Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (13 page)

Those who had a clairvoyant relationship with nature disappeared; the people were blinded in their souls. The new science was the blind man’s walking stick, with which he tapped around in the dark. Because the natural spirits disappeared from human consciousness, the animals became sad and silent and the banned gods grew increasingly wrathful and more threatening. Beloved Freya revealed herself more and more as Hel; as Hecate, who brings insanity and destruction; as the black, bloodthirsty Kali. The green earth became a desert. Heaven, the etheric heights on which the gods once wandered, became an empty space, filled with black holes and chaos.

Contrary to current propaganda, witchcraft medicine is not based on ideological grounds, on the knowledge of how to poison the unwanted unborn in the womb, on how best to combine drugs in order to take a “trip,” or on making amulets to protect against existential angst. Witchcraft medicine is the practice of becoming whole. It heralds the reestablishment of the wonders and magic in internal and external nature: the resettlement of the meadows, forests, and souls with the delightful and colorful elves, with the nature spirits of Pan, with the radiant angels. It also brings the ability to enjoy these places and souls and to understand their healing songs, words, and advice.

The time has come to rip down the walls and plant hedges.

The great cultural anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski spoke of the basic needs of humans that must be satisfied by each society in order for it to function. They are:

1. food and shelter
   
2. gratification of physical urges and reproduction
   
3. physical and spiritual health
   
4. social security
   
5. meaning (religion, art)
   

Power and authority within a society are given to those who prove their ability to address these needs successfully. When conquest, colonization, or unrest makes it impossible to ensure the satisfaction of these basic needs, then the former functionaries, priests, and authorities are deprived of their power, reviled, persecuted, tortured, or arrested. From then on a new paradigm, a new concept of meaning, regulates the satisfaction of the basic needs.

A transformation such as this, a reversal of values, took place after the Great Migration, and then again with renewed elan in the fifteenth century. The elders—those who were closest to shamanic heathendom, such as the wise women and the priests—were stripped of their power. They were accused of hindering the satisfaction of human needs on all levels. With black magic they threatened the food supply and the overall survival by conjuring up bad weather, invoking plagues of mice and rats, and secretly milking animals. The
Bilwis
(“he who knows about magical power”), formerly a priest who blessed the growth of the grain, was degraded into a malicious grain demon. The wise women, protectors of the life of the tribe, were identified as witches who destroyed the fertility and health of the tribe. The rituals that provided meaning and festivities throughout the year’s holidays were replaced by others, and ancient forms of worship were condemned as devil worship.

The accusations of the Inquisition can be understood more clearly against this backdrop. They reveal themselves to be part of an ideological campaign of destruction against the last bearers of archaic shamanic consciousness in the Western world. We shall look at the points of their accusations a little more closely from this perspective.

Devil worship:
The witches were said to have rejected the true God and made a pact with the devil. On the witches’ sabbat
(Synagoga diabolica)
practitioners worshipped the devil, who held court as a black goat. On certain witches’ holidays the witches attended gatherings that usually took place on the moors or on a mountain. They flew there on animals (dogs, goats) or objects (brooms, fireplace shovels, pitchforks) with Diana, the “forest devil woman.”

Sex magic:
Witches had sex with the horned one and with the
Buhlteufel
(“lover devil”) as well. As
succubi
(“those who lie underneath”)—erotic spirits of the night—the witches sucked semen and created demonic beings on their own. In their world the witches slept with
incubi
(“those who lie on top”) and gave birth to demon children and ugly changelings. Some even had a long-standing, almost marriage like relationship to demonic lovers (Biedermann, 1989: 114).

Supposedly, witches could bewilder innocents and seduce them with false love using spells and philters, which were made with a combination of aphrodisiac magical herbs such as mandrake and henbane, or even menstrual blood. Conversely, they could make men impotent by binding knots into their laces and make the women frigid and insensitive, or destroy the fruits of love by “closing their womb.”

Black magic:
Witches destroyed the crops by conjuring hailstorms, tornadoes, and floods. They usually brewed the bad weather in their “witches’ cauldron.” They lamed, made infertile, or in some other way harmed the cows and other domestic animals. They secretly stole milk from cows. They knew the poisonous herbs and used them to poison people. They sent diseases to people.

Devil Worship

For the native people who have converted to a civilized religion—whether Christianity or Islam—the immediate surroundings become increasingly less familiar. They can no longer synchronize their existence with the local mountains and forest, but instead must look to a faraway desert land brought closer to them by a priest who refers to a book written in an incomprehensible foreign language. His religion is based on an abstract belief instead of on personal direct experience and vision. Folk Christianity moved the sacred occurrences back to their immediate surroundings: The Christ child was born in a manger, which looked just like the mangers in their village. Mary dried the swaddling cloth on the elder bush that grew next to the manger. And if the congregation wanted to believe that the Savior and his disciples walked through cornfields and meadows, well, the village priest could live with that.

But the so-called witch went further. She was still connected to the wilderness behind the fence. She still had access to “inner” nature. She knew the depth of the forest as well as the depth of her soul. She knew both inside and outside—after all, they are one and the same. The same ancient deities who had appeared to her Paleolithic ancestors many thousands of years before came to her deep in the forest, in the depths of her soul. She was still aware of the Great Mother, the Earth Mother. All ancient peoples knew her. The traditional peoples, such as the Native Americans, still know her as the grandmother who lives in a realm of light beneath the earth. She is the guardian of the souls of humans and animals. She takes in the dead, and after a period of time gives them a new birth. She helps the dying and those who are about to be born over the threshold.

The ancient Stone Age hunters—possibly already Neanderthals—worshipped her in caves deep in the earth. On the walls of the cave they drew the outlines of the buffalo, woolly mammoths, horses, and reindeer that ripened in her womb in order to be born on earth, where the hunters could encounter them. In the darkness of these caves the shamans traveled to her, sometimes dressed as an elk—like the sorcerer in the Trois Frères caves—and prayed or gave thanks for the game. Here in the womb of the Earth Mother the youth were initiated into the spiritual mysteries. The Venus statues carved out of soapstone and ivory that archaeologists have found in many such caves were probably depictions of this primordial Goddess.

We still know the Great Goddess from the Grimm fairy tale about Frau Holle. She captures the souls of those who have lost the thread of their lives and have fallen into the depth of the well shaft. The shamans of many different peoples tell of the underworldly realm through which the soul wanders. It is a bright land with golden green meadows and apple trees—it is the Avalon (apple lane) of the Celts. The Goddess has large teeth like a dragon’s and wild hair; thus many who behold her are frightened. But to friendly souls she shows herself in a sweeter, kinder figure. When she shakes her feather bed it snows and bestows fertility on the fields. Often she visits the world of the humans—as a wise virgin with a growling bear in the spring, as a beautiful forest goddess riding on a stag, as the flower-bedecked May bride of the sun god, as a dancer during the midsummer round dance, as a fat farmer’s wife with pears and apples at harvesttime, as an old gray witch in the November fog. She frequently flies through the stormy weather as Mother Goose on her gander, with the accompaniment of her companions. The wild goose, the swan, and the baby-bringing stork have been symbols of the flight of the soul—the shamanic flight—since the Stone Age (Campbell, 1969: 1679). When she is Parvati, the mountain woman, she delicately caresses the feathers of the wild geese—they are the masters of yoga—when she rests after her long flight on the mirror-clear Manasa Sea beneath Kailash, the world mountain. She fills the geese’s souls with the light of inspiration and sends them back into the world of humans. As goddess of the wild animals, the wilderness, the springs, and the caves, and as a birth assistant, Frau Holle appears to the Mediterranean peoples in the form of Artemis or Diana. The Neolithic Chinese knew her as Mother of the Valley, who created heaven and earth. She found her place in folk Christianity, transfigured into Mary of the grotto.