Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants
Read Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants Online
Authors: Claudia Müller-Ebeling,Christian Rätsch,Ph.D. Wolf-Dieter Storl
Acknowledgments
Although the three of us have brewed up a new magical potion, like three witches, the idea to write a book about witches’ medicine came from our publishers and friends Urs Hunziker and Heinz Knieriemen.
We are particularly grateful to our dear friend and pharmacist Patricia Ochsner. Her ideas and her expertise were important ingredients.
More wonderful additives were provided by Anupama Grell and Roger Liggenstorfer, Wolfgang Kundrus and Janine Warmbier, Conny and Hartwig Kopp, Daniel Delany, Margret Madejsky and Olaf Rippe, Daniela Baumgartner, Andrew Sherrat, and Peter Linzenich.
For the English-language edition we appreciate the contributions of our translator, Annabel Lee, and our editors Susan Davidson, Robin Catalano, and Doris Troy.
Greatest thanks!
To your health. In the name of Hecate!
Contents
7. Images of Witches: The Demonization of Nature’s Healing Powers
8. Witches’ Medicine—Forbidden Medicine: From the Inquisition to the Drug Laws
Appendix: European Plants Associated with Witches and Devils
Introduction: Is Witchcraft Medicine Good Medicine?
Wolf-Dieter Storl
Witchcraft medicine is the medicine of the earth. It is the oldest medicine of humankind, the healing art still used by the last remaining primitive peoples. Witchcraft medicine is primordial wisdom, primordial memory, and the true
religio
. It is the legacy of our Stone Age ancestors, which has been passed down in a continually shifting form through the Neolithic agricultural period, through the Bronze Age, and through the Iron Age, into the era of the Christian Middle Ages and their belief in miracles. The Inquisition did its best to destroy this ancient wisdom. But neither the threat of torture nor that of being burned at the stake, neither the ax of the so-called rational Enlightenment nor the reductionist straitjacket of a soulless, positivistic science has been able to permanently damage nature’s medicine. For this medicine not only lives on in decaying, dusty traditions, but is nourished by the clear spring of wisdom, by the immediate inspiration of the devas, and by the inspiration of the spirits of the plants, animals, stones, stars, and elements as well.
Witchcraft medicine is based on the understanding of the healing powers of our inner and outer natures. Witchcraft medicine is more than a factual knowledge of medicinal herbs, poisonous plants, psychedelic compounds, or gynecological preparations. It is the ability to converse with the animal and plant spirits and to forge friendships with them, an ability that has been suppressed in most people. It is the ability to achieve the ecstasy that makes communion with these beings possible.
While this natural medicine includes the power plants, the ones that cause intoxication and ecstasy and that humans reach for when they want to obliterate their mundane state of existence and catapult themselves into the world “beyond,” it mostly emphasizes the gentle plants that capture cosmic harmonies and convey them to humans so that the people may be healed. Only when humans radiate happiness and health can nature be happy and healthy. This is why Mother Gaia has powerful herbs and roots ready at hand.
Witchcraft medicine transcends clinical medicine, which, being bound in the corset of experimental natural science, proceeds only by measuring, documenting, and blindly testing what is tangible—the superficial matter—according to the principle of trial and error. Witchcraft medicine recognizes the “inner being” of the illnesses, the “little worm without skin or bones,” the worms of hate and envy that wriggle their way into us and suck out our life energy. This healing art understands the magical bullets and destructive memories that bore deeply into our physical and spiritual bodies. In order to heal the wounds caused by such ethericastral entities and negative occult energies, the practitioners of witchcraft medicine, the shamans, call on their allies—the plants, the stones, the animals, the water, the fire, the earth. These also have a deep dimension as spirit beings, angels, and devas. You can speak with them; they can respond.
Witchcraft medicine understands the vitality of existence and knows about the souls and the spirits of all creation. Witchcraft medicine is magical, and for this reason it causes discomfort to those whose souls are dead and frightens those whose spiritual eyes are blind. It scares them because it is a reflection of their powerlessness. To the bigoted inquisitors the efficacy of this medicine was granted by the devil himself. Thus the women who guarded this ancient wisdom were considered evil seductresses. To the schoolmaster of the “Age of Enlightenment,” witchcraft medicine was an annoying superstition based on erroneous thinking that had to be eradicated from the minds of the country folk. To the masters of modern ideology, witchcraft medicine, with the special powers of communication it entails, is simply not a matter important enough for discussion; it belongs to the realm of a schizophrenic, a mentally unstable person, or, at best, a hopeless romantic. But in the end it might just be witchcraft medicine that leads us out of our current ecological and spiritual crisis, for its roots reach deep into the earth and tap into the healing waters of primordial wisdom.