Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (25 page)

For the northern Europeans these festivals of the dead were held in late fall. Among the Celts the grave mounds, the
sidh-mounds,
opened up in the full moon of November and the Samhain festival of the dead, one of the quarter days, was celebrated. Today it is still considered a typical witches’ holiday.

The shamans and the witches can make healing and fertility magic because they understand the connection among the dead, the moon, and the vegetation and also know the rituals that reach into the dimensions beyond. That is also witchcraft medicine.

Plants that demonstrate powerful pharmacological effects must be used with expertise; otherwise, they will cause considerable damage. For this reason such plants are generally feared and in due course demonized. Those who know how to use them correctly are also feared, and all too easily turned into “witches.”
¹

“You shall experience the bond between yourself and your own peculiar destinies—fates which will at times transport you to an exalted world of wonderful visions, at others to the most vulgar of existences. It is said that the wondrous has disappeared from the earth, I don't believe it. The wonders have remained. Although we no longer wish to refer to the wondrous which surrounds us daily by that name anymore, because we have been lying in wait for a series of phenomena based on the principles of the cyclical return. But often a phenomenon flows through our environment that brings all of our cleverness to shame, and one that we, because we refuse to embrace it, in dull stubbornness refuse to believe. We therefore persistently deny the existence of the phenomenon to our inner eye, because it was too transparent to mirror the harsh surface of the external eye.”

—E. T. A. H
OFFMANN
,
D
IE
E
LIXIERE DES
T
EUFELS
[T
HE
D
EVIL'S
E
LIXIRS
], 1815

Witchcraft medicine is a kind of applied pharmacology of the plants with potent activity. The powers that be have always sought to control the use of strong medicines because, among other reasons, rulers feared they might be poisoned by a skilled hand. In earlier times, however, the powerful activity observed in a substance was considered to have its origins in the supernatural, the magical, or even in the sorcery of witches.
²
In other words, the potency and effectiveness of a substance were considered proof of witchcraft.

Indeed many medical treatments used during antiquity were not based on rational pharmacology, but were a combination of ritual and the use of material substances. Man already believed in archaic times that the plants revealed their power only when harvested with the proper ritual gathering method, and only when the correct accompanying words were spoken.
³
The ancient authors (such as Homer and, in particular, Diocles) wrote of the
rhizotomoki,
the root gatherers of archaic times, that they were the inventors of pharmacological medicine and that they still spoke with the plant spirits (Baumann, 1982: 15; Graf, 1996: 69). These root gatherers observed the gods sacred to the respective plant. They made use of the moon’s energy and knew the particular oath formulas for each plant. Witchcraft medicine belongs to the spiritual and cultural legacy of the rhizotomoki. When a scientific theory rationalizing the healing arts emerged with the Hippocratics,
⁴
ritual and magical medicine was slowly suppressed. It was ridiculed as superstitious and ultimately driven underground. Only certain areas of magical medicine were maintained in the healing cult of Asclepius and were officially accepted into late antiquity (Krug, 1993; cf. Meyer and Mirecki, 1995).

Witchcraft medicine is the healing art of the underground. It is the forbidden and despised medicine, the one oppressed by the Church and/or state, the kind of medicine sanctioned as “alternative,”
⁵
for it makes decisions over life and death. And it does more than make people healthy—it brings joy and awareness, inebriation and mystical insight.

Witchcraft medicine is wild medicine. It is uncontrollable, it surpasses the ruling order, it is anarchy. It belongs to the wilderness. It scares people. It is one thing above all: heathen.

Witchcraft medicine stems from shamanism and has its roots in Paleolithic times. Witchcraft medicine is mythological, ritualistic, and strongly feminine. Witchcraft medicine is religion—a shamanic healing religion revolving around sacred, in other words, effective, plants.

Cults, in which the medicinally effective plants and sacred beverages play a role, have always been viewed suspiciously, at first by representatives of the Christian faith, later also by Western medicine. The witches, the last wise women of European culture, fell victim to the Inquisition. In Siberia in the 1930s and 1940s shamans were prosecuted as counterrevolutionaries. Today shamans are also denigrated and ridiculed. So it was in the year 1990 that the Protestant church of the Indonesian island Siberut, which lies east of Sumatra, released a decree forbidding the activities of the medicine men as heathen and blasphemous (Plotkin, 1994: 187).

The most important domains of witchcraft medicine include knowledge about the preparation and use of the
pharmakon
as:

• aphrodisiacs (philters,
  Virus amatorius
  ) and anaphrodisiacs
  ⁶
  
• birth control and abortifacients
  (abortativa)
  
• poison/medicine
  (pharmakon)
  
• inebriants or “traveling herbs” (psychoactive substances)
  ⁷
  
• life-extending and rejuvenating elixirs
  

Thus witchcraft medicine was used to increase happiness, for birth control, to heal, to damn, for visionary knowledge, and for life extension. This is why magic was originally called
pharmakeia
(Luck, 1990: 58).

But the ambivalent magic of weather-making, as well as intentional black magic (curses or
devotio, defixions
;
⁸
ritual maledictions or
dirae
; poisoning; death magic
⁹
) also belong to witchcraft medicine. Witchcraft medicine also has an affinity for unusual individuals and people with extraordinary abilities (of prophecy, spiritual healing, and so forth).

The initiation for becoming a “witch doctor” took place within the framework of rituals, mysteries, and orgies. Witchcraft medicine stands under the protection of the Great Goddess in her manifestations as Hecate,
¹⁰
Artemis, and Diana in particular, but in Aphrodite, Venus, and Freya as well. These goddesses demonstrate distinct shamanic traits, just as the magicians of antiquity
(magoi)
¹¹
and witches themselves do. And the witches’ herbs come from the gardens of the goddesses.

The threatening plants with potent pharmacological activity were called magic plants, witches’ herbs, or devil’s drugs.
¹²
During antiquity the people who made use of these plants, the “sorceresses” and “witches,” were called
pharmakides
or
pharmakeutriai
in Greek (Gawlik, 1994: 150; Graf, 1996: 159). The Greek word
pharmakon
(plural
pharmaka
) simultaneously means “medicine, poison, and magical substance.”
¹³
In the Middle Ages the German word
Kraut
(herb) had the same meaning as “magical substance.”
¹⁴
In Venice magic or sorcery was even known as
erberia,
which means “herbalism” (Golowin, 1973: 6f).

A typical characteristic of witches’ herbs is their ambivalence—to some they cause damage and disease, to others they offer health and protection. Often they ease the problems they have caused, and they are intoxicating or induce trances.
¹⁵
They are true
pharmaka
—in the ancient meaning of the multidimensional word. For these herbs the wisdom of Paracelsus—that it is only the dosage that determines whether or not something is medicine or poison—holds true. And with witches’ herbs it is extremely important to determine the correct dosage. It is well known that in antiquity the witches’ clients were often poisoned or were made “crazy” by the love potions
(amatoria, remedium amoris)
¹⁶
that commonly contained the active pharmaka of nightshade, henbane, or hemlock.
¹⁷
But because the users did not heed the maker’s instructions out of pure greed, they overdosed. For this reason such substances had already been forbidden by Roman times (Graupner, 1966: 26).

The person who, even if it is done without bad intention, provides abortions or love potions, because doing so sets a bad example, will be sentenced to the following punishments: People of lower classes shall be sent to forced labor in the mines, members of higher classes are to be exiled on an island after the seizure of a portion of their possessions. If a man or a woman dies because of the treatment, the death penalty will be implemented (
Codex iustinianus
, dig. 48.8; 3.2,3).

The above is the origin of the saying, “The greatest magician is the one who best knows the secrets of the plants” (Golowin, 1973: 7). Herbalists were often called
Kräuterhexen,
or herb witches (Boland, 1983). Today herbalists and women who know about healing, especially ones who live in the countryside, are still described as “witches” and are often viewed with suspicion (Bourne, 1995). Similarly, shamans and other folk doctors are described in ethnographic literature as “witch masters,” “witch doctors,” or sorcerers; healers and psychics are called “witches” (for example, Donner-Grau, 1997).

In antiquity the term
witch (strix, striges)
appears only in later literature. Originally one spoke of magoi (magicians). The term described a certain type of shamanic traveling priest (sometimes known as
Goetians,
from the word
goetia
, which means “magic” or “shamanism”). In later times prestidigitators and carnival conjurors were also called magicians (from the word
mageia
, which means “sorcery”). Thus in the Greek literature Moses, Aaron, and Jesus of Nazareth were referred to as magicians (Budge, 1996; Graf, 1996: 13). Moses was probably a trickster who was chased out of Egypt and who greatly impressed a dilapidated Jewish tribe with his little theatrical performances (for example, his “Indian” rope trick) and lured them over to monotheism. Moses is also considered the author of one of the most important folk works about witchcraft medicine,
The Sixth and Seventh Book of Moses
.
¹⁸
Therein it says:

How to obtain magical powers: On the eve of the Adelbert festival (June 1) kill a snake, cut its head off, place therein three kernels of hemp [
Cannabis sativa
L.] and bury the whole thing in the ground: When the hemp has grown, twist a rope out of it. If you wrap this around your body, then even the strongest force will be withstood (Bauer, 1984: 151).

The most famous Thessalian witches were called
veneficus Thessalus
. Magic, poison mixing, shamanic practices of the Goetians, and
goetia
(techniques for ecstatic rituals and divination) were classified together under the term
veneficium
in Latin—but in Greek they were classified as pharmakon (Graf, 1996: 45). In other words, magic was originally applied pharmacology.