Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (2 page)

”When the strong commit violence against the weak, it means that the strong are opposing nature. That which places itself contrary to nature will very soon come to an end.”

—L
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But the following must also be acknowledged: Evil witches do indeed exist! Asocial magicians, malicious sorceresses driven by resentment and greed, and those who use their knowledge of the occult in order to bring harm to others can be found throughout the world, from South America to East Asia, from Africa to the South Pacific. Their abilities are feared mainly in unstable societies where poverty, violence, and oppression reign. A central concern in African medicine is determining who the destructive magician is and rendering him harmless. Ethnologists have collected from exotic lands many examples of witchcraft and murder by voodoo (Lessa and Vogt, 1965: 298).

These phenomena also exist in the Western world. During the mid-1970s hippies, alternative communards, illegal immigrants, dropouts, and legions of Southern Californians fleeing violence and environmental catastrophes (such as pollution and smog) streamed north into the still-pristine forests of Oregon. The resulting unstable social climate became a breeding ground for sorcery and unhealthy occultism. I lived in Oregon at the time, and during those years bizarre occurrences were seen frequently. Again and again farmers found their horses and cows dead in the pasture, their genitals or udders cut off. Not far from my house a hitchhiker was arrested, and his pockets were found to be filled with severed human ears. One day the gas station where I usually filled my car was not in service because a biker had killed the owner and then sucked blood out of her jugular vein before driving off. The talk was of witchcraft and Satanism.

This sort of pathological behavior has nothing to do with the witchcraft medicine that we are talking about here! Nor does witchcraft medicine have anything to do with the kind of rabid, man-hating feminism that experienced a peculiar flowering during this period in Oregon. The archaic medicine we are speaking about is a holistic one, embracing both the masculine and the feminine, the sun and the moon.

The malicious witch of fairy tales, like the one in the story of Hansel and Gretel, eats small children. However, this figure is never representative of a living person; instead it represents a negative spiritual archetype that impedes the maturation of the individual soul. This witch symbolizes the fear of the light of truth. She lives in the darkness, unripened by the light. Because she is separated from the whole of herself, she is unable to shine; therefore she is, necessarily, ugly. Like the old winter witch made of straw that country people burn in the springtime so that the beautiful goddess of summer can make her entrance, the negative spiritual witch must also go through the purifying, transforming spiritual fire. Only then can the king’s daughter (Anima) and the king’s son (Animus) celebrate their marriage. Their wedding symbolizes the discovery of the self, the process of healing and becoming whole.

The Christian inquisitors were obsessed with the archetype of the ugly, life-hating witch. They projected their own spiritual disease, their own obsessions, onto innocent women, often poor or elderly, whom they tortured and burned at the stake. What was originally intended as an internal process of becoming whole was turned into an external practice of black magic.

In order to understand the nature of witchcraft medicine, we must look deeply into the well of remembrance. The roots of witchcraft medicine lie in our Stone Age ancestors’ experience of nature. We shall now dig into this soil.

After the glaciers receded, the Ice Age tundra where great herds of buffalo, reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, and mammoths had grazed was gradually sown with the seeds of trees. Many of the herds died out; some migrated to Siberia. The last of the nomadic hunters of large animals followed them. It was, in Eurasia, the end of the Paleolithic period.

The forest drew under its spell the small hunting tribes that remained behind. They hunted the shy wild animals that hid in small herds deep in the forest—deer, stags, and wild boars—and the somber lone wanderers, such as the bear, the badger, and the moose in the bogs. To hunt like this was laborious; it took more time than it had before and bagged less. In equal proportions to the rate at which the hunting bounty diminished, plant-gathering increased in value. Within the natural division of work of the primitive people, collecting roots, fruit, bark, and birds’ eggs fell mostly to the female gender; thus the work of women gained in importance. While the meat was distributed among the community according to strict regulations, the women gathered the daily plant rations for their families. It is still like this today among hunter-gatherers: The men work at politics, securing friendships and nurturing alliances for when the time comes for the meat to be divided; the women tend to the daily aspects of survival.

The tribes would settle for a while in places where gathering was feasible. Harbors were prized as camps, for there one could find the starchy tonic roots of the cattail, the marsh woundwort, the club rush, the arrowhead, or the water chestnut. One could also use the duckweed
(Lemna)
for soup or eat the juicy shoots of the reed, and the nutritious seeds of the winnowed or flooded sweet grass
(Glyceria)
were greatly valued. In addition, harbors provided various crustaceans, mollusks, and small amphibians.

Besides making arrows for hunting birds and small animals, constructing fish traps, knotting nets, and making harpoons and hooks, the men probably spent the rest of their time—similar to the hunter-gatherers of today—loafing about and communicating with the many spirits that animated the forest, the cliffs, and the water. This era is known as the Mesolithic period.

The Mesolithic people moved with the seasons in broad circles to different hunting-and-gathering regions. They always returned to the same camps. Many of their favorite plants grew there. Spilled seeds and the disposed rinds of tubers found a suitable environment when the competitive vegetation was trampled down and the ground was fertilized with ashes, excrement, urine, and trash. The step to domestication was, therefore, but a small one. During this period some hunters in the Near East intentionally began to turn the soil, make small mounds, and sow grass seeds they had gathered previously. Young animals were tethered or fenced in, and eventually tamed. In this way the hunter-gatherer groups became settled. They built themselves permanent houses with stalls for the captured animals.

Hunter-gatherers have few possessions, and most of these are incorporeal: They are visions, fairy tales, songs, magical incantations, and medicinal knowledge. These people live from hand to mouth, in the here and now. Who wants always to be lugging heavy burdens around with them? But for sedentary tribes it makes good sense to have large jugs and containers made of clay. Grains and other food can be stored in them, and beer can be brewed. In ancient times beer—made with consciousness-expanding herbs—was a sacred drink with which the forces of the fate, the sun, the earth, and the vegetation gods were celebrated (Rätsch, 1996: 50). This cultural transformation in which the first permanent settlements developed is called the Neolithic revolution by primeval historians.

Neolithic village settlements spread out from Asia Minor and up the Danube River and its tributaries. Toward the end of the fifth century the pioneers, people of what is known as the Linear Pottery culture, settled the river valleys of central Europe. There they farmed wheat and barley, fava beans, and flax, and for their matrilineal families they built square communal houses twenty to thirty meters long in the middle of areas that had been burned. After a decade or two, when the soil had been depleted of nutrients and the fields and meadows had lost their fertility, the first farmers moved on. Once again they cleared the next piece of the immense primordial forest, logged the huge trees using fire and hewn-stone axes, seeded the disturbed land, and provided the cattle, goats, and sheep with a new grazing area.

The Neolithic settlements were tiny islands in a sea of green leaves. Still, several thousand years later, in the early Middle Ages, the tree cover was so thick that a squirrel could have leaped from tree to tree from Denmark to southern Spain without ever touching the ground.

On the edges of the cultural islands, on the transitional ground between agricultural fields and the primordial forest, an edge-biotope developed. Thorny undergrowth such as blackberry, wild rose, sloe, gooseberry, hawthorn, buckthorn, barberry, and sea buckthorn and fast-growing hedgerow trees like rowan, black alder, hazel, and elder found a suitable ecological environment there. This natural hedge acquired a practical purpose for the Neolithic farmers: It was an effective fence for the scattered grazing animals. The more the ruminants chewed on the growth, the thicker the thorn barrier became, until a natural hedgerow was created. Posts, stakes, and rods could also be cut from the hedge, as could laths for the walls (which were then daubed with clay) and materials for basket weaving. Nutritious birds’ eggs, juicy berries, and tasty nuts could be found in the hedgerow. The most potent medicinal herbs also grew in this edge-biotope.

But above all, the thick thorny hedge offered protection. It prevented the wolves and bears from penetrating, as well as the voracious deer, which had a keen eye for the emerging agricultural crops. The hedge probably also discouraged the “wild people”—the last of the fur-wearing hunter-gatherers who still roamed the forest and who were thought to steal children—from entering. (In the Middle Ages such “wild folk” were hunted and executed by the knights.)

Today the thorny shrubs, especially the hawthorn and the wild rose, symbolize protected, undisturbed sleep. Fairy tales speak of a thorny hedge of roses, and many farmers still place a rose gall (the round, mosslike growth on the stems of wild roses that is caused by the sting of the rose gall wasp, also called a rose apple or sleep rose) under the crib of newborns so that they will sleep quietly and deeply.