Herb
A spice shaped like a diagram of itself — and one that must be bought carefully.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Star anise is one of those things that looks designed. Eight boat-shaped carpels arranged in a perfect radial star, each holding a single shining seed, the whole thing woody and fragrant and geometrically improbable. It reached Europe from southern China in the sixteenth century and was an immediate curiosity as much as a flavouring.
It is a fixture of Chinese cooking and the backbone of five-spice; it is also botanically unrelated to aniseed, sharing only the anethole that gives both their flavour. Craft, which likes a shape, puts it on altars for divination, in incense for psychic work, and in luck charms, and the star is doing most of the work in every one of those.
There is a further, unglamorous claim on its importance. Star anise was for years the industrial source of shikimic acid, the starting material for the antiviral oseltamivir, and demand for the spice spiked sharply during flu scares. A spice that looks like an illustration from a grimoire also spent a decade as a pharmaceutical feedstock, which is a nicely modern kind of correspondence.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Common in contemporary practice
Placed at the points of an altar layout or carried for luck, chosen almost entirely for the shape. It is one of the clearest cases in the Compendium of a correspondence built on appearance rather than any inherited tradition — which practitioners are usually quite open about.
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.