About herbal magic: ancient heritages vs. modern interpretations

[popopopuipuipui]

In witchcraft and folk magic practice, herbs are really common. And there are a lot of books telling people the correspondences.
How do you understand and study the magical properties of the herbs? I mean, like it is easy for me to understand hyssop is related to cleansing because that is what the Bible says, but not all the herbs have shown this kind of context.
When it comes to a book that tell you what a herb means, how do you figure out the reason and context behind it?
And how do you distinguish between ancient heritages vs. modern interpretations? I feel that sometimes online information can be really misleading. People just do whatever witchy instagram accounts do, though those account never explain why.

 

[Medea]

I do a lot of online research because the reasons why herbs have the correspondences they have can be folkloric, historical, or sometimes are just about the plants name or appearance. Sometimes they also have the do with the behavior or medicinal properties of the plant .TLDR; I would google “why is poppy associated with both sleep and death” or “why is mandrake good for both love spells and hexing.” If the internet doesn’t know look for books on the folklore of plants, but usually the internet knows. Always look for primary sources if you can but they don’t always exist because sometimes it’s oral folklore.