Now that people are more aware of cultural appropriation from using white sage and palo santo for smoke cleansing and have been using other alternatives, I'm just wondering if I can use garden sage people use for cooking instead of white sage? I'm not sure if we cannot use a specific type of sage or all sage. Thank you in advance for your reply :)
I generally just use garden sage that I grow in my own garden when I have need of the energies of sage. I don't see any reason why you could not do the same. Our ancestors used what came easily to hand, not something that they had to purchase from far away.
Different species of Laminaceae -- the Sage family -- often the Salvia genus, are used globally for smoke cleansing, for banishing, protection, and sometimes even for entheogenic work. But sages are not exclusive to these purposes.
Fankincense, sandalwood, various cedars and junipers, and just about anything aromatic which smolders -- whether it has a pleasant or pungent odor -- has been used. Even pine straw has been used in some cases in North American folk traditions in such cases that juniper is unavailable for saining.
It is why I tend to shy away from "smudging" as a term, as that is a specific ritual to certain Native groups, many of which do things different from other groups -- regardless of their practices often being conflated or combined in ways which happen to be more convenient or fit a desired narrative in the case of some practitioners (such as citing a single culture while including items not locally available to that group, or insisting that it must include all four elements while using items in a manner which said People would find disrespectful).
I'm European. (German speaker, sorry for my mistakes.) I definitely do NOT use S. apiana. I'd have to buy it in some esoteric shop,no way to find out where it comes from and how it was harvested.
Many natural habitats have been destroyed because people started to ask for a certain plant species (or decorative fish or....)
A big NO for all that call themselves "green" witch.
I use only sage that I have grown in my garden or collected myself. I take care not to harm the individual plant or it's ecosystem.
Garden sage has a pleasant smell and can be used for incense. That's a domestic plant, it doesn't have the power of it's wild relatives. You will carefully choose a variety that will survive winter and still has a pleasant taste. (I grow a Bavarian variety, very frost-hardy. Taste can't keep up with Italian varieties. Same with rosemary, "Arp" will survive - 20 degrees but tastes a bit ... strange.)
If you want to use garden sage tea for healing your cough, you better buy dry leaves at the drug store: These are tissue-culture clones, their content of medically useful substances is optimized and standardized.
S. nemorosa is weakly psychoactive, the tea more do than the smoke. It will make you sleep better. Not addictive, not dangerous. Plants collected in the wild may contain a lot of nitrate, because plant is a nitrophile.
S. pratense is ... like blue sky and summer sun. I use the flowers for tea and incense.
There a number of other native Salviae that can be used, depending on where you live. Prefer the garden varieties if you cannot properly identify them in the wild.
