Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (45 page)

Presumably none of us has ever seen a witch and yet most of us have a relatively concrete picture of what a witch looks like. Where does this originate—this tangible idea we have of a figure that exists only in an imaginary reality? Why does every child know what a witch looks like?

Ideas are always pictorial—
bildlich.
The picture is created—
“das Bild bildet”—
and finally it makes culture—
Bildung.
These words are related by virtue of their connection with the pictorial image. For the purpose of our search, understanding the expression of spiritual energy inherent in the pre-Christian syllable
bil
proves informative.
¹
This prefix is found not only in terms within the same general realm of meaning, such as
Bildung
(culture),
bilden
(to form),
Bild
(image, picture),
Bildnis
(portrait), and so forth, but also in
Bilsenkraut
(henbane), whose psychoactive effects indicate that it is a sacred plant. There is also something magical and intriguing emanating from pictures of witches, and the idea of the witch continues to stimulate the pictorial fantasy of painters and illustrators even in our own times.

Our cultural consciousness has been filled with various images of witches based on pictures left for us by painters and illustrators. (And as a rule these artists were men.) Our imaginations have been shaped by paintings and engravings by artists such as Hans Baldung Grien, Hans Weiditz, Francisco José de Goya, and Ludwig Richter that have influenced our fairy-tale idea of the witch. We usually think of a witch as being an old, stooped hag with a crooked nose and warts, and we imagine her testing the flesh on Hansel’s body with long, withered fingers or preparing magical potions. But she has also appeared in many pictures as a lusty and naked young maid, in her bloom of life, who seems to be engaging in a nocturnal orgy with other naked women. Although the picture of the crooked-nosed old witch of fairy tales and children’s books is dominant in our collective imaginations, these two very contradictory pictures of the witch exist side by side in the culture in which the witch arose.
²

Let us place ourselves in the sphere of dualities for better orientation—for only because of the fact that there is day do we know what night is. Such a juxtaposition is entirely appropriate to our context; after all, the witch is first and foremost “nocturnal,” just as are certain animals and plants (predominantly those of the Nightshade family). “The night is the friend of the spirits—secret and still,” understood the physician and philosopher Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombast von Hohenheim (1493–1541), who is best known by his nickname, Paracelsus. Besides, the witch is a Christian invention, and if her virtuous, chaste, dutiful sister did not exist, then she—the heathen unbeliever, the sinner, and the evil one—would have never seen the light of day (or, we might say, the dark of night). The witch embodies the suppressed nature of Mary, and Mary contains all that the witch is not allowed to be—or, more precisely, all that has been suppressed in our cultural picture of the witch.

Mary: The Chaste Cultural Heroine

On the side of the day and the virtuous is Mary, the mother of God. She, Our Lady of the Sorrows who endures so much suffering, is considered the conqueror of demons and thus can be addressed as the “healer of humanity” in a figurative sense, as von Laufenberg’s fifteenth-century poem demonstrates. Mary is not depicted in a direct relationship with healing and medicinal herbs,
³
but as the mediator between the humans, the saints, and God she accepts the healing medicine that humans offer her in order to integrate it into the divine order.

“This, the world of medicine see, with the weeds removed from sight. This is a rose, of thorns free, with a lily’s chastity bright.”

—H
EINRICH VON
L
AUFENBERG

In this sense Mary stands in direct opposition to the witches, who speak directly to the plant spirits—who speak to nature in the “shape” of these plant spirits. Mary is the mediator of knowledge but she herself does not possess it.

Who was Mary? If we are to believe the biblical sources and the scholarly brotherhood as they have presented it, Mary was brought by her parents, Joachim and Anna, to the temple to work as a servant until her marriage to the aged carpenter Joseph. She was visited by a winged messenger who told her that the Holy Spirit—a divine lover—would come upon her and she would conceive the child of God. Thirty years later Mary was witness to the brutal murder by torture of her son. But she was rewarded in an unusual way for her life’s work. She went to heaven, where her son was also lodging, became his “bride” (for in the Bible Jesus is known as the Bridegroom of Heaven), and was crowned the Queen of Heaven.

So much for the particulars. The most important questions for our study are these: What sort of picture did the artist paint of Mary, the witch’s virtuous sister? And what can the settings of these paintings tell us of the worldview the Church sought to oppose to the natural world of the witch?

In paintings, drawings, and woodcuts by northern European artists Mary is usually dressed in expensive clothes and appears regal—even amid the dreary scenery of the manger. As the embodiment of the Mother she holds the baby Jesus in her lap. This image of the mother with child was modeled upon the Egyptian goddess Isis with her baby, Horus. In ancient Egypt and the traditions of late antiquity, Isis was the authority on medicinal herbs. Isis cults existed in the southern Germanic regions up to the beginning of the Christian conversion.
⁴

As a rule, in paintings Mary has been represented in an environment created by humans. As the intercessor for the fallible humans, who turn to her and to heaven, Mary is often surrounded by lofty and elaborate architecture. Thus in the early fifteenth century the worldly and Churchly dignitaries—as well as the common people, whose primary source of theological instruction came from the art displayed in the churches—encountered their heavenly mediator kneeling on decorative tiles in lavish halls with ornate columns and surrounded by bull’s-eye windows, as in the painting of the Annunciation by Jan van Eyck. In the distance are cities, symbolizing the sacred city of Jerusalem, and trade ships sailing on rivers. Even when the monks and abbots who beseeched her heavenly grace encountered Mary’s image in “the fields of paradise,”
⁵
she was not out in nature but inside walled temples.

When one does see Mary in nature—for instance, during her escape with Joseph and the child of God to Egypt—it is an exotic fantasy of nature, where the trees almost genuflect to the divine descendant and in the distant sky threatening clouds announce the drama of the Bethlehem child-murder that was left behind. In devotional paintings, scenes of the baby Jesus playing unself-consciously on Mary’s lap are also often presented in lavishly adorned environments. If a natural area is depicted, it is a carefully laid-out garden surrounded by a hedge, a wall, or a well-tended rose screen, depending on the fashion of the times. (In Germany, “Mary in the Rosebush” is an independent genre of Mary images extant since the thirteenth century, with its apex occurring in the fifteenth century.) In the well-known examples of this genre by Stefan Lochner (c. 1448) and Martin Schongauer (1473), one sees a domesticated nature in which the leaves of the roses, the strawberry plants, and the lilies are woven together into a tapestry. Therein the “beloved Virgin” finds herself well protected and sheltered, as if in a jewelry box. Her long golden hair, which symbolizes the sun and its radiance (an attribute of the light-gods of the Old Norse Eddas
^a
), flows loosely on her shoulders, while her buttoned-up dress ensures that no glance of her body will detract from her motherliness. The shawl around her head, like that which Muslim women wear, is in the traditional color of Mary: blue or red. The blue of the sky and the red of the Eucharist blood are also contained in this color symbolism, chiefly as the blood of Mary’s sacrificed son, Jesus, which the faithful “ingest” during Mass in the form of red wine.

Like the colors, the environment and the few animals and plants that have surrounded Mary in art since early Christian times have symbolic meanings. The enclosed garden is a dominant symbol for the chastity of the Virgin Mary, who is—as can be seen by her loose hair—not a married woman but more like an innocent girl, pure and chaste. This plane of symbolism is also the one addressed in the pictorial theme of “Mary in the Corn Dress”: Hinrik Funhof of Hamburg (died c. 1484) depicted the Mother of God standing with folded hands and flowing hair; fertile life sprouts from her corn dress, which stands for the cultivated fields of the Middle Ages. This painting represents Mary as the field of God and an immaculate temple servant.

In the Song of Solomon the enclosed garden symbolized the closed womb of Mary, the virginal Queen of Heaven. The iconography in this scene of the well-cultivated garden surrounded by rosebushes or battlements is related to the Garden of Eden. In the oil painting Paradiesgartlein [Garden of Paradise] from circa 1410 executed by a master from the Upper Rhine, Mary is shown in an enclosed garden surrounded by lilies, lilies of the valley, strawberries, irises, primroses, fruit, and the deciduous trees of feminine saints, as if she were part of a courtly society.
⁶
(This painting can be viewed in the Frankfurt Städel museum.) All of these plants—especially the lily and the rose—refer to the chastity and faith of the Holy Virgin. They are the symbolic plants of Mary not because of their medicinal powers (or if so, only very tangentially), but because of their beauty, their pure white innocence, their Eucharist red color or their heavenly blue color.

These pictures of Mary indicate a path to the hidden cultural messages in the pictorial images of witches. The lily is white and immaculate. “Spring delight is the purity, and immortality always sprouts luxuriantly from her white blossoms,” mused Methodius of Olympus on the lily. The Song of Solomon compares these sensuous and aromatic flowers with the Church and its true believers: “Be happy, sweet smelling lily! Lady, fill the faithful with your scent!” The song continues with the comparison that, like the “Virgin under the Jews and heathens who persecuted her,” the lily remains “blinding white and brilliant through faith.” Because the lily grows among thorns in Palestine, the land where Jesus was born, and because the flowers of the rose rise up on a thorny stem, both of these flowers became the symbols of the strength of Mary’s faith amid an unchaste, unbelieving, and later apostate environment.
⁷

In the year 430 the poet Sedulius attempted, by way of verse, to atone for the comparison between the rose and Mary, who had “atoned” for the actions of her sister, Eve, through the Immaculate Conception.

How innocently the rose blooms amidst the sharp thorns, with no wounding prickers it crowns the mother shrub with honor, And so too from out of the sacred clan of Eve came Mary full of grace; The Virgin atones, the new one, while the earlier Virgin fades away.

The Christian mind-set that made an immaculate act out of conception and transformed a mother into the heavenly bride of her divine son influenced the cultural example of womanhood that ordinary women were meant to follow. But this was not apparent during the conversion of the former Roman Empire to Christianity. The early years of Christianity were marked by great suspicion and loathing of the female sex by the fathers of the Church, who took their cues from Saint Paul in this regard. The effloresence of the cult of the Virgin Mary accompanied a widespread cultural reevaluation of the place of woman that gained ground in the eleventh century and grew stronger over the following centuries. Initially this led to more tolerance for women in general, not merely witches. But then, with the shock waves caused by the Black Plague, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, the Virgin mother and witches became paired in a dual relation, the celestial brilliance of the one matched by the infernal powers of the other.