Herb
Small, stubborn and everywhere at once — courage measured out in tiny leaves.
These are associations the community holds, not settled fact — the more a reading is shared, the bolder it sits.
Thyme is the herb of small persistent things. It creeps over rock, survives drought, and produces a smell out of all proportion to its size. Greek writers connected it with courage — the word was used as a compliment for a brave man — and medieval Europe kept the association going, with the story of ladies embroidering a sprig of thyme onto scarves for knights repeated so often it is impossible to say whether anyone actually did it.
In the craft it stands for courage, for clearing grief, and for the fairies. Wild thyme in particular is one of the plants whose growing places were said to be theirs, and English fairy lore attaches to it as firmly as to hawthorn. Bundles were hung at doors and burnt at funerals; thyme in the coffin appears across several European traditions.
Nothing about it has been shown to confer bravery. What it does have is a genuinely powerful aromatic chemistry, an old reputation as a preservative that predates any understanding of why, and the useful quality of growing in a crack in a wall when nothing else will.
Readings practitioners have offered, ordered by how many recognise them. Take what serves, leave the rest.
Carried forward
Nicholas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (1653)
Culpeper puts thyme under Venus in Aries and calls it a noble strengthener of the lungs. He also remarks that it is so common a herb that anyone who cannot find it is not looking, which is the closest he comes to a joke about foraging.
Carried forward
English and Welsh fairy lore
Wild thyme grows on the banks and turf where the fair folk were said to be, which is why it appears in protective bundles as often as in cooking. The rule that follows in most tellings is not to bring it indoors from a fairy hill.
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.