The Seeds of Taranis - A Story of Mistletoe

It was the run up to Christmas a few years back and I was a correspondent with the Daily Mail when the features editor called me with an unusual assignment: “Head for Tenbury Wells in the Malvern Hills,” she told me, “I’d like you to write a piece about their annual mistletoe auction.” 

My journalistic curiosity piqued, I headed for sleepy Tenbury on the banks of the River Severn in Worcestershire, where the parasitic mistletoe plant grows in profusion among the county’s apple orchards and, so it seems, on every other oak tree too.

I imagine most people in the US will associate this enigmatic plant with the fun Christmas tradition of ‘kissing under the mistletoe’ but in Europe it’s heavily associated with legend, and in particular the legend of the Druids.

The Romans observed white-robed Druid priests cut mistletoe with a mystical Golden Sickle, exclusively from oak trees, catching the distinctive fronds bearing their translucent, pearl like berries, in a white sheet so the sacred plant wouldn’t touch the ground and be despoiled.

Druid priests used the bead-like fruits in healing potions and believed they were particularly effective in helping women with severe period pain and other female reproductive problems. They also believed the milky white, mistletoe fruits were the semen of Taranis, the god of thunder, falling from heaven and so the myth of the berry’s aphrodisiac qualities was born among the Celtic tribes of Britain.

When Christianity arrived in Britain, the Church allowed the tradition of kissing under the mistletoe to continue as a harmless hangover from pagan times. At least that’s what I’d always believed until I headed for an apple orchard near Tenbury to watch the ‘Fruits of Taranis’ being harvested for the auction, and noticed there were no women involved in the gathering. That’s unusual in a modern agricultural setting and I asked the orchard owner why. His answer came as a surprise.

“Over the centuries women have never take part in the mistletoe harvest, because of a superstition put around by the Church that they’ll become barren if they do,” he said, “Still to this day local women won’t take any chances and even migrant women from Eastern Europe shy away when they hear about the curse of the mistletoe. It’s really a religious paradox because on the one hand the Church allowed the pagan kissing tradition to survive, and on the other they warned their flocks mistletoe would make women childless. It suggests the early Christian priests couldn’t make their mind up about mistletoe and were hedging their bets.”

Mistletoe on a hawthorn bush near my home.

Modern science tells us the Druids were right to revere the Fruit of Taranis, which has indeed been proven effective for treating many conditions including epilepsy and various female reproductive ailments. And promising research is showing mistletoe extracts could also help treat some cancers. 

But the pharmacologists aren’t telling traditional practitioners anything they haven’t always known and it’s here that we find a path of coherence where the ancient wisdom of the mistletoe, fizzing with resonance, has travelled down the millennia.

The transmission of ancient knowledge through powerful vectors like oral tradition and epigenetics can have a wholly positive resonance. Equally these messages can be mutated where vested interests and ignorance block them, short circuiting the cohesive nature of the message to create division.

Stories from our deep past, like the folklore of mistletoe can be an irrepressible manifestation of cohesion in our human condition and I see the safeguarding of age-old narratives as a sacred duty, particularly when as individuals we are culturally connected to those stories.

I did go on to Tenbury to watch rows of mistletoe in bundles go under the auctioneer’s hammer as garden centre managers and florists from all over the UK made their annual pilgrimage to buy the Fruit of Taranis. Many were old acquaintances from previous sales, and hip flasks were passed around to ward off the chill in what was a truly jolly festive gathering.

Perhaps it may have been my imagination but as I watched events unfold I’m sure I saw one distinguished, grey-haired patron moving quietly around the rows of mistletoe, casting a Druid’s eye as he looked for a bundle that hadn’t touched the ground.