Remember, Mugwort,
what you brought to pass,
what you readied,
at Regenmeld.

You’re called Una, that most ancient plant.
You defeat three, you defeat 30,
you defeat venom, you defeat air-illness;
you defeat the horror who stalks the land.

This is known as The Nine Plants charm. It is featured heavily in the Oscar Nominated movie “Hamnet.” Now I’m not one to just talk about movies often on here, but I was fascinated by this movie and I found myself thinking about it days and weeks after seeing it in the theater.

The themes within this movie explore death, sympathetic magick, and green witchery aplenty. It is a beautiful study of loss and rebirth and I can’t recommend it enough. The film is based on a 2020 book of the same name by Maggie O’Farrell. It tells a fictionalized story of Will Shakespeare, his wife, Agnes (known to most of us as Anne Hathaway), and their children, one of whom is named Hamnet.

I am a big fan of fictionalized tales of Shakespeare, look no further than Dream Country from the run of The Sandman comics and the story “A Midsummers Night’s Dream” as a prime example.

The Bard lends himself well to stories of witches, Fae, and the unknown. In this film we are introduced to Agnes as a force of nature, the wings of her Kestrel familiar reflecting her inner wildness. She has talent for the sight, of healing, and her connection to the land is strong. The inclusion of the Nine Plants Charm caught me off guard, but her ways were very familiar territory growing up with my own herb mending grandmothers.

In interviews, Jesse Buckley, the Best Actress winner for this role, discusses Agnes as less a ‘witch’ and states “Agnes’ relationship with nature is a spiritual one.” She is above all things a Mother, and her sympathetic ties to her children are both fierce and heartbreaking. She wants to protect them, but the dual side of nature is ever looming. Life is a cycle, and in it’s end is Death.

Even the children are part of her spiritual upbringing. We’ll get in a bit of spoiler territory, so if you haven’t seen the movie, please do so and experience the film as purely untethered as you can. When the children trade roles earlier in the movie, it is a foreshadowing of how brave Hamnet serves to fool Death into thinking he is his Sister, thereby sparing her life by taking him instead. It is heartbreaking as it unfolds. Agnes the healer cannot bring her beloved son back, and his spirit haunts her until the end where his Father has poured his own grief into a play and within that story Hamnet’s on stage death shows Agnes a catharsis to her grief.

It is a beautiful movie shaped by the unpredictability of nature and magick’s cost. I loved the director’s careful depiction of Agnes’ ways…even when her talents could not save what she loved most.

And you, Waybread, plant-mother!
You’re open to the east, yet mighty within:
Carts creaked over you, women rode over you,
over you brides bellowed, over you bulls snorted!

You withstood it all—and you pushed back:
You withstood venom, you withstood air-illness,
you withstood the horror who travels over land.