Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (46 page)
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Authors: Claudia Müller-Ebeling,Christian Rätsch,Ph.D. Wolf-Dieter Storl
As the cult of the Virgin Mary began gaining ground in the late eleventh century, emphasizing what the Church regarded as most virtuous in women, only a woman capable of imitating the Virgin Mary’s example would be deemed worthy of sharing in her sacred exaltation. But what woman is capable of this? What bride does not fall into lust’s “sink of iniquity” by fulfilling her marital duties? And what woman, after laying eyes on her love’s masculine fruit and granting admittance to the fire of nuptial desire, could come away unburned?
The acrobatic efforts required to heed the example set by the Virgin Mary necessitated that some things be left behind—the qualities that were shunned were those that distinguish humans as part of nature, as sensuous beings. This dichotomy presumed evil in human nature and in the world (including the plant world) on the part of the early Christians. Such a presumption can be recognized in God’s words as rendered in the first book of the Old Testament, when God chastises Adam for listening to Eve and eating from the tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field” (Genesis 3: 17–18).
If we keep in mind how art has positioned the image of the witch in opposition to the Virgin Mary, the witch’s transformation in the Christian imagination will become more clear. Nature is moody and unreliable. What it bestows upon humans in the form of insurmountable obstacles or natural catastrophes does not always coincide with humans’ personal desires or requirements. Because we have, in our cultural circle, already bestowed the role of the benefactor—the all-knowing, the holy, and the good—upon God, his son Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints who act as mediators between the human and the divine spheres, the negative role was left to others, namely the devil and his human assistants: the warlocks and, above all, the witches.
If Mary is the rose or the lily among thorns, then the witch embodies the thorns.
The Symbolic Plants of Mary
LILY (
Lilium candidum
L.)
“In mythology and symbolism these lovely flowers with a delightful aroma have a double meaning. When the baby Hercules suckled on the divine breast of Hera he immediately demonstrated superhuman strength. He suckled so powerfully that part of the mother-milk flowed into the universe and thus the Milky Way was created. A drop fell on the earth. There where it dampened the soil the first lily bloomed. When Aphrodite saw the pure white flower she became jealous and out of spite made an enormous, obscene stamen, the ‘donkey penis,’ grow out of the middle of the white blossom. Therewith the plant guardian of chaste marriage became a symbol of the amorous adulteress. During the Catholic Middle Ages it once again became a symbol of chastity, and even of the Immaculate Conception—thus the name Madonna lily
.
” (Rätsch, 1995: 216f.).
STRAWBERRY (
Fragaria vesca
L.)
Strawberries have been found in the northern European pile-dwelling settlements of the Neolithic period. They were possibly the remains of berry offerings for the wood spirits. In antiquity one finds reference to the strawberries that the “lady with the stinking husband” (Faun or Pan) sought out in the protected grove. For example, as Horace reported, “She goes around scot free in protected groves searching for hidden strawberry bushes and thyme from the path, the lady of the stinking husband” (
Odes
I: 17). To the Germanic peoples the red, sweet-smelling, good-tasting, and seductive fruit was sacred to their love goddess, Freya.
Christianity did not take up this sensuous symbolism but concentrated instead on the strawberry’s lack of thorns, seed, or skin, from which the Christians strangely derived a symbolic connection with righteousness, modesty, and humility. The red flesh of the fruit became the symbol of the incarnation of Christ. The small white flowers of the strawberry plant became the symbol of Mary’s innocence.
Folk medicine attributes to the plant an apotropaic, or demon-repelling, activity. In the art of the Middle Ages and the early modern era strawberries are found exclusively in the context of Mary and the Passion play of Christ.
ROSE (
Rosas
pp.)
To the family of the rose belong the hedge rose and the pleasant-smelling cultivated multiflora rose. Symbolic meanings associated with the rose are as multifaceted as its different species. The Germanic peoples consecrated the hedge rose to Frigga, the stern wife of their father god Odin/Wotan, who watches over moral laws. The red rose hips held thunderstorms and magic at bay.
In antiquity
Rosa centifolia
stood in close proximity to the love god Eros and was also an important ally (and thus an attribute) of Aphrodite, as its aroma excites erotic desire. Not only were the Romans and the Greeks under the spell of the rose’s beauty and scent; poets of all cultures and times have been enthralled with this flower.
According to Gallwitz, “The early Christians detested the rose cult of the Romans … until they brought the rose’s thorns into connection with Christ’s crown of thorns” (1992: 204). For instance, the early Christians associated the five petals of the flower with the five wounds of Jesus Christ, and the flower, which sits on a thorny stem, with the chastity of Mary’s Immaculate Conception.
The common people of the Middle Ages, and indeed even into the early twentieth century in rural areas, used the rose for love oracles. Other than rose hip tea, the rose, which has hardly any medicinal activity, was not used in a healing context.
LILY OF THE VALLEY (
Convallaria majalis
L.)
During heathen times the aromatic lilies of the valley were considered sacred to Ostara, the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic goddess of spring.
In the Christian context the small woods flower symbolized the Immaculate Conception, the Annunciation, the birth of Christ, and, ultimately, the Ascension, as well as modesty and humility. Painters depicted the plant, with its small white bell-shaped flowers, in images of Mary.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the lily of the valley was so well known as a medicine for strengthening the heart and brain that it became a heraldic symbol for physicians.
PRIMROSE (
Primula veris
L.)
The Celtic druids ritually gathered this yellow-blossomed spring flower and treasured it as a medicine—one that also showed the way to buried treasure.
Because of its similarity to a key ring it is called “Saint Peter’s key” in the Christian context. During the Middle Ages, Saint Hildegard of Bingen called the primrose
Schlüsselblume
(key flower) and wrote that it was used as a remedy for lameness and strokes. It also had the reputation of repelling demons.
In Christian art the primrose is an attribute of the Virgin Mary, especially in pictures of her Ascension but also in images of the Annunciation. The lily of the valley, however, often symbolized the Incarnation of Christ.
The Witch: The Sensuous Natural Woman
When one studies the drawings and the paintings of the witch that have been conveyed to the world through the European imagination since the end of the fifteenth century, one will recognize a world opposite that of the Virgin Mary. According to Christian understanding Eve, damned by God to carry thorns and thistles and to give birth in pain, was redeemed by Mary.
8
It is the offenses of this “earlier virgin,” who was seduced by the serpent and ate from the tree of knowledge, that Mary atones for.
9
On the Cologne cathedral there is a statue from circa 1520 of Mary standing on a crescent moon,
10
inside of which is an image of the serpent wrapped around Eve and the apple; the “sinner” Eve stands in the middle of an unruly nature that eludes humans’ toilsome attempts at cultivation. In contrast, Mary lives in the spiritual and cultivated domain of the world.
Mary has been depicted predominantly in an architectural, or man-made, environment. Pictures of Mary are solemn and static with a timeless, ideal quality. There is no place for emotions, much less passions, in these works of art. Through these images the Virgin Mary has been promulgated as the guardian of culture. From her sister, however, from the lady of the woods who is at home in the thorny brush, emanates a continual lurking danger that threatens all cultural achievements, including the moral and spiritual. In the pictures of witches we have a world where everything is in motion—a world that makes space for the forces of nature and the surge of emotions, a world in which the woods and the thorny wilderness impart a passionate, dramatic environment for the women, who are in ecstatic exultation.
The herb considered the magical plant of Circe is still called enchanter’s nightshade (
Circaea lutetiana
L.). (Woodcut from Gerard,
The Herbal,
1633.)
From the late 1400s, when images of witches first began to appear in manuscripts and frescos, until the nineteenth century, when a more evenhanded attitude toward the witch began to prevail, witches were settled in an unwelcoming wilderness. In his thorough 1863 study of the sorceress
(La Sorcière),
which he worked on for more than thirty years, the broadly educated French naturalist, historian, and author Jules Michelet offered an answer to the question, Where are the witches? “In the most impossible places, in the thorny woods, on the moors, there where hawthorn and thistle block the path. During the night in many an ancient megalithic grave.”
11
Hans Weiditz depicts the weather-witch in an unwelcoming woods. She appears to be determining the path of the stars and conjuring stormy weather. (
Die Wetterhexe
, Woodcut in Petrarca
, Von der Artzney beyder Glück des guten und widerwertigen
, 1532.)
The illustrator Hans Weiditz, who worked in Strasbourg at the beginning of the sixteenth century, drew the witch in the “thorny woods.” Weiditz created a woodcut for Francesco Petrarch’s
Book of Philosophical Comfort
; written in 1468 and published in German in Strasbourg in 1532, the book is about how man walks on the path of virtue and through good and bad strokes of fate can grow morally. The woodcut by Weiditz is referred to as the “weather-witch”
(Wetterhexe)
or the “herb-lady”
(Kräuterfrau)
.
12
In the middle of the thorny woods, surrounded by thistles, nettles, and brushwood, an old stooped woman with unkempt long hair stands on a stone pedestal. Like Atlas, on her shoulders she carries the world, in which the path of the moon and the stars has been inscribed. With her distaff she appears to influence not only the luxuriant growth of nature but also the raging thunderstorms and hailstorms that rain down on the fenced fields.
The eloquent art historian Wilhelm Fraenger poetically characterized this witch as nature’s personification. “The woods woman is barely differentiated from her surroundings. Her furrowed face is the grooved bark. Her bent figure is a crooked stalk. Her crippled feet are like the roots, and her blowing hair is like the night wind.” She is “so absolutely immersed in and akin to the nature that surrounds her” that she has an effect “as if she were the mythical symbolic embodiment of vegetation and atmosphere.” And it appears “as if the stormy, stifling heat of a summer night, the knotted, dense woods, and the strange plants were embodied in the symbol of this old field spinstress” (Fraenger, 1985: 88, 89).
Hans Weiditz put much effort into the depiction of the plant world, and in 1529 he produced true-to-nature watercolors as drafts for the woodcuts of the herbal by the preacher and botanist Otto Brunfels, whose finely engraved system of plant roots is reminiscent of the blowing hair of the herb witch.
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In the drawings of Weiditz, the witch, the nature woman, is not depicted as radiant and sensuously seductive. Instead her frightening physiognomy and her stooped posture are associated with plants that block the path for humans and cause them pain if they touch the herbs; this association endured through the centuries; thus, it is predominantly the thorny, prickly plants with burning nettle hairs that are known as “witches’ herbs” in Grimm’s Dictionary.