Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (16 page)

During their initiation, the Siberian shamans experience demons who hunt them, kill them, chop them up, cook them in a great cauldron, and then eat them; this is the representation of the dissolution of the everyday personality. The Goddess in the form of a bird takes the pale discarded bones, puts them carefully back together again, surrounds them in a shell of ice, and incubates them in a nest high up in the world tree. When the young are able to fly, they leave the nest of their mother and fly back to the earth, where they awaken as freshly created shamans. Now they have the wings to fly into the other world, now they can speak with gods and ghosts, accompany the dead part of the way, and greet those who are reincarnating. They can also heal, as they have the power over every disease demon that has eaten a piece of their flesh. Because they know their way around the regions beyond, they can also bring back lost souls who have been kidnapped by demons or sorcerers. They use herbal incense to seduce the souls and sing to them magical songs. All of this is witches’ wisdom, witchcraft medicine.

The Flight to the Holy Mountain

Another primordial image that lives on in the soul of the witch is the vision of a holy mountain on whose peak the dispenser of life and happiness is enthroned. The sacred mountain of the gods is found everywhere: It is Mount Olympus of the Hellenists, Mount Sinai of the Hebrews, Bear Butte in South Dakota of the Cheyenne; it is Mount Santis, on whose heights the Neanderthals celebrated the bear cult about seventy thousand years ago; it is Mount Shasta of the California Indians, where the animal spirits and the creator live, and which intergalactic UFOs visit. (California hippies are convinced of this.) In West Tibet it is the sacred world mountain Kailash, on whose snow-white summit Parvati and Shiva are found in a profound embrace of eternal joy
(ananda).
And in places where there is no natural elevation, the ancient peoples built mounds and pyramids.

Many of the elevated sacred places in central Europe are consecrated to the Virgin Mary or to a saint. On special days, usually at Easter or Whitsunday, people made a pilgrimage to a chapel on the sacred site, sang religious songs, made extensive vespers, and left behind votive offerings. However, other mountains remained under the dominion of the ancient gods and cults. A Munich vesper from the fourteenth century mentioned a
Brochelsberg
as being an abode of nocturnal ghosts and witches. Such “buck mountains,” “hay mountains,” or “heathen caps,” where the last heathen festivals took place, were found throughout Europe. The most famous of these is the Brocken in the Harz Mountains of Germany. The “witches” usually gathered there on Walpurgis Night. They danced the last winter snows away in full “participation mystique.” In the sagas they danced so vigorously that they danced through the soles of their shoes. At the same time raging boys went out dressed as werewolves to scare off the enemies of summer.

Flying Ointment

Later, as the persecution increased, fewer and fewer dared ascend to the heights. Now they “flew” mostly in a psychedelic trance. They stayed at home, undressed, and anointed their temples, sexual organs, and other parts of the body where the skin is thin with a flying ointment. They rode on lubricated brooms and pitchforks, or simply sat in the dough tray
^b
before they were elevated through the chimney in a trance. They followed Holda (Frau Holle) or Diana, flying with a whole retinue. Some rode on geese, ducks, goats, pigs, wolves, cats, or other animals (familiars), to which they were connected in their souls. While traveling, or so it was believed, the flying witches rested in the thorny hedgerow and ate hawthorn tips or alder buds. Some farm wives twisted wreaths out of valerian, ground ivy, or centaury and wore them as crowns around their foreheads; this was said to help them see the witches flying.

To make the flying ointment, native plants in the Nightshade family (henbane and thorn apple) were simmered in pig or goose fat. Poisonous plants, such as poison hemlock
(Conium maculatum),
monkshood
(Aconitum napellus),
and bearded darnell
(Lolium temulentum
), were added to this mixture. Harmless herbs, such as poplar buds and mallow, added a synergistic effect. Poisonous herbs like the above can sever the soul (the astral body) from the body; thus it is able to fly into the astral world behind the world of exterior appearances. There the soul not only encounters speaking animals, elementary beings, and nature spirits, but it is also able to take on animal forms. While the body remains in a deathlike posture, the soul can slip into animals and move through the forest as a werewolf, a
Werbär
(were-bear), a
Werkatze
(were-cat), a bird, or a beetle. If not used properly these herbs can lead to fatal poisoning. The shamanic art is, at best, the ability of the soul to find its way back to the body.

Both of these elements—animal transformation and soul travel—are well known to cultural anthropologists. They belong to the repertoire of shamanic techniques of ecstasy of many different peoples. They have been used since the Stone Age, if the cave paintings in the Pyrenees and the cliff drawings from Australia to Tierra del Fuego have been properly understood.

We don’t know any more details about the witches’ ointment. The ethnobotanist Herman de Vries points out that there are no recipes passed down by women that can be verified (de Vries, 1991: 31). All recipes that are known were written by early scientists, often clerics or doctors. The ointments
(Unguentum populeum)
were not forbidden; they were officially used for the treatment of pain, as a numbing wound dressing, as an executioner’s salve, for rheumatism, and for hemorrhoids. The common people were also quite familiar with plants that move the spirit, and used them for love potions and as spices to make beer more inebriating.

The Church sought to establish Satan as the true adversary of God, and thus did not base the witch phenomena on the pharmacological effects of the ointment, because to do this would have created a material explanation that would place the very existence of the adversary in question. The courts themselves made use of such ointments. The inquisitors used them to revive defendants after they had been thoroughly questioned and—due to the effects of scopolamine—used the ointments as “truth serums” to break the resistance of tortured prisoners.

Sex and Fertility Magic

The sex magic the witches were also accused of is ancient women’s wisdom. In all cultures women know which herbs to use to make themselves pretty and desirable and which ones to use to attract and seduce a man. They know which plants can ease heavy menstruation, which ones promote fertility, or, if necessary, bring on a missed period. They know plants that make births easier, minimize the loss of blood, stimulate milk production, or quiet a crying child. It is practically common knowledge. But there are also women whose personal experience and spiritual vision have a broader scope than the others. These are the wise women who, as embodiments of the Great Goddess, play an important role in primitive societies.

Such respected and knowledgeable women were thorns in the sides of the celibate priests and misogynist monks. They were rivals in the power struggle over souls. Because of this, these shamanically gifted women, who protected the tribe’s fertility and their ability to love, were transformed into dangerous witches who spoiled the fruits of love, who, through knot-tying magic, caused men to be impotent, who feigned false love to innocent young boys, or who killed infants and used their fat to make their witches’ ointment. Priests, who damned sexual desire as sinful, turned the love goddess Freya into a lover-demon. Out of the cuckoo, once considered a herald of the beloved Goddess by the Indo-Europeans, they made a satanic bird:
“The cuckoo should fetch her!
(“To the devil with her!”).

People who are connected to nature love their children. The children are not “had” like one has an automobile or a piece of furniture, nor are they “brought into the world” like superfluous objects. Children are the ancestors embodied. They are the future, they bring joy, and, as the Cheyenne medicine man Tallbull explained, they scare off evil ghosts and problems that assemble like miasma around the foundation of the home. Like other traditional peoples the Cheyenne women intuitively experience the souls coming out of the wilderness and into their wombs in order to be born again. But sometimes they are spirits a woman does not want, perhaps twins that would be a great burden for her, or perhaps the times are so difficult that she could not take care of the infant very well. Then the woman says to the spirits that they should wait awhile or seek out another womb.

In a certain sense it could be said that these Native Americans regulate their fertility in order to live in harmony with nature so that the material basis of life, the game and the vegetation, is maintained. The respected Cheyenne families, the “nobles,” bring a child into the world only every seven years. They believe that it takes that long for the father to completely gather his strength again so that a full-fledged
tsistavostan
(true person) can be born. The Cheyenne trace the current population explosion to the fact that more and more individuals are being born who possess only a fraction of the power that a complete person has. Between births, the Cheyenne parents practice abstinence.

Aside from the nobles, the Indians used plants to regulate their fertility. One of the most important plants for the Cheyenne women’s ritual is the silver sage or “woman’s mugwort”
(Artemisia frigida).
Only women are allowed to touch or use it; it is taboo for men even to speak about it. (The men have “men’s mugwort,”
he-tan-i-wan-ots [Artemisia gnaphalodes, A. ludoviciana]
for their own rituals and public ceremonies.) The prohibition is so strict that Bill Tallbull did not dare to tell me anything further about the plant. However, the women of other tribes, the Blackfoot and the Arapaho, for example, use it, among other purposes, to stimulate missed menstruation (Kindscher, 1992: 49).

The Cheyenne also know how to use gromwell
(Lithospermum incisum).
They call this plant, which is part of the Borage family, “lame medicine”
(hoh-ahea-no-is-tut)
because they grind the roots, leaves, and seeds into a powder and then rub it on parts of the body that are lame. They also rub a decoction of the plant from the head to toe of a sick person who is going “crazy” from the distress of the illness. And if someone is suffering from insomnia the medicine man chews the gromwell, spits the chewed plant matter in the patient’s face, and rubs it on the heart region. Nothing is publicly known about the use of gromwell by the Cheyenne in women’s medicine to restrain ovulation in order to induce temporary infertility. The Shoshone women are known to drink a cold infusion of the gromwell roots for a period of more than six months to protect against pregnancy. Other tribes also use the plant in this way.