(M43) Of the flowers which it has been customary to gather for purposes of magic or divination at midsummer none perhaps is so widely popular as St. John’s wort (_Hypericum perforatum_). The reason for associating this particular plant with the great summer festival is perhaps not far to seek, for the flower blooms about Midsummer Day, and with its bright yellow petals and masses of golden stamens it might well pass for a tiny copy on earth of the great sun which reaches its culminating point in heaven at this season. Gathered on Midsummer Eve, or on Midsummer Day before sunrise, the blossoms are hung on doorways and windows to preserve the house against thunder, witches, and evil spirits; and various healing properties are attributed to the different species of the plant. In the Tyrol they say that if you put St. John’s wort in your shoe before sunrise on Midsummer Day you may walk as far as you please without growing weary. In Scotland people carried it about their persons as an amulet against witchcraft. On the lower Rhine children twine chaplets of St. John’s wort on the morning of Midsummer Day, and throw them on the roofs of the houses. Here, too, the people who danced round the midsummer bonfires used to wear wreaths of these yellow flowers in their hair, and to deck the images of the saints at wayside shrines with the blossoms. Sometimes they flung the flowers into the bonfires. In Sicily they dip St. John’s wort in oil, and so apply it as a balm for every wound. During the Middle Ages the power which the plant notoriously possesses of banning devils won for it the name of _fuga daemonum_; and before witches and wizards were stretched on the rack or otherwise tortured, the flower used to be administered to them as a means of wringing the truth from their lips.(162) In North Wales people used to fix sprigs of St. John’s wort over their doors, and sometimes over their windows, “in order to purify their houses, and by that means drive away all fiends and evil spirits.”(163) In Saintonge and Aunis the flowers served to detect the presence of sorcerers, for if one of these pestilent fellows entered a house, the bunches of St. John’s wort, which had been gathered on Midsummer Eve and hung on the walls, immediately dropped their yellow heads as if they had suddenly faded.(164) However, the Germans of Western Bohemia think that witches, far from dreading St. John’s wort, actually seek the plant on St. John’s Eve.(165) Further, the edges of the calyx and petals of St. John’s wort, as well as their external surface, are marked with dark purple spots and lines, which, if squeezed, yield a red essential oil soluble in spirits.(166) German peasants believe that this red oil is the blood of St. John,(167) and this may be why the plant is supposed to heal all sorts of wounds.(168) In Mecklenburg they say that if you pull up St. John’s wort at noon on Midsummer Day you will find at the root a bead of red juice called St.