Ruda (Rue) ohli-way

How to Use It

Witchcraft & Folk Magick

• Dress a green or white candle for luck, protection and abundance, burned on a Sunday.
• Anoint a small sachet or a cimaruta-style charm and carry it as protection against envy.
• Touch a drop to the doorframe beside a potted rue plant to strengthen its role as a guardian of the house.

Hoodoo & Rootwork

• Add a few drops to a luck or uncrossing bath, worked downward over the body.
• Dress a lucky hand or mojo bag weekly with the oil to keep it fed.
• Anoint money before spending it, a traditional way of asking it to return.

A Simple Working

• Set out a white candle and a small piece of fresh or dried rue.
• Dress the candle with Ruda oil from the middle outward and light it.
• Pass the rue sprig through the smoke three times and set it at the foot of the candle.
• Anoint your wrists and the back of your neck, asking for luck and for envy to pass you by.
• Let the candle burn down, then wrap the sprig in a scrap of red cloth.
• Carry it, or place it above the front door.

Pairs Well With

• Fresh rue, kept in a pot by the door in many Latin American homes.
• Basil, often bundled with rue for limpias.
• Rosemary, another protective herb of Mediterranean folk magick.
• Red thread or cloth, a traditional companion of anti-evil-eye charms.
• Lodestone, for the luck and abundance side of the oil’s intention.

What You Receive

Ruda (Rue) ohli-way oil, in a 1 oz bottle.

Origin & Lore

Ruda is the Spanish name for rue, Ruta graveolens, a bitter, blue-green Mediterranean herb that travelled to the Americas with Spanish and Portuguese settlers. It is planted by doorways, tucked behind ears and swept over the body in limpias across Latin America, and this oil is made with the intention of good luck, love and abundance, the gifts rue is said to bring once the evil eye has been kept away.

In Italy, witches and their neighbours alike wore the cimaruta, a silver charm shaped like a sprig of rue hung with tiny amulets.

Rue is one of the herbs most associated with the evil eye in Mediterranean lore. The Italian cimaruta, a silver rue sprig with charms such as a moon, key and hand on its branches, was worn by babies and adults alike. In Spain and across Latin America, ruda is kept in the house, rubbed on the body and used in limpias, and on the first of August in parts of Argentina and Paraguay people take caña con ruda, cane spirit steeped with rue, to see off the bad luck of winter.

The seventeenth-century English herbalist tradition placed rue under the Sun in Leo.