Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (11 page)

In the winter the old woman sat at the hearth, but in the summer she went to the grove, to the thorny hedgerow at the edge of the settlement. Throughout most of the world it was the duty of the white-haired woman to collect dry brushwood and kindling. She knew the nine kinds of wood. She knew which wood gave warmth when burned, which one healed sick children, with which one evil ghosts could be smoked out.
¹
She had learned how to use the wood from her grandmother, who in turn had learned it from hers, and so on, until the chain of tradition was lost in the campfires of the ancient Stone Age, in the Dreamtime, when the gods were still visible and wandered the earth. She also found nine herbs, which she used for seasoning, spells, and medicine. And when she rested on her favorite spot in the hedgerow, underneath the elder, the hawthorn, or the hazel tree, the Dreamtime came tangibly nearer. A spirit would approach her in the form of a speaking bird, a beetle, a fox, or a little gray manikin and whisper secrets to her. Sometimes it was even Frau Holle herself who stood before the woman as a beautiful sorceress or as a wrinkled troll-wife with big frightening teeth and eyes that glowed like red coals. The grandmother showed her gratitude with a small offering—a little porridge or a bowl of milk—which she brought the next day to the hedge. Maybe she also blessed the stone or the tree where she had received the vision with some blood or some red ocher, or she burned aromatic mugwort or juniper. Witches’ ceremonies!

Because the grandmother frequently visited the hedge and spent a long time there, it follows that the other inhabitants of the village described her as a “hedge-sitter.”
Hagadise
or
Hagezusse
means “the woman
(Zussa)
or the spirit
(Dise)
in the hedge
(Hage),
” so eventually the different Germanic peoples called her something similar. In English she is called the old hag. Clan mothers, the female ancestors who still weave the fate of the tribe and who stand by them with advice and protection, were described as the
disir.
The disir
^a
give the warriors courage, the poets inspiration. They are present at birth as the “mothers of fate” when the umbilical cord is severed. For the dying they sever the threads of life and help them on their journey to the other side. Frau Holle is the ruler of the disir. Lovely Freya, the dispenser of love and sexuality, is known as Vanadis (Lady [Dis] of the Vanir) (Sigruna, 1996: 17). The Vanir are the gods of growth, of joy, of fertility, and of the woods.

The old woman in the grove and at the hearth represents the connection to the disir, the mothers of the tribe. The wise woman is herself an incarnation in an earthly chain who binds the past with the future generations. She was honored not only as a grandmother but also as the Goddess herself. She was the Freya (literally “lady”) of the house, the
housewife
in the original sense of the word. It was she who brought harmony among the house, ancestors, and hedge spirits, who kept up the communication with the animals and plants. With this she became the guardian of the local ecosystem.

Out of the word
Hagezusse
came the word
Hexe
(witch). The ancient Scandinavians call this woman
Tunritha,
“the fence rider.”
Zunrite
is her name in the upper German dialect; she is
Walriderske
in low German. This name was not given to the wise women because they flew through the air riding fence posts, as some etymologists have suggested, but because they sat in the hedgerow, on the threshold between nature and culture, between the world of the spirits and that of the humans.

The wise woman, who understood best how to mediate between the two worlds, and whose knowledge and spiritual range were great, could be called a shaman in an ethnological sense (Duerr, 1978).
Angenga
was the Anglo-Saxon name for the
Haegtesse;
it means “the lone one who slips around.”
Wicca,
from the Germanic
weiha
and Old Norse
vigja
(“sacred,” “worshipped,” “numinous”), was another name, which means something like “dedicated to the gods.” In medieval ecclesiastical Latin she was called, among other things, a
lamina
(little wood mother) and
herbaria
(little herbal mother).

Naturally there were also male magicians, sorcerers, and “sacred men” who knew how to negotiate the world of the spirit and the Divine. There were also hunters, shepherds, and forest visitors who knew their way around the realm beyond the hedgerow. In addition there were powerful shamans who could climb up and down the World Tree as nimble as a squirrel, or could fly like eagles. There were shamanic healers who, with the help of their animal allies, were able to sniff out the disease demon that had nestled deep inside the body. Some men could tell where the game was hiding in the forest by the rips and skips made by a stag’s shoulder blade as it smoldered in the fire.

But when it came to the secrets of the plants, the women mainly were responsible. According to the elder Tsistsistas medicine man Bill Tallbull, the women usually inspired the plant shamans in their relationship to the plants. While we were walking together in the Bighorn Mountains he explained to me, “If a plant radiates a blue light, it is a sign that the plant spirit wants to make contact with you. If you don’t understand it, then wait until it appears to you in a dream. If you still don’t understand it, then ask your grandmother. She will know.”

It is said that the ancient Knight Wate, the weapons master of the Gothic king Dietreich of Bern, that a “wild woman” had initiated him into the arts of medicinal roots:

She had a long time ago taken note,

That Wate was doctored by a wild woman!

—S
ONG
OF
G
UDRUN

Odin/Wotan, the great shamanic god, was said to be able to heal with magical spells—and could do so better than the divine women of medicine. In the Merseburg charm,
^b
written down by an unknown monk in the tenth century, the author says:

Phol (Balder) and Wodan rode to the wood,

then Balder’s filly sprained its foot.

Then Sinthgunt sang over it and Sunna her sister,

then Frija sang over it and Volla her sister

then Wodan sang over it, as well he knew how:

“like the leg-sprain, the blood-sprain,

thus the limb contorts:

Leg to leg—blood to blood!

Limb to limb, such as they belong together!”

But Woden also heals with herbs, as we know from a collection of eleventh-century Anglo Saxon herb charms:

Nine healing plants against nine horrible poisons.

A worm [a disease-demon] came slithering,

to strike and to kill.

Then Woden took nine wonderful twigs,

he smote the worm until it flew apart in nine shredded parts.

But when he gathers his roots and herbs and uses them to heal, Odin dresses as a woman (Grimm, 1877: 333).

Often it was forest women, swan maidens, and fairies that revealed the right medicinal herbs to the herbalist. In the time of the plague the wood-maiden called from the forest, “Eat anise and valerian and the plague can’t touch you!” (Meyer, 1903: 195).

Male shamans in Eurasia often have wives in the other worlds who inspire them, but female shamans can also be married to someone from the other world. Sometimes it is the Goddess herself—the grandmother earth, the tree-green Jörd, Holda, Freya, the threefold Brigit—who appears to the herbal shamans.

That women have particularly easy access to the secrets of the plants did not escape unnoticed by the first Latin Church scribe, Tertullian (c. C.E. 160–220). The Church father was convinced that not only could the women seduce men, but also they could enchant angels. In exchange for the indecency they had committed with the fallen angel, Lucifer had given women the knowledge of herbs and cosmetics as a sort of whore’s payment. (
De anima
LVII).

Not every witch was an old crone; naturally, there were also young ones. There were girls whose uniqueness was demonstrated very early through signs and wonders or through obvious clairvoyant abilities. Perhaps it was a child that was abducted by a predator animal and miraculously returned home unharmed. Those who had been struck by lightning and survived were also considered special. It might be a young woman who unwittingly prophesied future occurrences, who fell very easily into a trance without being confused, or who could let her spirit soar with the birds. Hildegard of Bingen is said to have been able to describe exactly the appearance, color, and pattern of a calf even though the animal was still in its mother’s belly. Only when it was born did everyone know that her description had been accurate. During the Middle Ages a child as unusual as this was placed in the care of the convent under the protection of the Church; today the concerned parents would bring her to a therapist. Primitive people often give up these children for adoption to shamans, or they go to the shamans as apprentices. The Native Americans of Arizona and New Mexico know that they need people with such unusual gifts, and that is why they hide these children from school officials and don’t allow them to cut their hair.

Even when they are still young, girls with special gifts are respectfully referred to as “old,” for their wisdom is ancient and archetypal. Thus it is said in a Chinese legend that at his birth Lao Tse, whom we have to thank for the
Tao Te Ching,
came out of his mother as a “white-haired old man.” Particularly powerful
sadhus
(wandering holy men) and yoga masters are often said to be hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years old, although they are still in the prime of their lives.

Before the Christian era the witches enjoyed great respect among northern Europeans as magicians, healers, and prophets. Tacitus, the Roman “expert on Germania,” found it remarkable that the barbarians were convinced that “there was something sacred and prophetic about women, and they neither neglect their advice nor their answers” (Tacitus,
Germania
8). These women were called
Seidhkona
(woman who knows magic) or
Volva
(seeress) in the far North. They carried a magical wand, sang themselves into ecstasy with magical songs, and prophesied (Ström, 1975: 259). But they also liked to bring bad luck to their enemies. They could call the hidden creatures by name, and knew words and runes that worked in the depths. Their words and their magical herbs could work as a blessing or a curse. Therefore they were—like the shamans and medicine men—not only respected everywhere, but also feared.

The ability to ward off black magic and to kill enemies without any visible weapons was grist for the mill of the Christian missionaries, who sought to convince the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic tribes of the superiority of their dogma. Right from the beginning of their missionary work, during the time of the European migrations, the missionaries tried to defame the wise herbalist women. Along with the berserkers and the heathen priests, the women represented the primary hindrance to conversion. They were rivals in the battle over the rule of the souls.

Sacred trees were felled, gods were degraded into demons, the heathen religion became a cult of the demon
(cultus daemonum)
and its practice was severely punished, the wise women were depicted as weather-witches and poison-mixers. Instructions for the missionaries, such as the eighth-century
Indiculus superstitionum et pagarum
[Declaration on the Superstitions and the Countryfolk], listed the prohibitions forced upon the heathens (Daxelmüller, 1996: 102–105). The following was forbidden:

processions through the countryside carrying images of the gods

idol worship at grave sites, grave sacrifices, the meal of the dead, and the singing of songs of the dead

invocation of the dead, or the questioning of the dead

rituals and sacrifice in the forests, groves, on trees, stones, springs, and crossroads

the spring festival in February

singing magical words

moon magic of the women

oracle, prophecy, and divination from sneezing, smoke, ashes from the hearth, and the behavior of birds, horses, and other animals

The
Penitentia,
or penance books, laid down the punishment for prophesying, invoking the gods, the interpretation of dreams, herbal knowledge, love potions, and going about with animal masks on. The representatives of the Christian faith did not bother with the actual contents of the indigenous, nature-oriented religion of the heathens when restricting their customs—it would have been sinful to deal any closer with such horrible idolatry. For the monks and the missionaries it was of no consequence whether or not the devil and demons were called Wotan, Woden, Odin, Pan, Frau Holle, Diana, or Artemis. The disir,
idisi,
^c
and wise women were all thrown in one pot along with the kidnapping, bloodsucking witches and lamia of the Romans, with the poisonous python of classical antiquity, and with the witch of Endor and other evil daughters of the darkness from the Old Testament.

Nevertheless, as herbalists and midwives the wise women were indispensable to the villagers. Although they were relegated to the shadows of the Christian Church, they remained carriers of ancient spirituality until the Middle Ages, albeit under the guise of folk Christianity. The herbs dedicated to Freya were collected in the name of the Holy Mother or the Trinity. Some of the herbs of Woden were dedicated to Rochus, patron saint of the plague, for he was a wanderer with a stave like Woden’s, and he wore a cloak and a floppy hat and had a wolf (or dog) at his side. The plants of Thor, who protected the treasure seekers or root diggers from serpents and lindworms, were attributed to Saint George, the dragon slayer Michael, or Christopher the “giant.” Mezereon
(Daphne mezereum),
which once was dedicated to the sky god Tyr (Ziu, Tius), the tamer of the Fenris wolf, was transformed into a devil’s plant like many other poisonous plants. As long as the people went to Mass and made their contributions, no one bothered the rural healers and magicians, or the foolish and “superstitious” people who worked with such plants.