Herb
A seed that made fortunes, harmed the careless, and still sits in the spice rack.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Nutmeg and mace come from the same fruit — the seed and the scarlet lacy covering around it — and for a long period both came only from the Banda Islands. The Dutch conquest of Banda in 1621 to secure that monopoly killed or displaced almost the entire population, and it is impossible to write cheerfully about this spice without that sitting somewhere in the paragraph.
In eighteenth-century England a gentleman might carry his own nutmeg and a small silver grater, which tells you both how valuable it was and how much people liked it. Folk use ran to gambling luck and money, and a whole nutmeg carried in the pocket is a charm recorded in both English and African American practice, sometimes drilled and filled with mercury, which was a spectacularly bad idea.
Nutmeg also has a genuine and unpleasant psychoactivity at high doses, which appears in prison memoirs and among people who had nothing else. It is not a recreational drug; the experience is reported as protracted, frightening and physically miserable, and the dose that produces it is not far from a harmful one.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Duskveil editorial note
Nutmeg turns up in old grimoires and in modern forum posts as a cheap way to alter consciousness. It is a poisoning, not a vision: people are hospitalised by it every year. Nothing in the traditional record makes that a reasonable risk.
Carried forward
English and African American folk practice
A whole nutmeg carried in the pocket for luck in games of chance, sometimes worn on a string. The versions that involve drilling the nutmeg and filling it with quicksilver were dangerous then and are dangerous now; the charm survives, the mercury should not.
Credit what you carry. Much of this comes from living traditions, and some of it from traditions that are closed — held by particular peoples and not offered for general use. Where you know whose practice a reading came from, name them; where you don't, say that too.