I’ve been gathering legends of Aconitum, monkshood’s parent toxin, and they pop up everywhere. In Shasekishu, in Shakespeare, in Medea. In the funny little pamphlet on your windowsill from the British Homeopathic Association. Hapless thirteenth-century Japanese servants mistake dried aconite root for sugar and almost, but do not, die of it. Henry IV imagines the poison as blood mingled “with venom of suggestion.” Medea fails to poison Theseus with aconite-tipped wine. Athena, armed with aconite, transforms Arachne into a spider. The moon
