Plants

Cabbage

Herbs

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Cabbage." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/plants/cabbage.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Cabbage. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/plants/cabbage

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-cabbage,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Cabbage},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/plants/cabbage},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

Cabbage, a herb, is ruled by the Moon in Culpeper's herbalism, cooling, moistening, and soothing to the fluids of the body. Broad-leaved and full of watery juice, the cabbage was a staple pot-herb of the poor and a homely physic besides. Culpeper and the ancients used the boiled leaves and juice to loosen the belly, and, curiously, the raw juice or a bruised leaf bound on to cool inflammation, draw out swellings, and heal ulcers and sore breasts, a poultice still used for aching joints. The old writers held that wine drunk after cabbage guarded against drunkenness. Moist, cooling, and nourishing, its many layered leaves gathered round a moon-pale heart mark it a plant of the Moon.

Facts

Debunked

Origin Period

1653 5Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Correspondences

Element Correspondence

Water 2Cunningham

Origins

Botanical Identification

Brassica oleracea, family Brassicaceae, the mustard family 3

Origin of the Name

From Old French caboche, "head", a dialect word for head, entering English to describe the plant's round, head shaped growth. 4A Modern Herbal

Origin Region

Coastal southern and western Europe 3

Meaning

Themes

Luck 2Cunningham

Attributions

Ruling Planet

Moon 1Culpeper

Temperament

Cooling, moistening, and soothing to the fluids of the body 1

Traditional Ailments

Boiled leaves and juice used to loosen the belly 1

Attestation

Meaning in the Attesting Source

Roman writers, Cato the Elder among them, held that wine drunk after eating cabbage would guard the drinker against drunkenness, a belief that stood beside the plant's ordinary regard as a staple pot-herb. 4Roman tradition

Learn More

The Plain Vegetable the Romans Revered

The cabbage, Brassica oleracea in its many cultivated forms, is one of the oldest of European vegetables, and it held a place in Roman esteem out of all proportion to its humble modern reputation. Cato the Elder devoted long passages of his treatise on farming to the cabbage, calling it the first of all vegetables and crediting it with keeping the household in health; the Romans ate it before a banquet in the belief that it staved off drunkenness and cleared the head afterward, a folk conviction recorded here as history rather than as fact. Its dense, layered head and reliable hardiness made it the staple green of the poor across the old world.

Cabbage's preserved form, fermented as sauerkraut in Germany and much of northern Europe, had a genuine and well-documented role in the history of seafaring health: the British explorer James Cook stocked large quantities of sauerkraut on his Pacific voyages in the 1770s, and the near-absence of scurvy among his crew, at a time when the disease routinely killed sailors on long ocean passages, is credited in large part to the vitamin C the fermented cabbage preserved, a genuine nutritional discovery reached well before vitamins themselves were understood or named.

A Cool and Homely Herb

The old herbalists treated the cabbage as a cooling, moistening plant, and its long association with sobriety and plain sustenance gave it a symbolism of homeliness, thrift and the domestic hearth rather than of any high mystery. In folk speech a cabbage stood for the ordinary and unglamorous, and children in several European countries were told they were found under a cabbage. Its genuine importance is agricultural and dietary, a single wild coastal species bred into cabbage, kale, cauliflower, broccoli, sprouts and kohlrabi, one of the most productive transformations in the history of cultivation.

In Scotland and Ireland cabbage played a part in Halloween divination: young people pulled the first cabbage stalk they found while blindfolded, and the size, shape and taste of the stalk, along with how much earth clung to its root, was read as a sign of a future spouse's character and fortune, a custom recorded by Robert Burns in his poem Halloween. This playful divination sits oddly beside the vegetable's reputation for plainness, a reminder that even the homeliest kitchen plant accumulated its own small body of folk magic alongside its long record of feeding the poor.

The word cabbage itself descends from the same root as cole, seen today in coleslaw, literally cabbage salad, from the Dutch koolsla, a small etymological trace of the vegetable's long history in the everyday language of eating rather than in myth.

Cross-Tradition Connections