Devils Ivy..is it evil?

T

tablariddim

forexU2
Valued Senior Member
There's an old wife's tale in my country, that holds that the plant commonly known as devils ivy is a bringer of bad luck and more specifically, an 'ouster', something that will make you somehow leave your home or lose something important from your home.

Example:
A good friend of ours once bought a beautiful Devils Ivy plant and put it in her lounge. When my wife saw it she explained that she knew the plant to bring bad luck but ofcourse nobody took the tale seriously.
One year later our friend took her family and emigrated back to her home country,vacating the flat.Four years later she divorced her husband and virtually disowned her only son of 17 who has special needs.
Meanwhile, she had given the plant to my wife because she's good with plants. One year after we got the plant we decided to repatriate as well, so we vacated our home and gave the plant to another family of friends.
As soon as we arrived back home in Cyprus my wife discovered a lump on her breast. It was malignant, she had a botched up lumpoctomy which had to be reopened 3 times but thankfully she survived it and had to take a nasty hormone suppressing drug for five years
she stopped the treatment herself after four, she couldn't take the shit anymore. Anyway thank god/shiva/mohamed/computer in the sky, she's fine now and I sincerely hope she stays so.
Meanwhile, one year after we gave the plant to our family of friends the husband got on a plane to Lagos Nigeria (his home country again!) and never returned. Apart from 2 or 3 years later when he returned just to collect some belongings and disappear again.He left a wife, three young teenage daughters and a young teenage son!
His wife couldn't keep up with the mortgage payments and had to move out, but because of some legal technicalities in the way the mortgage was arranged and because her husbands signature was needed before she could sell it, she was still liable for the payments and she is still paying for it.
I don't know what she's done with the plant.

Example:
A friends mother was recently killed in a road accident. When we visited their house, we noticed pots and pots of recently placed Devils Ivy plants on the porch!

Example:
When another friends mother recently died (ok she was 92)from a stroke, we noticed a recently bought Devils Ivy plant in the sitting room.
The mother used to live in my friends house.

Coincidence or evil plant?
 
Is it an actual strain of Ivy? Or is it just called that? I'll check my herbalist books and see if I can find any reference to it.
 
Hi Skye Blue,
the Latin name is Epiprenum Aereum and the Greek is Pothos. I'll look up the meaning of Pothos and post it, chow 4 now.
 
Sure, my natural reaction would be to say that the 'bad luck' events would have occured nonetheless and that the presence of the plants was merely a coincidental red herring. But (and theres always a but), when you actually begin to observe these type of phenomena it makes you wonder.
If it was wishful thinking that led to those events happening (even on a subconcious level) and I believe there was a lot of wishful thinking going on.Then I can only conclude that there might be something to the superstition - The plant of wishes and desires, but with a price to pay for wishes granted!


Do you know anybody who has owned a healthy money plant (Lunaria annua)? Do they seem financially secure to you?
The reason I ask is this, because 'money plants' are supposed to bring you good fortune. We've been cultivating these plants for decades now (started with a cutting and then cloned the original) and have given cuttings and even whole healthy plants to friends and family in the hope that they would enjoy their beauty and maybe make a coupla dollars in the process.
Well, all the people that managed to keep their plant alive and helped it grow are all better off financially than they used to be (even relatively speaking - allowing for inflation, higher wages etc).
All the people that let their plant die on them have not enjoyed any financial benefits.
We have 6 very healthy specimens which are all clones of the original and our finances are pretty healthy too. So, who knows? buy yourself a money plant and get rich, mebbe!
 
I haven't found anything on "devil's Ivy", at least not yet. I'll keep my eyes & ears open though.
 
tab-It's also possible that the people whose plants survived were simply better with responsibility, which would show itself in their finances.

I know I'm channelling Dana Scully here, but let's take other similarities into account. Did they all have painted houses? And what of people who do well without the presence of these plants? A curse or a blessing is little more than words, and carry no more weight than what people put into them. I believe I could own the Hope Diamond and live a happy, healthy life as long as I took sensible care of myself.

Just out of curiousity, what is your country?
 
Hi Oxygen,
I agree with you and I would be the first to dismiss these type of superstitions but sometimes I wonder just what the results would show if a serious study was ever undertaken to find the correlation between superstitions and actual events.
I have a very open mind and I know that the truth is sometimes far stranger than fiction.

I'm Greek from Cyprus (the last divided country in the west) but I spent over 30 years in London UK.

[This message has been edited by tablariddim (edited December 16, 1999).]
 
Given that the biggest variable would be the plant, you have to find a study group of about ten people with similar financial circumstances and capabilities and give each of them a plant and equal starting resources. It would help if they were all unskilled in money matters, so as to see with greater clarity the effects of the plant. Then compare their results with an equal number of people with the same skills and resources and compare the differences. I'd recommend carrying out the test three times to discount any flukes or anomalies.

Now if I only had the financial resources to carry this out. Maybe I should get a money plant! :)
 
I think a lot of it has to do with the person's mindset.

Let's say I believe that burning sage will bring me wisdom. I burn some while reading a textbook and later find that I retained virtually all that I have read. Was it actually the sage that helped me remember, or was it because by burning the sage I have told my brain "hey, it's learning time"? Kind of like Pavlov's dog - we learn symbols either consciously or unconsciously, and then those symbols can affect us directly when invoked, even if we don't realize this is what's happening.

This is part of why I am studying herbs, incense and oils for my witchcraft study - I want to ingrain in myself what each scent stands for, so when I want to affect my brain and bodily energy, I have a set of symbols that coincide with physical, tangible elements. So during a spell, if I wish to gain wisdom, I'll incorporate sage oil or sage incense, and this will hopefully trigger my subconscious brain into an accelerated learning pattern. I am Pavlov and the dog all rolled into one! :)
 
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