Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (10 page)

Rites of Initiation

In the previous pages we have seen how divine beings break through the barrier of civilization and affect the destiny of humans at specific magical times during the year. But not only do the gods approach the humans; the humans approach the gods as well. They go into the wilderness, into the numinous magical world behind the hedgerow, in order to accumulate energy that can be found nowhere else. They go exhilarated, expectantly, but also full of respect and modesty.

Above all, those who are loaded with magical energy—hunters, herb-gathering women, shamans, and fools—go into the woods. They decorate themselves with the feathers and furs of the wild animals they have encountered in their visions or those they have befriended. They scent their bodies with the smoke of aromatic herbs, color their faces white with chalk, red with ocher, and black with soot. They wear flower wreaths and green branches in their hair. In this way they come into harmony with the creatures of the forest, the spirits of the animals, and those of the plants. They not only bring medicinal and magical plants, mushrooms, antlers, hunting bounty, and other delicacies when they return home, but they also tell tales of wondrous encounters, dangers withstood, and victories achieved.

The stories that were once told by such people to a rapt audience by the crackling fire have been partially passed down to us in fairy tales and legends. These boundary walkers were initiates, not parroting believers like the throng of churchgoers and sect members of today. Nor were they initiates in the sense of our modern scientists, who train their eyes only on the external data of the senses, painstakingly measuring, weighing, and numbering them. No, the people we are talking about combined an astute, precise observation of nature with an ear toward its internal workings. In the mirrors of their souls they looked into the soul of the forest. This forest soul appeared to them in the form of fairies and moss-beings, who instructed them about the medicinal powers of the roots and crystals and also revealed the entrances to the realm of Frau Holle. The soul of the forest appeared as tree elves, fire spirits, grim trolls, talking birds, and radiant virgins, and had conversations with the people.

Nearly all primitive peoples send their pubescent boys into the wilderness, to the source of power and wisdom, for initiatory rites. For only deep in the woods, in the caves, or in another place far removed from the village, beyond human time and its sorry efforts, beyond motherly protection, can the boys set aside their childhood and experience their own true natures and the meaning of their existence. Under the guidance of older men, with the help of poisonous herbs and empowered by fasting, pain, and deprivation, the boys’ everyday consciousness dies. Themselves having become spirits, they encounter beings from beyond that will be their teachers. They meet their totem animals, they learn to recognize their animal helpers and befriend their own primordial, wild nature that has been untouched by society. Through this animal—the natives of Central America call it the
nagual
—they experience a power they have never imagined: It awakens the instinct of the jaguar, the sacred rage of the warrior, the intuition of the healer, the enthusiasm of the singer, or the spiritual energy of the thinker. It lets them dive into the depths or fly into the bright heavens, where they encounter gods. An unshakable self-confidence emerges through this experience in the regions beyond the thorny hedgerow.

The experience of initiation is one of death and rebirth: Like wild game, the initiates are killed, chopped up, and cooked in the cauldron of the Great Goddess. They are reborn with a new personality, a new name, and a more mature outlook. They are born twice: the first time from their human mother and then again from the Great Mother. Only in this way can they truly become men, able to take over responsibility for the women and children, for the old and infirm, for the clan and the whole tribe.

The initiation has been different for girls and usually not as dramatic. The most important secrets of womanhood were passed on through the course of the daily work with the grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and other female blood relations while gathering wild plants, sowing, hoeing, weeding, spinning, sewing, and cooking. The actual initiation was, and still is among many peoples, the first menstruation. Many Native Americans send the women to a menstrual hut outside the village where they learn the mysteries of the female body and fertility. As the fairy tale of Rapunzel suggests, we once had menstrual huts for girls in puberty under the care of an old “witch” (Diederichs, 1995: 267). Marriage and the birth of the first child were further initiations.

Methods using psychedelic plants and traumatic pain (wounding, hunger, pulling teeth, tattooing and scarification, cutting), which catapult the soul into the beyond, play a less important role in the feminine mysteries because, according to the anthropologist Felicitas Goodman, the female human is closer to her instincts and intuition by nature. However, the female shamans and prophets, the “flying women,” especially in the European cultural regions, did know the most about entheogenic plants.

The women in the archaic hunter-gatherer groups who roamed through the forest with their children and female relatives gathering useful and edible roots, berries, nuts, and medicinal plants gained intimate knowledge of the plants over the centuries. Just as the men gained knowledge about the animals they hunted, the women developed a confident understanding about the location, growth patterns, pharmacological characteristics, and transsensory aspects of the vegetation. Of course, in the first Neolithic villages the women tended to the domesticated vegetation, the preparation of the beds and fields, the plants, the sowing, and the harvesting. All evidence indicates that the fields belonged to matrilineal clans and were worked communally by women of blood relation, as the Iroquois and other horticultural tribes have historically done. In such societies the men were responsible for the heavy work of clearing and cultivating the fields, as well as hunting, making magic, communicating with nature spirits, and taking care of the domestic animals—if there were any. With the exception of psychoactive botanicals, such as tobacco among the Indians, which played a role in the house of the men and in vision quests, the knowledge of the secret of the plants and plant spirits fell mainly to the women.

On account of their long years of experience and as carriers of traditional knowledge, grandmothers enjoyed great respect and their advice was considered valuable. It is still like this today among primitive people: Since their children are grown, they can retreat from the necessary daily work and have the time and leisure to ponder. They are concerned with the health and well-being of the people in the house and of the animals in the barn. When someone gets cut, the grandmothers know which herbs are styptic. They know where the root grows that stops diarrhea in calves. They collect calming tea herbs for teething infants. They know the birthing herbs, love herbs, herbs of youth, and also the right sayings so that the plants release their full effectiveness.

Every settlement, every clan, had a white-haired old woman to whom the ancestors and forest spirits or the Goddess whispered many a secret. These women cooked salves—carefully stirring while murmuring magical words—in the lard of bear, badger, wild goose, or pig with herbs they gathered when the moon was right. The grandmothers knew how to brew healing and intoxicating herbal beer, to bake herbal cakes, to bind magical plant amulets, and whatever else would bring health and relief to the sick. Sometimes the touch of an old woman’s wrinkled hand and a good word was enough.

The old woman also tended to the fire that lived in the heart of the house. Before sunrise she stoked the coals, prayed for friendship and protection, and told the fire the dreams the previous night had given her. Native Americans still do this.

In the winter the old woman usually sat by the fire, listened to the crackling and popping sounds, and occasionally heard therein the voices of the ancestors and the spirits. And when she sometimes fell into a trance—the word comes from the Latin
transire,
“to go over”—her soul, pulled upward with the swirling smoke, slipped up the chimney, through the opening, and into other dimensions.

The Chimney

The campfire has been in the center of social life since the beginning of the time of man. Primordial man
(Homo erectus)
was already warming his body by the fire a good million years ago. Fire not only gave warmth and light, dried wet clothing, and cooked meat, but was also sacred and healing. It was the sun spirit or the heavenly fire that had taken up residence among the people. The ring of boulders that were placed around the fire were the original medicine wheel. The stone circle became the focus (in Latin,
focus
means “hearth” or “fireplace”) of the sacred. (Later, in the High Neolithic period, stone circles such as Stonehenge took on gigantic proportions.)

During the winter nights people sat around the fire in the tent, yurt, or tepee and listened to the stories of the shamans. In the flickering lights, in the dancing shadows on the tent wall, in the glowing and fading of the coals, in the ascending smoke, the spirits, the inhabitants of other dimensions, could briefly be incarnated. Sometimes it was an ancestor, sometimes an animal spirit from the forest.

There in the fire the ancestors could be given scraps from the meal so that they remained in good spirits. The Chinese still burn colorful resplendent clothing made from silk paper, money, and cloth in order to please the ancestors on the other side. For a long time Scandinavian housewives continued to sacrifice a little butter, a little bread, and such to Loki, the fire spirit. Bowls with milk and porridge were set out for the “poor souls” and the underworldly all the way into the Middle Ages, especially on Christmas, Easter, Whitsuntide, and other sacred days.

Sacred is the hearth. When a new bride (for instance, in Indo-European settlement areas, in eastern Asia, and in Mexico) enters the house she must first walk around the hearth and greet the fire. Newborn babies are also carried clockwise around the fire to honor the ancestors.

Many people, including prehistoric Europeans, buried the bones of their dead under the fireplace or by the hearth. Celtic headhunters smoked their trophies, the heads of slain enemies, in the chimney. In many places, such as China, figurines of the house spirit are placed on the hearth.

The opening for the smoke, the “wind eye” (window), as the Germanic peoples called it, was the door through which the ghosts entered and exited. So that no evil ghost could slip through, the wind eye was protected with magical symbols. Germanic peoples hung the heads of sacrificed horses on it—horses that, like Falada in the fairy tale of the goose maiden, made prophecies and whose words were understood by the wise old woman. The Scandinavians carved dragons and serpent motifs—typical protectors of the threshold—on the roof beams where they cross above this opening.

As early as the Paleolithic period the smoke hole in the peak of the tent must have been a ghost door and gateway to the transsensory worlds. Siberian shamans make notched birch trunks that reach to the smoke hole. They climb up the “shamanic tree” when they enter the spirit world during the ritual. (Just as the tent has a wind eye at the top through which the spirits enter and exit, the tent of the heavens that covers the earth has a hole: the North Star on the top of the world “tree.” The gods of the heavens enter and exit through it.) The smoke hole is thus also a kind of hedge, a threshold to the regions beyond. The image of the witch that flies out of the chimney remained in public consciousness for a long time.