ourselves.  Ruby will help in awakening the passion and power of the physical, grounding our spiritual energies, and directing our power towards purpose.

Suggestion for working with Cardamom and Ruby together:

1.    These are two very grounded earth allies.  Use them in an everyday manner.  Wear your Ruby with intention, and add Cardamom to your cooking.  Empower your self care and vitality.

2.    Create a ritual for higher magic by bathing in a Cardamom essential oil perfumed bath, while sipping a Cardamom infused elixir or tea.  Feel the warmth grow in your body.  As you relax, get clear about your desired intention for manifestation.  After emerging from your bath create sacred space, and place the Ruby on your body, asking for its healing, grounding, or activating energies.  Blow an intention into your stone and wear it for a moon cycle.  Do this on a full moon for releasing work, and on the new moon for creating something new.  Cleanse your crystal after this cycle, unless you are still looking to see and feel the effects.

3.    Offer a ritual of healing and sensual enlivening for a beloved.  Prepare by scenting your hair oil, body butter, and/or lip balm with essential oil of Cardamom.  Engage in magical cooking with Cardamom.  Include the herb in your savory dishes, desert, and special drinks for the evening.  Wear a ruby with intention.  Prepare a Cardamom scented bath.  Pour the water over your beloved with a bowl, continuously, while repeating a soft chant or phrase, calling them to awaken to love of self and other, to heal, or to empower.  Both partners breath deeply and follow the senses and heart.  Offer a massage, using the infused oil or body butter, and placing the stone at their lower chakra area.  This kind of pampering doesn’t have to come just once a year.

May you love and live with passion and purpose.

Ometeotl.

-This blog was written by Melusina Gomez, originally for publication with the eleventh house.