Basil

Basil, Ocimum basilicum, is a tender aromatic annual of the mint family, native to tropical Asia and Africa and long naturalised in the Mediterranean kitchen. Its name comes from the Greek basilikon, royal, marking it a kingly herb, but the same word invited a link to the basilisk, the deadly serpent of legend, and basil carried a genuinely split reputation in the old herbals, praised by some, condemned by others, with a persistent tale that it bred scorpions or that scorpions bred in the brain of those who smelled it too much. It should be kept distinct from holy basil or tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum), a different and sacred species of Hinduism.

Holy basil, tulsi, kept carefully distinct above from the sweet basil this article otherwise describes, carries a major devotional life of its own in Hinduism: the plant is worshipped as a goddess, an embodiment of Vishnu's devotion, commonly grown in a special pot or shrine in the courtyard of Hindu homes and temples, and the ceremony of Tulsi Vivah ritually marries the tulsi plant to Vishnu each autumn, one of the relatively few plants in any major world religion to be venerated as a deity in its own right rather than merely dedicated to one.

Culpeper placed basil under Mars in the sign of Scorpio, and reported the old dispute over it at length, noting that authorities were so at odds that some called it a herb of love and others a breeder of venom. In folk practice basil ran to both poles: it was a plant of love and courtship, a pot of basil given or grown at a window signalled affection, and in parts of Italy and the Mediterranean it was a lover's token, and it was also a plant of mourning and the grave, as in Keats's retelling of Boccaccio's tale of Isabella and her pot of basil grown over a buried head. Love, death and a whiff of danger cling together to this fragrant kitchen herb.

Basil holds a specific liturgical place in the Greek Orthodox Church: tradition holds that Saint Helena found the herb growing on the site of the True Cross in Jerusalem, and basil is accordingly used to prepare and sprinkle holy water on major feasts, especially the Exaltation of the Holy Cross in September, a distinct and still-practised religious use that sits apart from the folk disputes over the plant recorded above. Basil's love-and-death symbolism in the West has no bearing on its status in India, where a botanically distinct relative, holy basil or tulsi, Ocimum tenuiflorum, is itself sacred, worshipped as a form of the goddess Tulsi and planted in courtyard shrines across Hindu households, a devotion the culinary basil of Mediterranean cooking, Ocimum basilicum, never carries.