====== Cardamom ======
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---- dataentry herbs----
latin_names: Elettaria cardamomum
folk_names: 
gender_tags: Feminine
planet_tags: Venus
element_tags: Water
deity_tags: 
effect_tags: Lust, Love, Sex
part_tags: essential oil, dried seeds
----
</div>

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===== Magical Uses =====

The ground seeds are added to warmed wine for a quick lust potion. They are also baked into apple pies for a wonderful amatory pastry, and are added to love sachets and incenses.

===== Aromatherapy =====

Cardamom is the second-most expensive spice in common world trade today. Only saffron is costlier. At the time of this writing, fairly good quality cardamom sold for $2.50 an ounce in San Diego. Many stores don’t carry it, so check with mail-order suppliers (Appendix II).

This is one of the most luxuriant, richest scents you’re ever likely to encounter. Cardamom seeds bear an unfortunate resemblance to a small, legless insect, but their delicious fragrance (powerful even in a whole state) more than makes up for their rather peculiar appearance.

It is used throughout the Middle East and elsewhere to flavor and scent coffee. Part of its popularity may stem from its legendary property of arousing sexual desires. This effect is also felt (by some) when inhaling its odor.

If this is undesirable, simply visualize love as you smell the intoxicating fragrance. See yourself in an equally beneficial relationship. Create this state in your conscious mind and use the fragrance of cardamom to stir your own energies. After inhaling, send out your charged power and let it do its work.

The aroma of cardamom is also recommended to clear the conscious mind and to stimulate the appetite. It may have other uses. When I Jet a friend smell a simmering potpourri I’d devised (largely scented with cardamom), she told me I should bag it and sell it as a drug. This statement from a very anti-drug woman points to the power of its fragrance.

Cardamom is closely related to ginger and has some of that particular plant’s spiciness in its odor. The essential oil perfectly captures its fragrance and yet, somehow, lifts and heightens it in some unexplainable way. This is one of my favorite scents (is it obvious?).
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