# Centaury (Centaurium erythraea)

**Centaurea**

**Known today as.** Common centaury, *Centaurium erythraea*.

Kind: Plant

## What did Canale use it for?

Among the amulet herbs: hung about the neck, and used in fumigations and decoctions against hexes (ch. 10; see [the amulet herbs](https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/the-amulet-herbs)).

## What does modern science say?

Intensely bitter, and still used for loss of appetite and indigestion.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **swertiamarin**: the secoiridoid bitter
- **gentiopicroside**: 
- **sweroside**: 
- **xanthones**: 

**Mechanism.** A gentian-family bitter: the secoiridoids provoke saliva and gastric secretion by reflex and increase appetite; no central action.

**Dose.** Safe; nothing is recorded against it beyond its bitterness.

**Standing.** EMA monograph (2016) for loss of appetite and mild dyspepsia; it is also in a licensed German combination for urinary complaints (Canephron).

## What lore surrounds it?

By tradition going back to the Greek herbal writers, the plant is named for Chiron, wisest of the centaurs, who used it to heal a wound, in some versions the poisoned wound from Hercules’ arrow that never fully healed, and taught its use to other healers. The genus names *Centaurea* and *Centaurium* both preserve the story.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Pliny.** “Centaury, it is said, effected a cure for Chiron, on the occasion when, while handling the arms of Hercules, his guest, he let one of the arrows fall upon his foot: hence it is that by some it is called chironion.” The lesser centaury, lepton or libadion from growing by fountains, has a root never used, its virtue being in the juice drawn in autumn; “in Italy this kind of centaury is known as gall of the earth, from its extreme bitterness,” and the Gauls call it exacum because it purges off noxious matter; the root of the greater centaury is given in white wine for snakebite.

**Culpeper.** Under the Sun, “as appears in that their flowers open and shut as the Sun, either shews or hides his face”: boiled and drunk it purges choleric humours, opens obstructions of the liver, gall, and spleen, and is given with good effect in agues; “much used by the Italians in powder” for the dropsy and green-sickness; a dram of the powder in wine against the biting of an adder.

## Sources

- Theoi Project, “Chiron.”
- Pliny the Elder, *Natural History* 25.30–31, 25.55, trans. J. Bostock & H. T. Riley (1855), Perseus Digital Library.
- Culpeper, N. (1653). *The Complete Herbal*, “The Ordinary Small Centaury.” Project Gutenberg #49513.
- EMA/HMPC (2016). *European Union herbal monograph on Centaurium erythraea Rafn, herba* (EMA/HMPC/277493/2015).

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*Centaury.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/centaury

Historical description, not medical advice.