Wormwood

It was in the first half of 2012 that I had been working an extremely early shift in a low paid job in Wormwood Street. The streets name had aroused my curiosity, being familiar as I was with the Book of Revelations, and this combined with the apocalyptic count down that seemed to be playing out on the calendar made the above find even more prophetic. A faded chalk spiral on the wall of 'All Hallows on the Wall'. This church was built on the old London Wall and had replaced a previous church that resided on the Roman city wall. It survived the apocalyptic fire of 1666 and was renown for it's many hermits.

Wormwood Street is called as such not after the biblical prophesy but after the Wormwood plant that used to grow on the London Wall. Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) is one of the ingredients that is used to make Absinth and contains thujone which is psychoactive and can cause convulsions and hallucinations (as well as kidney failure) if taken in large enough amounts.

Nicholas Culpeper (1616 –  1654), a kind of proto New Age anti-establishment astrologer/healer, insisted that Wormwood was the ingredient that was vital in understanding his work The English Physitian, a guide to herbs as medicine. His entry on this plant was described as reading like a stream of consciousness, suggesting that he had taken it when writing. Culpeper set up a phamacy in a halfway house (liminal?) in Spitalfields, just down the road from Wormwood Street and outside of the wall that marked the extent of the City of London's authority. He treated patient for free, gathering herbs from the nearby countryside.

Culpeper  appears as the major protagonist of 'Doctor of Medicine', one of the stories in Rudyard Kipling's 'Puck of Pook's Hill'. (Puck being the king of the faeries, as featured in Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night's Dream)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemisia_absinthium

Wormwood, αψίνθιον (apsinthion) or άψινθος (apsinthos) in Greek, is a star or angel.

"The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water— the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter." (Rev 8:10–11)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wormwood_%28Bible%29

Wormwood also links with the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. 

The city name is the same as a local Ukrainian name for Artemisia vulgaris (mugwort or common wormwood), which is also чорнобиль "chornobyl"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_%28city%29#Name_origin