which both ends are in the
earth take the newer root, delve it up, cut up nine chips
with the left hand and sing three times the Miserere mei
Deus and nine times the Pater Noster, then take mugwort and
everlasting, boil these three worts and the chips in milk
till they get red, then let the man sip at night fasting a
pound dish full ... let him rest himself soft and wrap
himself up warm; if more need be let him do so again, if
thou still need do it a third time, thou wilt not need
oftener."--_Leech Book_, II. 65.

The leechdom for the use of dwarf elder against a snake-bite runs
thus:--[34]

"For rent by snake take this wort and ere thou carve it off
hold it in thine hand and say thrice nine times Omnes malas
bestias canto, that is in our language Enchant and overcome
all evil wild deer; then carve it off with a very sharp
knife into three parts."--_Herb. Ap._, 93.

Some of the most remarkable passages in the manuscripts are those
concerning the ceremonies to be observed both in the picking and in
the administering of herbs. What the mystery of plant life which has
so deeply affected the minds of men in all ages and of all
civilisations meant to our ancestors, we can but dimly apprehend as we
study these ceremonies. They carry us back to that worship of earth
and the forces of Nature which prevailed when Woden was yet unborn.
That Woden was the chief god of the tribes on the mainland is
indisputable, but even in the hierarchy of ancestors reverenced as
semi-divine the Saxons themselves looked to Sceaf rather than to
Woden, who himself was descended from Sceaf. There are few more
haunting legends than that of our mystic forefather, the little boy
asleep on a sheaf of corn who, in a richly adorned vessel which moved
neither by sails nor oars, came to our people out of the great deep
and was hailed by them as their king. Did not Alfred himself claim him
as his primeval progenitor, the founder of our race? There is no
tangible link between his descendant Woden and the worship of earth,
but the sheaf of corn, the symbol of Sceaf, carries us straight back
to Nature worship. Sceaf takes his fitting place as the semi-divine
ancestor with the lesser divinities such as Hrede and Eostra, goddess
of the radiant dawn. It is to this age that the ceremonies in the
picking of the herbs transport us, to the mystery of the virtues of
herbs, the fertility of earth, the never-ce