Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (12 page)

But then in the late Middle Ages, as the plague grew worse and worse, as increased feudal oppression stirred a general anxiety about life, and as fanatical Cathari accused the Church of spiritual laxness, the state of the culture changed again. From then on superstition was a sin against God, as defined by the Church scholar Thomas Aquinas. Eager academics began the work of constructing a demonology in which the devil took on terrifying proportions as the mighty Lord of Darkness and a dangerous opponent to God. No longer was he “Hans-jump-in-the-fields” who sometimes appeared in the midday hour when people were resting from the heavy field work, nor was he the poor devil who had to haul stones to build a church or a bridge in order to be repaid for his service by being pelted with stones. No longer was he the wild hunter, the Green Man who made gold from lead, the black stranger who turned the heads of the young women but who could be chased off with spicy herbs. No, from this point on he was the very embodiment of evil itself.

In the minds of the clerics, a satanic oppositional church developed that forbade everything that was right and good. Midwives, herbalists, and superstitious farm wives eventually fell under suspicion of being servants in this temple of Satan. But only from about 1480 on were witches identified as negative by the laws of Church and state.

The Wrath of Venus

With the discovery of the New World (1492), the Christian worldview based on the Bible began to falter. Many problems arose for which the “word of God” had no answer: Was the earth round after all? Who were the Indians? The question of whether or not the native inhabitants even had human souls was only first given an affirmative answer in 1512. Surely they were not ancestors of Noah, whose three sons—Japheth, Shem, and Ham—were considered to be the primordial fathers of the Europeans, Asians, and Africans. Were these native people—as certain classical scholars dared to suggest—survivors of the drowned island of Atlantis, whom Plato had spoken about in his works
Timaeus
and
Critias
? Were they antipodes who, like flies on the ceiling, crawled on the underside of the earth’s disk with their heads down? Were they the pre-Adamites, creations of a previous God, as Paracelsus conjectured? Were they the ancestors of the lost tribes of Israel?

But it was not only epistemological devils that eroded the foundations of Christian self-understanding. One year after the return of Columbus, a new plague broke out among the mercenary troops of the French king and spread rapidly throughout the entire Old World. It was called the “French disease”
(Morbus gallicus),
or “syphilis,” after the frivolous shepherd Syphilos, who brought shame to the temple of the sun and was punished for it by Apollo with a festering pestilence. Rubbing the sick person with vinegar liniments containing angelica, rosemary, and other herbs or essential oils and using elaborate fumigations with expensive resins—methods that had been helpful with the first plague—proved ineffective. Neither mastic gum nor goose fat, honey, mallow roots, or other softening and cooling herbs could prevent the wet, noxious-smelling pustules, the infections of the mucous membranes in the throat, gums, and nose, the perpetual runny nose, and the proliferating figlike growths on the intimate parts. Nor were the “Mars plants,” such as narcissus root and nettles, able to stop the “wrath of Venus.” No herb seemed suited for this disease! And the patron saint of syphilis sufferers, Saint Fiacrus (otherwise known as the patron saint of hemorrhoids), offered by the Church really wasn’t able to do anything either.

The guaiacum resin imported from America, in which so much hope had been placed, as well as sarsaparilla, sassafras, and other plants with which the Indians had successfully treated syphilis, proved useless in Europe. They were useless mainly because the European doctors ignored the cultural and ritual contexts in which the successful cure took place in the New World, including strict fasting, sweat lodges, total abstinence, and chastity. This was all too elaborate, too heathen. It is now known that the phenol derivative guajacol found in the resin, when combined with the daily sweat lodges (wherein the body reached a temperature of at least 42˚C), thoroughly kills the syphilis spirochetes in the organism (Griggs, 1982: 40).

Many levels of society were infected, but the disease mostly affected the ruling classes. It affected Church leaders as well as monarchs: Pope Julius II, whose feet had been eaten away by the disease, could no longer allow anyone to kiss his feet. Despite his having six wives, all of the British king Henry VIII’s children were either born dead or proved inviable—they had already been infected in the womb. The king believed that his wives were to blame, and so that he could legally divorce them he joined the Reformation and declared himself head of the British Church. Ivan the Terrible terrorized his people in Moscow, murdering his own son and wife after syphilis had infected his brain.

The only treatment that seemed to help was the highly poisonous quicksilver (mercury) salve borrowed from the Arabian alchemists. For the pain there was the opium preparation laudanum. The medicinally induced quicksilver poisoning left the patients sweating, shaking, and foaming at the mouth; they got diarrhea, became apathetic, and lost their appetite. Sores appeared on their teeth and gums, their skin turned yellow because of liver damage, their hair and teeth fell out, their kidneys became inflamed, and they suffered serious disturbances of the intestinal tract. But because this “quacksilver” alleviated the symptoms of syphilis a little, it was considered successful and was prescribed—the “miracle drug” of the times—for practically all other diseases, from asthma to colds. The result was an iatrogenic catastrophe: Modern chemical medicine was born! “Heroic medicines”—heavy metals, mineral poisons (antimony, vitriol, and so forth), and strong purgatives for the intestines, which had been destroyed by therapy—were considered advanced. The herbalists and their wisdom were no longer needed!

The horror this plague ushered in ran deep. The malicious disease, which was passed through sexual intercourse, sowed mistrust between the sexes. Brief sexual contact, no matter how tempting, could bring pain and death
.
The Puritans had a new impetus, and they preached against unchastity and impure sexual relations. The culture of the bathhouses, with their sensuous, carefree interaction between the sexes, succumbed. The joyous May and midsummer festivals, with their dancing and trees of love, found themselves in dangerously close proximity to the witches’ sabbat. Typical of this new attitude was the writing of the Puritan Phillip Stubbes, who called the maypole a “stinking idol” and identified the Lord of the May Festival and Dance as Satan, Lord of Hell. He also warned that “of the maidens who go into the forest on May night, barely a third returns immaculate.”
²

Indeed, nature was no longer understood to be the Bride of God, as “the realm of earth in which God sowed the sacred grain” (according to Hildegard of Bingen). No longer was it the good wise soul of the world, full of the signs and wonders of God, but it was instead a dangerous witch that had to be brought under control. It is symbolic that the worst phase of the syphilis epidemic—between 1550 and 1650—was crowned by the Inquisition, and that during this time the fundamental principles of modern experimental science, whose goal is to control nature, were formulated. The dialogue with the souls of the world, the conversation with the plants and animals that had been sustained since the Stone Age and had still been cared for within the frame of the traditional Christianity, came to a standstill. Over many centuries celibate, misogynistic priests led a campaign of destruction against the carriers of the ancient tradition of shamanic culture in the form of the Inquisition. And this happened not only in Europe but also with the same brutality against the idol and devil worshippers in the New World and other colonies.

We all know the gruesome stories about “witches” that were spread by men of the Church—for example, how they caused harvests to go bad and brought about pestilence, how they slaughtered babies so they could use the fat for their witches’ salve, how they made a pact with the devil by letting a drop of their blood fall into the fire in which bones burned, how they fornicated with the adversary, kissing his stinking rear end. Yes, the ruling power, the Inquisition, had to make a powerful intervention, for Satan, he who severely threatened the divine order of things, was at work. The “henchmen of evil”—usually poor farmers, herbalists, and midwives—averred their innocence, but under torture they confessed almost every time. And if they did not confess, then that was double the proof of witchcraft, for what mortal could have withstood the torture without the help of the devil’s power?

The New Science

While the Inquisition murdered the carriers of an intuitive and visionary understanding of nature, academics fiddled around with new methods of obtaining knowledge and power over nature. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), who functioned as state attorney under King James I during the witch trials, was considered one of the fathers of experimental natural science. In his writings nature appears as a revolting witch who had to be “stretched on the torture rack in order to squeeze her secrets out of her” (Merchant, 1987: 177). Man, he wrote, should exploit her with the help of mechanical manipulation and make her into a slave for the “good of humanity.”

For René Descartes (1596–1650), who was also a priest, nature was only a machine without consciousness, without feelings. Plants and animals were mechanical objects that could be mathematically (quantitatively) described and manipulated like all mechanisms. Finally, with Newton (1642–1727) the planets themselves were no longer gods but lifeless satellites in an empty space. An approachable nature, full of elemental spirits, fairies, elves, and deities, ceased to exist; these were foolish superstitions. Today if these subjective delusions present themselves, we have, in our humanitarian age, psychiatric remedies that are paid for by medical insurance.

The preachers of the Christian faith took the first step toward the demythologizing of nature, in which the old gods were banned and degraded (Storl, 1997a: 121). Natural science, which was formulated in the wake of the torture of the witches, removed the soul from nature entirely. This reductionist science also left behind a dead landscape of the soul, for when nature has been desacralized and emptied the pictures, scents, and colors of the soul are taken as well. It too becomes empty, alienating, joyless—a “wasteland,” as the poet T. S. Eliot called it.

Thus the hedgerow, in which the witch once sat and talked to the animals, plants, and spirits, turned—as noted by Hans Peter Duerr in his important book
Dreamtime
—into an impenetrable wall. The forest was already a frightening place for the Church scholar Augustine. It was profane, a
sylvus daemonicum
full of unclean demons. The heavenly city of Jerusalem—a citadel surrounded by reinforced walls, protected from the devil and his fallen angels, where the only “true” God ruled—was offered as an alternative for those seeking redemption. This citadel god increasingly revealed himself as the personification of the human ego. And this ego always felt threatened by the “devil,” by the irrational, the uncontrollable, by the immeasurable magical fullness and the indescribable magic of being. The Inquisition found an effective weapon in the ego’s fear, or
Angst
(from the Old High German
angust
, meaning “narrow, clamped”), of dissolving into the transcendental being. The people most affected by the Inquisition were the simple nature-bound people. Ultimately the windows of this prison were barred shut with grates made of Cartesian coordinates and walled over with abstract theories during the rational Age of Enlightenment.