Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (21 page)

When Australians, Africans, or Native Americans told nineteenth-century ethnologists that a stone, tree, or flower had made them pregnant, it was considered proof of an animistic prelogical mentality. The sorts of ideas about intercourse and pregnancy that are fabricated and theorized about in university seminars and coffeehouses are astounding! For example, feminists still consider this to be the remnants of a primordial matriarchal society, because for them the idea that a plant made the woman pregnant categorically negates the fatherhood of the male.

However, what the native women told the curious ethnographers was simply what they had intuitively experienced. They had, like Buddha’s mother, who saw her son floating by as a white elephant, experienced the spiritual child before conception. Naturally the role that intercourse played was not unknown to them. This just made it possible for the spirit to receive a body.

The child’s soul that has taken refuge in the flowers, the trees, the cliffs, or the stones comes near to the mother who is full of curiosity before the fertilization of the egg. The sexual act, in which the lovers melt into one another, makes it possible for the child to bind itself to both parents in the stream of inheritance. The heat of the ecstasy of love, the penetration of all barriers that the ego constructs around the body and soul, allows the child to weave into the fertilized egg, into the DNA double helix. Now cell division can begin.
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The Time of Begetting

When the humans were generally still clairvoyant, they paid attention to when and where procreation took place. They oriented themselves to the customs of their forefathers and to the rhythms of the universe. The melting together of man and woman was experienced as sacred ecstasy, as a communion in which the human neared the Divine, not as a random, egotistical, desperate act, as so often is the case today. In ancient European cultures it was considered especially favorable to conceive children in the open countryside—in the meadows, the fields, and, in particular, the woods beneath the hazel tree when the moon was full and the sun was ascending in the yearly cycle. The joyous month of May, when people could take part in the exhilarating greening and flowering of nature, was considered to be a particularly favorable time for impregnation. Only after the conversion to Christianity—as happened in other heathen customs—was a May wedding warned against. For Christians, May is the month of the Virgin Mary and it is dedicated to her chastity; therefore, couples are supposed to refrain from the pleasures of the flesh or else they will produce fools, idiots, or, at the very least, difficult children (Loux, 1980: 66).

The May festival was a bathing festival. The wise women prepared aromatic herbal baths and brewed strong beer that lent the humans wings. The girls braided flowers into their hair like Freya herself.

The people drank a wine scented with sweet woodruff
(Asperula oderata),
which stimulated desire and eased inhibitions. The May drink is well known; the Benedictine monk Wandelbertus wrote in the year 854, “Pour pearly wine on the sweet woodruff fine.” The “May bowls” of today are prepared by very decent, very civilized methods. A few little twigs of sweet woodruff are placed in the wine for a short while, and then a little sugar and lemon are added, and finally some sparkling wine is poured in. People are afraid that too much woodruff results in a terrible hangover. But if these warnings are ignored and numerous handfuls of the wilted forest herb are soaked in the wine, then the reason the plant is called “master of the wood,”
Herba matrisylvae
(wood mother herb) and
reine des bois
(forest queen) quickly becomes apparent. It not only excites amorous desires but it also makes the forest, all of wild nature, venture a few steps closer. The wood spirits watch and grin at you.

The quarter days, such as the full-moon festival in May, are free spaces, breaks in the flow of time; they are moments in which the world beyond comes closer to the world of humans. Not only can witches and shamans fly effortlessly during that time, but the otherworldly creatures, elemental beings, fairies, and elves also are able to descend to earth and find reincarnation easier.

During May the youth collected colorful flowers, mugwort, thyme, chamomile, sweet woodruff, ground ivy, bedstraw, and other aromatic herbs—which were sacred to the goddess Freya, or later to Mary—and built beds of them for lovemaking in the blooming meadows or in moss-covered forest groves. In the eighteenth century the young people in France still built “castles of love”
(châteaux d’amour)
out of leaves and flowers that the maidens hid in and the boys raided.

The May festival was also an occasion to “quicken” the young women with birch and hazel branches. Not only is the energy set free from the body in this way, but the branches also transmit the flow energy from the ancestral world to this world.

The children who were conceived in May are born into the world during Candlemas, near the threshold of springtime when the goddess of light reappears. This is also when the bear regenerates and emerges from her cave with her young. The Midsummer and the August festivals were also considered favorable times. On the other hand, the days of November were unfavorable.

Pregnancy

During the early phases of pregnancy, the child is not yet bound fast to the embryo. While the growing fetus goes through the entire evolution of the species once again—from amoeba to jellyfish, fish with gills, amphibian, and so on—in the watery environment within the placenta, the accompanying child-soul can easily leave the belly and sway around the mother. It regularly goes on adventures, dances with butterflies, plays with songbirds and other animals, and delights in flowers and trees. And when it is frightened, it flees back into its warm cave (Rätsch, 1987: 31).
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During this time strong souls (for instance, the future shamans, chieftains, or warriors) play with powerful, exceptional animals—wolves, bears, lions, vultures—that later become their allies or familiars.

This floating around lends the expectant mother her distinct loveliness and her radiant aura. Who has not noticed how much butterflies like to flutter around pregnant women, how birds like to fly close past them, and how ladybugs enjoy landing on them? For these reasons it is nourishing for the pregnant woman to spend as much time as possible in nature. The Hindu
Shastras
prescribe long walks in the garden for pregnant women. This attitude toward nature also explains the custom in which the woman embraces or shakes young fruit trees. The belief, repeatedly confirmed by ethnologists, that children can be strongly influenced by what the mother sees and does during pregnancy is based on this idea (Loux, 1980: 52). Sometimes pregnant women are told not eat strawberries because they could cause strawberry-like birthmarks. A farmer who had stuttered since childhood explained to me that his speech impediment resulted from his mother listening to a radio program in a foreign language while pregnant. In Silesia infants can be born with scaly skin if the mothers eat fish while pregnant. Naturally, eating fish is healthy—in this instance it has less to do with the nutritional and physiological standpoint than with the power of suggestion on the impressionable soul of the fetus.

During the last weeks of pregnancy, with the increasing “souling” of the embryo, the child remains more and more in the belly. Usually humans are not able to remember their prebirth existence. Through hypnotic regression or potent psychedelics—such as ayahuasca and ololiuqui—it is possible to break through this amnesia. Some people have even retained images from their prebirth existence. For example, the English poet Thomas Traherne (1637–1674) sang of the joy he had experienced, “how like an angel I came down,” and how everything, the flowers and the trees, shone bright and wonderful (Traherne, 1991: 4).

The ancient Celtic poems also paint a picture of the other side of nature, of the land of the elves where the incarnated souls are found:

Hair there like primrose and the whole body is the color of snow. White there the teeth, black the brows. All of our guests there are a feast for the eyes, every cheek there has the color of the foxglove.

—
FROM
“L
EBOR NA
H
IDRE
,”
AN ANCIENT
I
RISH POEM

Birth

When the time of delivery was finally at hand, the village midwife, the “night woman,” was called for; often it was the pregnant woman’s own grandmother. The midwife was called secretly, given a nod; it was better if no unfriendly ears or malicious spirits found out about the birth. The old woman, whose gaze was fixed not only on the material surface of existence but also on the realms beyond, had already seen the child long before it would be born. Through dreams and signs she could foresee who was coming into the world, which ancestor, which warrior, which healer, or even which deity was on its way to becoming embodied. And because what she said turned out to be correct, the elder seemed like the Norns informing fate.

On her way to the birth the midwife paid attention to signs, the animals that crossed her path, the wind, the clouds, the sun, and the moon. These revealed to her how the birth was going to proceed. She came in the darkest of nights as well. She had no fear; she was a sorceress who knew the night side of existence and of her own being.

Once inside the house she made sure that the doors and cupboards were open, that aprons and shoelaces were untied, and that the thread or yarn was unknotted so that the infant would not be strangled at the threshold or get stuck. She gave the birthing woman advice with comforting words, and she also knew the magical words used to call the disir, Frau Holle, or the Salige Frau for assistance. The Indian midwives sang Vedic birth mantras. The Germanic peoples carved protective runes: