Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (68 page)

^d
Translation by Anne Carson from
If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho
, New York: Knopf, 2002, p. 3. (Trans.)

1. The Wild Earth and Its Children

¹
The forest is full of frightening things for those who do not live in it. This has always been the case. For the central African Bantu tribe, who clear the woods in order to plant their plantain and yams, the primordial forest is a dangerous place, whereas for the Ba-Twa, a forest tribe in Africa, the forest is God itself—goodness and security. Over time the Western world has distanced itself so far from nature that here too the forest has become a frightening place—but for different reasons. Western people are scared of rabid foxes, and they are afraid to eat wild raspberries or blueberries—after all, they might be contaminated with fox tapeworm eggs. And there are ticks, which can cause Lyme disease and encephalitis if they bite you. The best solution is never to go into the forest! (Or you can do what many do when they go hiking, and march through the forest as if through enemy territory.) When considered soberly, however, the fear of the forest reveals itself to be mere hysteria. The likelihood of catching rabies or tapeworm in the woods is less than the chance of being hit by a truck. The fear of the forest is the fear of one’s own soul, of the “evil witch,” of the shadows of one’s own personality.

²
Slash-and-burn farming and agriculture are heinous acts to the hunter-gatherers. When the American authorities wanted to force the Native Americans in the Northwest to become farmers, Smohalla, the dreamer of the Nez Percé tribe, expressed his anger with the following words: “You demand that I should plow the soil? Should I take a knife and slice open my mother’s breast? When I die, then she will not let me rest in her lap. You want me to dig up the stones? Should I take the bones out from under her skin? When I die, she won’t take my body so that I can be born again! You demand that I cut the grass and make hay and sell it like the whites! But should I dare cut the hair of my mother?”

³
The Neolithic worldview, which separated the cultural landscape from the wilderness, peaked in the dualistic vision of Zoroaster. Thus a Satan (Ahriman) stands in opposition to the God of creation (Ahura Mazda). One is responsible for all that is evil (wild animals, poisons, weeds) and the other is responsible for good (domestic animals, medicine, cultivated plants). This schizophrenic vision still guides Western religion—Judaism as well as Islam and Christianity (Storl, 2002: 139).

⁴
The country people continued to gather nine types of wood for the solstice fire for a long time. They were used as incense or as a decoction to bathe in if there was a suspicion that a spell had been cast on a human or an animal. For protection against all evil the wood is collected on the early morning of Good Friday or on Midsummer Day, and the bundle is hung on the house. In France wood is still hung on the chimney; as it dries the illness caused by the spell disappears. Ultimately it became only the “witches” who gathered such wood. On the winter solstice in order to seduce a lover a witch lit the wood at midnight and threw her dress to the door of the room as she said, “Here I am, buck naked and bare. If only my love would come and throw my dress in my lap!” During the witch trials (in Mecklenburg in the sixteenth century) the witches admitted they had used nine types of wood from “oak, birch, alder, thornbush, rowan, elder, spruce, and two kinds of thorns [probably hawthorn and blackthorn]” (Bächtold-Stäubli, 1987: vol. 6, 1061).

⁵
In the Slavic lands the patron saint of mushrooms replaced the god Svantjevit. This god was worshipped as the protector of the fields, and he rides a white horse and carries a horn of plenty. From the foam of his horse’s mouth the mushrooms grow.

⁶
Yarrow is a power plant. It has also changed the destiny of my life. A friend I visited in a Camphill community (in the Swiss canton of Geneva) pointed out a roundish object hanging off the roof on the sunny southwest side of a garden shed. “I don’t know what is going on here,” he said, somewhat disturbed. “But it gives me the creeps. It’s a deer bladder filled with yarrow. It’s buried in the earth over the winter and then put into the compost. Is it sorcery or something?” As an ethnologist I naturally found this very interesting. I couldn’t stop thinking about this yarrow wrapped in a deer’s bladder. Because I assumed this could have to do with ancient magical practices that had been handed down, I took the time to conduct field research and stumbled unexpectedly upon the world of biodynamic agriculture initiated by Rudolf Steiner. It would not be exaggerating to say that yarrow, the sweet, dirty-white to pink flower of the Sunflower family with the finely feathered leaves, enjoyed the status of a quasi-sacred plant in the village community I researched. The places where yarrow grew were not permitted to be mowed, for had Steiner not said that the plant’s mere presence radiated healing energy? I discovered that the herb was placed in compost because it contained a lot of sulfur, and that yarrow preparations helped the cultivated plants to better assimilate cosmic impulses because “sulfur carried the spiritual into the physical.” And what is good for the humus and the garden plants is also good for the humans. So the tender leaves were picked in the springtime and added to salads. Yarrow tea was served with nearly every evening meal. The tea “brought the astral body into harmonious connection with the etheric one.”

⁷
The students of Rudolf Steiner still believe that alder wood is a resting place for
astralized
(sentient and invisible) beings. They consider the rhizobia, which greedily absorb the element nitrogen, to be the physical carrier of the astral body. Just as life incarnates by way of oxygen, so the soul incarnates through nitrogen.

2. The Old Woman in the Hedgerow

¹
The knowledge of the different qualities of the different species of wood is still known in a few places. The farmer-philosopher Arthur Hermes (1890–1986), who used a different kind of wood in his hearth for every day of the week, explained to me, “It is really primitive to only reduce heat to what the thermometer says! Each species of wood has its own unique qualities. Essentially, they could be classified into seven groups because trees also correspond to the seven planets. Beech burns long; fir burns hot. So when you want to cook a little soup with the warmth of Saturn, you should heat the oven with beech or fir. You get the warmth of Jupiter from the maple and also from the oak, which also contains the warmth of Mars. Ash wood radiates the sun but Mercury is also there. Cherry, poplar, and willow give off a pleasant, cooler moon warmth. Birch and linden contain a very healing Venus warmth. I am lucky to live here in the forest and can find my planets for the oven myself. The city folks can’t do that. Nevertheless, they should know that the different types of firewood are healing. Now and then they should make a fire for themselves and let the heat work on them. Many problems are healed this way—everyone has experienced how relaxing it is to gaze into a lively wood fire. If the rays are caught in a cooking pot it is even better” (Storl, 1989: 32).

²
“In May, at Whitsunday or at other times, all young boys and girls, old men and women walk in the woods, groves, hills, and mountains at night, where they spend a pleasant night of leisure. In the morning they return with birch trees and branches in order to brighten their gatherings. It is no wonder as a great lord is amongst them and rules over their pleasure and games, namely Satan, Lord of Hell. But the greatest treasure which they bring back with them is the May apple, which they carry home with them with great respect in the following manner: They have twenty or forty yoked oxen, each of which has a sweet smelling bundle of flowers tied to their horns. The oxen pull the maypole, or better said, this stinking idol which is decorated top to bottom with herbs and grasses, wrapped with ribbons and sometimes painted in different colors, home. Two to three hundred men, women, and children follow in deep respect. They set it up, ribbons and cloths flutter off the end, and they strew the ground, bound green branches around and place summer leaves and bows of leaves next to it. And then they begin to dance around it, just as the heathens did when an idol was consecrated ” (Phillip Stubbes,
Anatomie der Mißbräuche
[The Anatomy of Abuses], London, 1583).

3. The Witch As Shaman

¹
Parsley is considered an aphrodisiac and also an abortifacient. In earlier times streets of commercial love were called “parsley alleys.” The English
parsley bed
has an erotic meaning (Beuchert, 1995: 259). In the poem the phrase “red wine, white wine” plays on the taking of the girl’s virginity.

²
Acharia Rajneesh (1931–1990), the “sex guru,” referred to himself as Bhagwan the divine—
nomen es omen
. He assembled a large following among New Age believers but at the same time made many enemies with his teachings, which propagated sexuality as the royal path to enlightenment.

4. Midwives: Fertility and Birth

¹
Like Persephone, the Greek goddess of animals and death, Frau Holle lives simultaneously in the starry sky and in Earth’s interior. Our ability to reason, which we have thanks to Aristotle and Descartes, refuses to accept this idea. It collides with every rule of logic. Logic is useful for describing the laws of the physical world, but in the regions in which the visionaries work the laws of earthly logic are suspended or often transmuted. Quantum physicists move on such boundaries as well: Atoms are waves and mass; Schrödinger’s cat is dead and alive. The South African Bergdama tribe believes that the dead live in small huts in the sky and that at the same time these huts are the earth mounds in which their bones lie buried. A missionary attempted to show the savages that this was an undeniable contradiction. A gray-haired Bergdama responded, “It is only your head that separates these things. For us, each term includes each other!” (Huxley, 1974: 42). Don’t we also bring flowers to our dead at their graves while at the same time believing they are with Saint Peter in heaven?

²
In the southern countries—for example, those in the Mediterranean region—the sun is hot and penetrating. In those areas the warrior, the masculine aspect of the sun, is pronounced, while the cool, mutable moon is feminine. The Celts, the Teutons, Native North Americans, the Japanese, and many of the Siberian peoples saw the sun as the generous, warm, life-giving mother and the moon on the other side as masculine. (The grumpy man in the moon who carries dried sticks gave all of his water to the earth.)

³
Our top-heavy contemporaries—the modern intellectuals and other people who are unable to release themselves from their ego-based reason—often have difficulty conceiving children. Infertility and impotence, and an exaggerated cult of orgasm and perversion, are symptoms of the loss of the transcendent dimension of sexuality. Our sex is not ecstatic, it is not devoted to the gods, it is not in harmony with nature; it is civilized, cramped, and infertile. Sex takes place “inside the walls,” inside the mind, following the instructions from the sex manual—unlike the people who are still bound to nature, the ones beyond the hedgerow. But it is precisely there, in the wilderness beyond the hedge, where the horned god, Frau Holle, and the ancestral spirits dwell, where the reservoir of joy is found, where the source of returning life lies.

⁴
While in the embryonic state the human soul can very easily leave its body, which is in the process of its development; it is ecstatic in the truest sense of the word (
ec
and
static
mean “out of oneself”). The shamans also find themselves in ecstasy when they are traveling. The ethnopsychologist Gerhard Heller pointed out that in shamans there is a certain degree of regression to prebirth abilities when they are in a trance.

5. The Mother of Death

¹
Shiva, who dances in the fire with his trident, or fork, and his retinue of demons, was the model for the Zoroastrian concept of the devil. The image of Shiva, more than the pictures of horned gods like Pan and Cernunnos, ultimately determined the picture of the devil created by the Pharisees, Christians, and Muslims (Storl, 1989).

²
The pitri are guests of King Soma on the moon. Soma, surrounded by a radiant milk-white aura, is the ruler of all liquids and juices. In the Vedas he is honored as nourisher and guardian of the world, for he moistens the earth with rain, lets the rivers swell, and flows through and enlivens the bodies of the animals and plants with juice. “Penetrating the earth I retain the creations through my power; by becoming a moon full of juice, I feed the plants” (
Bhagavad-Gita,
XV: 13). Soma is also the Lord of the Brahmans, who are allowed to press the sacred soma plant and bring out the intoxicating liquid of the gods as libation. Soma allows the reincorporating souls to stream down to the earth in the water of rainstorms. There they are soaked up by the plants. Inside humans the nutritional plants transform themselves into life energy in semen and sexual secretions. In this manner the souls are able to attain a new body on the Earth.

6. Witchcraft Medicine: The Legacy of Hecate

¹
“In the myths and poetry of the Greeks we learn about the great witches such as Circe and Medea. But perhaps they were not originally witches, and were instead goddesses, or even priestesses of gods of a religion that fell a long time ago. Their knowledge of herbs, roots, and mushrooms represented ancient, secretly protected experience and bestowed them with their particular power. In their own culture they were priestesses—the subsequent generations made them into dangerous witches” (Luck, 1990: 46).