Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (53 page)

The Healing of the Microcosm and the Macrocosm

For people who live in harmony with nature, the healing arts draw not only on their own bodies, but also on the body of the universe, on the macrocosm, into which humans are integrated. Every living being is governed by the weather, the seasons, and the cycles of nature that provide sustenance while also bringing decay and transitoriness. If the crops do not grow, if the harvest fails due to bad weather, or if a family is struck by illness and death, primitive peoples interpret this event as either a naturally occurring event or as a disturbance in the natural balance of all earthly and heavenly energies. Shamans have the ability to exert an influence on events by going into a trance and entering the reality of the world beyond, where they can receive knowledge about the causes of the imbalance.

Art historians who study images of witches have repeatedly remarked on the trancelike, somnambulistic condition of the women depicted by Albrecht Altdorfer and Hans Baldung (see illustrations on pages 151 and 152).
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The trance is a shamanic technique found in all cultures; it transcends the mundane world, with its obligations and limitations, in order to break through the boundaries of consciousness and open to associations, inspirations, and intuition.
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In this state shamans are able to recognize the origins of a disease and practical, therapeutic measures that can be taken against it. According to the shamanic vision of the world, humans are not separate from nature but are a natural component of it. This is demonstrated in the invocation of Manuel Córdova-Rios, who was trained as a shaman by the Amahuaca Indians of the Peruvian Amazon basin:

O most powerful spirit of the bush with the fragrant leaves we are here again to seek wisdom. Give us tranquility and guidance to understand the mysteries of the forest, the knowledge of our ancestors.
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Human culture reflects in a complex way on the basic principles of nature, which is understood as a cyclical process of becoming and decaying and as manifesting the poles of masculine and feminine. In his treatise
On the Mysteries of Egypt
(4.2), Iamblichus (250–325 C.E.) explained the magical influence on natural processes in the following way.

Every kind of theurgy
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has a mirror aspect. On the one hand it is practiced by humans and maintains our natural place in the universe; on the other hand the practice is supported by divine symbols because they are connected to the higher powers; it is able to ascend to the heights. It moves harmoniously in unison with their commands and can actually take on the appearance of the gods themselves. In accord with this difference the magician can naturally invoke the powers of the superior beings, for he who calls to them is a human being, but he can also give commands to them, for he has taken on the appearance of a God with secret formulas.

Weather magic should be understood as an effort to reestablish a lost balance. Since prehistoric times, and to this day in tribal cultures, rainmaking plays an important role in the work of male and female shamans.
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Those who put herbs in a censer and burn them imitate atmospheric processes on a small scale. The leaves, resin, and resin-containing bark—for example, from henbane, laurel, and frankincense—become ash, which is later put on the soil as nutrition, ensuring further generations of plants. The smoke rises and thickens into foggy clouds. It condenses and sinks like fog on the fields and as barely noticeable sediment on the plants. In this way man imitates the desired weather processes of the macrocosm on a microcosmic level.

This is exactly what the women who are still connected to such natural processes and their heathen traditions do. Such sympathetic magic can be imagined, in the foreground of the witch trials, through this confessional inquiry transcribed in the nineteenth book of the collection
Deutsches Bußbuch
[Church Decrees] by the Bishop of Worms (died 1025).

Did you act as certain women are wont to? When they need rain and have none, they gather several girls and select a young virgin from among these to act as a kind of leader. They remove her clothes and lead the naked one to a place outside the settlement where they find hyoscyamus, which is called
Bilse
in German. They have her pull out this plant with the little finger of her right hand and tie the uprooted plant to the little toe of the right foot using any type of cord. Then the girls, each of whom holds a rod in her hands, lead said virgin, as naked as she is, back from the river to the settlement by her hands while she places her feet down and moves them like a crab.
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Because this magical “conversation with nature” was interpreted as a prohibited intervention in God’s plan, the witches had to atone for this heinous act with their lives.
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By turning the magical invocation of rain, which brings fertility to the earth, into its destructive opposite—as it was stereotypically portrayed in all contemporary pictorial and written sources as hailstorms and thunderstorms—the ecclesiastical authorities severed access to heathen tradition and manipulated public opinion as they desired.

Medieval painters and illustrators did not show the primordial midwife bringing blessed rain to nourish the growth of the fields and to fertilize the earth, but they did show her influencing devastating thunderstorms. The women in these paintings are not shown in a joyous frenzy; rather, their naked limbs are orgiastically contorted and betray the ominous influence witches were believed to have on the natural world. This vision essentially reproduces the Church’s negative conception of nature, especially its more nocturnal and aggressive manifestations, which are believed to have a demonic source. This idea was even demonstrated by the scientifically oriented doctor and philosopher Paracelsus. In an event in Basel that is still much discussed in literature, Paracelsus openly burned the writings of the Greek-Roman physician Galen and some of his medical predecessors in order to exclusively allow his path to be lit by “the light of nature.” Nevertheless, Paracelsus was entirely rooted in the Christian faith. He considered rain and clouds to be “excretions” of the “hellish ghosts”:

And if they come out of their dwellings and into the heaven so they allow their secretions and its action which are in their nature, to move outwards; but that is nothing other than wind, hail, thundershowers, sun, and many more lavish and more destructive than the other rays of firmament.

Paracelsus considered the witches to be part of such diabolical atmospheric machinations when he wrote: “Thus the work of witches is nothing more than a secretion from the hellish ghosts who are violent due to their diabolic nature and as such create thunderstorms” (Paracelsus, 1989: 138f.).

Christianity can be seen as a smear campaign against ancient nature religions and the natural interconnection between people even when those targeted by the Church are obviously not operating out of these traditions, as is the case with Paracelsus.
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With the Christians’ monotheistic claim that there is only one (masculine) God and the entire Creation in all of its manifestations emanates from him alone, not only did all worship of nature fall under suspicion, but the entire magical worldview was distrusted as well. “For know in truth that all forces of nature are small compared against the power of the devil—but even greater is the power of the good angel,” wrote Hartlieb in 1456 (1989b: 40). In different sections of his book on the forbidden arts Hartlieb encouraged his reader to recognize “how the four elements were poisoned with the cunning and deceit of the devil” (1989b: 69). Since the early Christian era the Church fathers have never tired of talking their followers out of worshipping water, cliffs, mountains, trees, plants, and animals, with the instructions that only he who created these natural phenomena deserves honor—not the creation itself. Thus Athanasius (1987: 100), who lived as a bishop in Alexandria from 295 to 373 and also endured exile in Rome numerous times, criticized the heathens:

What could you, with regard to the irrational animals, attribute to them besides stupidity and wildness? When you, as I have heard, want to ensure that you only understood this as a myth, and when you allegorically … call the air Hera, the sun Apollo, the moon Artemis, and the sea Poseidon, you nevertheless do not honor God himself, but worship the creations without regard to God, who created everything. If you have developed such ideas because the creation is beautiful, you are only allowed to go so far as wonderment, and not make the creation divine. For honor is designated for the God of creation, not the created.

These words are found in
Vita Antonii
[The Life of Anthony]
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written around 356, which is a description of the life and work of Saint Anthony, the godfather of all hermits. Athanasius held up Saint Anthony as an example the Christians were supposed to imitate. This saint, whose varied temptations by demons and sensuality were passed down in many images, will occupy us in the following section, for witches have romped around in his environment since the impressive paintings of Bosch. In
Vita Antonii
Athanasius thundered against all forms of divination, healing, and magical arts, drawing attention to the new religion: “Where the sign of the cross appears magic loses its power, and witchcraft is ineffective.” Only saints like Anthony are permitted to work such wonders, for he is humbly conscious of the almighty God.

This division of a (permissible) wondrous power in the sacred name of God and the good and the wondrous power that causes destruction and evil has been firmly anchored in the Christian mind-set over the centuries. A division such as this, and the judgment of nature as fundamentally negative while the spirit of God that stands behind it is sanctified, became the basic theme of theologians, priests, thinkers, and researchers, regardless of whether they were Catholic, Protestant, or of Enlightened mind-set.
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In the 1630s Otto Brunfels declared in his introduction to his herbal that God was his witness, that he always had the worship of almighty God in mind, and that his multifaceted work would praise the “wondrously strange little plants.”
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In front of this backdrop every attempt of a person to see her- or himself not primarily as a creation of God but as a part of nature, the influence of which can be guided in a certain direction with magical practices, seemed reprehensible. Even when the magical intention was positive the intention to reach into the divine plan was considered in and of itself a break with God. When examining written sources on the nature of witches, even the nineteenth-century dictionary entry I consulted on the subject,
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a thoughtful balancing act is in evidence.
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This has to do with an interest in magical practices on the part of scholars, preachers, and painters, many of whom were obviously fascinated by magic
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and acquired a thoroughly profound knowledge of it through the literature that had been handed down. But they used their knowledge in order to tirelessly warn others about the dangers of its practices in detailed descriptions. This can be observed, for example, with the physician Hartlieb. Although he thoroughly disseminated all of his vast knowledge about the magical practices of his time, he was still repeatedly assigned by the margrave Johann von Brandenburg to hunt out these practices among his underlings and prevent it.
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