Clove

Clove (Syzygium aromaticum) is the dried flower bud of a tropical tree native to the Maluku Islands of Indonesia, and it has been one of the most prized spices in world trade for over two thousand years. Its warm, penetrating, slightly sweet scent is immediately recognizable, and its magical character matches that scent: assertive, warming, clearing, and capable of moving through resistance. Practitioners reach for cloves when they need protection with a strong presence, when they want to draw prosperity with a sense of abundance and expansion, or when they need to stop harmful speech and gossip in its tracks.

The spice’s fire-element nature makes it an amplifier of magical work: added to any working, it tends to increase the heat and speed of the intention. This quality of acceleration and intensification should be factored into how it is combined with other materials.

History and origins

Cloves were among the most valuable commodities in the ancient and medieval spice trade, traveling from their origin in the Maluku Islands through Indian Ocean trade routes to the Middle East, Africa, and eventually Europe. Their value was high enough to motivate the European age of exploration and the violent colonialism of the spice trade era, a history that is inseparable from the plant’s presence in Western culture.

In Islamic medicine and folk magic traditions, cloves were used for protection, purification, and healing. In Indian Ayurvedic practice, cloves (laung) have been used medicinally and ritually for centuries. In European folk magic, cloves entered use as a protective and money-drawing herb as they became more available through the spice trade from the medieval period onward.

In American folk magic traditions, including Hoodoo and Southern folk practice, cloves are a standard component of money-drawing and uncrossing formulas. Their use in pomanders, the studding of oranges with cloves, is a folk tradition that carries both practical (the clove’s volatile oils preserve the orange) and magical (the combination is protective and luck-drawing) dimensions.

In practice

Whole cloves are the most useful form for magical work, as they retain their volatile oils and scent much longer than ground cloves. They can be burned on charcoal as loose incense, added directly to sachets and charm bags, inserted into wax or fruit for sympathetic magic, or simmered in water to release their scent as a room-cleansing steam.

Clove essential oil, heavily diluted in a carrier oil (clove oil is highly irritating to skin in undiluted form), can be used to anoint candles and objects. Always dilute to one percent or less in a carrier oil before any skin contact.

Magickal uses

Clove’s primary magical applications are protection from harmful speech and malefic forces, money and prosperity drawing, love and friendship work, and purification. For protection, whole cloves are placed in sachets at entry points to the home, burned as incense to clear a space of hostile energy, and carried on the person. The specific use for stopping gossip is particularly well-documented in folk magic sources: the image of driving a clove (as a “nail” or “pin”) into something associated with the source of slander is sympathetically consistent with the spice’s penetrating, assertive energy.

For money work, cloves are added to green or gold sachets alongside cinnamon, basil, and bay leaf. The combination creates a warm, expansive prosperity charm. Cloves are also worked with in candle dressing: pressing whole cloves into a dressed green candle before lighting gives the working an additional fire-element charge.

For love and friendship, cloves are added to social and relationship sachets. Their warming, drawing quality extends to interpersonal attraction, and they are sometimes used in workings designed to warm up a cooling friendship or to draw new social connections.

How to work with it

A quick and effective space-clearing uses whole cloves on a charcoal disc: light the charcoal in a fireproof vessel, wait until it is fully glowing, then add five to seven whole cloves to the disc. The smoke that rises is potent and penetrating. Walk through the space you wish to clear, allowing the smoke to reach every corner, while stating your intention for protection and the clearing of hostile influences. Ventilate the space afterward.

For a money-drawing sachet, place seven whole cloves in a small green cloth alongside a cinnamon stick, a bay leaf with your intention written on it, and a coin. Tie it with gold cord and keep it near your workspace or in your wallet.

In myth and popular culture

Clove’s mythological footprint is modest compared to herbs with longstanding European folk associations, but its cultural significance is enormous through the history of trade. The Maluku Islands (Moluccas), clove’s homeland, were the sole source of cloves in world trade for centuries, making them the prize that motivated the Portuguese, Dutch, and Spanish empires to undertake violent campaigns for control of the spice routes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch East India Company’s monopoly on clove production, enforced through the destruction of clove trees on uncontrolled islands and the massacre of the Banda Islands’ population in 1621, makes clove one of the plants most directly linked to colonial atrocity in world history.

In medieval European folk belief, cloves were closely associated with protection against plague and pestilence, and the pomander, an orange or apple studded with cloves and spices, was carried as a guard against infection and as a symbol of prosperity. The word “pomander” derives from the French “pomme d’ambre,” apple of amber, and these objects appear frequently in portraits of Tudor-era English nobility as both practical items and status symbols.

In literary and culinary culture, cloves are inseparable from the warm-spice tradition of winter and celebration. Their presence in mulled wines, Christmas puddings, and holiday baking across Europe and North America has given them a firmly festive character in popular culture. The scent of clove is among the most reliably nostalgic of spice aromas in Western contexts.

Myths and facts

Common beliefs about clove in magical and folk contexts sometimes diverge from historical and scientific reality.

• A widespread belief holds that cloves can physically stop gossip or harmful speech by being inserted into a poppet or orange representing the speaker. No physical mechanism supports this; the practice belongs to sympathetic magic, which operates through intention and symbol rather than direct physical cause.
• Clove essential oil is commonly described as a skin-safe topical ingredient in popular herbal sources. In reality, undiluted clove essential oil is a strong dermal irritant and sensitizer, capable of causing burns and permanent sensitization; it must be diluted to no more than one percent in a carrier before any skin contact.
• Clove is often listed in popular sources as ruled by the Sun rather than Jupiter. Both attributions appear in historical herbal sources, and neither is universally correct; the Jupiter attribution dominates in contemporary Western correspondence tables, while Sun rulership appears in some older planetary magic systems.
• It is sometimes claimed that cloves were used in ancient Egyptian ritual and embalming. Archaeological evidence for clove use in Egypt before the Roman period is limited; their expensive trade route means cloves were rare in Europe until the medieval era, and their Egyptian ritual use in antiquity has not been definitively established.
• Clove cigarettes (“kreteks”), popular in Indonesia, are sometimes described as safer than conventional cigarettes. They contain tobacco and deliver nicotine and carcinogens comparably to standard cigarettes, with the added irritant effect of eugenol from the clove; they are not a safer alternative.