Poppy Seeds

Poppy seeds can be used to create confusion, dominate people, delay paperwork, especially if combined with black mustard seed and used to stuff a poppet or a candle used in sympathetic magic, or carry it on your person. In Ukrainian folklore in the coffin of a midwife [повитуха], people would put poppy seeds so that she would have gifts for all the children she helped to deliver when she met them in the next world [Ivanov 1909: 249].

Red poppies have also long been associated with sleep and death, perhaps because the narcotic made from the opium poppy can easily bring about both. Ancient Greeks and Romans presented them as offerings to the dead. In the Victorian Language of Flowers, poppy symbolized eternal sleep, oblivion, imagination. Red poppies also mean pleasure, the why poppy means consolation and the yellow poppy means success.