Read Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants Online
Authors: Claudia Müller-Ebeling,Christian Rätsch,Ph.D. Wolf-Dieter Storl
Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (52 page)
A mirror image of this example graced the title page of the edition of 1679. It depicts the same processes at all stages; however, all female participation has been removed. There is no herbalist, no pharmacist assistant, no female attendant at the sickbed. Only one background figure is female, and she seems to be more for decorative purposes: She carries a kind of fruit basket on her head and moves from the group of scholars in the direction of the garden.
Such a transforming of the women into men was also noticed by Gerlinde Volland in her study of mandrake depictions in two herbals from the sixteenth century. One is clearly based on the other in composition. In the illustration below from the German edition of the
Gart der Gesuntheit
[Garden of Health], which appeared in Antwerp in 1533 and 1547, one sees a woman gathering plants, including a male and female mandrake in anthropomorphic forms, in an unfenced garden. In a subservient posture she carries the plants in her apron to a male scholar. Volland questions, with justification in my opinion, the younger date of the woodcut at right from the London
Grete Herball
(1526), which is much more simplified in its composition. The awkward style of the picture and the reduction of the compositional details, as well as the fact that a man in the dress of a scholar is in a strange subservient posture and is depicted as the plant gatherer, seems to me to be a later, simplified replica of the more complex example.
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In the
Garden of Health
are found medicinal plants such as these two anthropomorphic mandrakes. The woman gathers herbs in her apron as a scholar gives her advice. (
Gart der Gesuntheit
, Antwerp, 1533 and 1547.)
With the help of burning incense, the Germanic seeress, an
alruna,
prophesies for Arimin the outcome of the decisive battle with Germanicus. (Steel-plate engraving from a drawing by F. Leeke, end of the 19th century.)
If folk medicine was based on magical practices that had a strong divinatory component and the magic was in the service of explaining the past and predicting coming events—connecting one’s physical state with one’s sins (or atonement for one’s sins) and foretelling wellness or death—then it is proper that such medicinal plants, which not only acted on the body but were also related to the spirit and the soul of humans (thus they were psychoactive), also held lofty status in the minds of the people who utilized folk medicine. The strength of the connection between women healers and the medicinal plants that act upon the spirit is demonstrated by the name the healing women were called by. The narcotic and consciousness-altering magical root of the mandrake, the plant that creates hallucinatory access to the secrets of the universe, was etymologically associated with the witch as a kind of godparent.
Alruna
was the name the northern European people gave to their seeress, who had vision into the hidden realms. The German word for mandrake,
Alraune,
contains the word
rune,
the German system of writing based on beech staves that the father god Odin discovered in a prophetic way when he hung from a beech tree in order to gain knowledge of cosmic connections. This mythical process can still be seen in the German word for the letter
Buchstabe
(beech stave) The verb
raunen
(to whisper) contains this unconscious access to the inner connection of the universe as well.
The Demonization of Medicinal and Poisonous Plants
As much as the medicinal plants were honored by the people who used them, so were they demonized by the Church; in fact, the demonization of certain natural medicines can still be observed today. Of course the psychoactive substances are demonized above all others, but with these plants—as Paracelsus already knew—the dosage determines whether a plant has medicinal or poisonous effects. For example, consider
Echinacea purpurea
(L.) Moench (syn.
Rudbeckia purpurea
L.), the immune-enhancing root of the purple coneflower, for which the pharmaceutical industry has the North American Indians, who have always made use of its preventive activity, to thank. On May 24, 1996, the headline of the
Hamburger Abendblatt
read, “Fatal Shock: Experts Warn About the Use of Echinacea Products.” That the plant can bring on shortness of breath and edema was determined from the results of repeated injections of the concentrated plant, which had been administered to people who were allergic to plants in the Sunflower family. For this reason the media used dramatic words to warn against taking ordinary preparations of the entire plant, including its common forms of capsules, tablets, tea, and tinctures. But the reality is that echinacea was only available to the consumer in oral preparations or as a salve for external use, and the fact that only doctors were allowed to administer injections from ampules was not relevant to the eager journalist.
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When dealing with nature and natural medicine the following formula still holds true: Shake out every last shred of danger while seeking a sensational story, never pause to ask what these dangerous stories might mean, do away with any sense of reason, never incorporate knowledge that might present the danger in a relative context but immediately offer information on the right way to deal with the danger.
Medicinal Plants of the Witches
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MANDRAKE AS MEDICINE
Tacitus, the Roman historian from pre-Christian times, handed down the word
Alruna
for a Germanic seeress. In the sixteenth century the term
Alraundelberin
was used for a wise woman as well as a witch.
During antiquity the root of the mandrake (
Mandragora
spp.) was used as an anesthetic, antiseptic, tonic, and narcotic. Mandrake wine was also administered in the Middle Ages and the early modern era to treat insomnia. However, such a medication could prove to be the undoing of the person who administered it. For instance, case files from Basel dating as early as 1407 report that in this Swiss city in the Oberrhein a woman who had used mandrake root was prosecuted. In 1416 a “pharmacy wife” who had administered mandrake root powder was exiled from the same city.
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In his 1578 edition of the
Kreüterbuch
, the Frankfurt physician Lonicerus (1528–1586) based his entry on mandrake on traditional knowledge of its use, especially when he emphasized the sedative and numbing activity of the rind of the mandrake root when used externally and internally. In women’s medicine the plant was used to expel a stillborn baby.
An old witch sells society ladies a mandrake manikin. (
Alraun,
painting by Otto Boyer, title illustration for the magazine
Daheim,
year 63, n. 20, 12/2/1927.)
HENBANE AS MEDICINE
The plant called
Hyoscyamus
that was used in witches’ salves grows from the Mediterranean to Asia Minor. In antiquity it was used as an ingredient in incenses prepared for divination and medicinally as a narcotic. Henbane seeds were also burned in the bathhouses during the Middle Ages, which led to increasingly vigorous opposition by the Church against the sensuous excessiveness between the two sexes, who visited these places of pleasure together. Lonicerus added to the “energy and effects” of “Bilsamkraut” (henbane) that it had damaging, poisonous qualities and made one crazy and sleepy. The seeds also work against pain in the eyes, ears, teeth, and joints—activity that has to do with the sedative, or somniferous and quieting, characteristics. In addition, when the crushed seeds of henbane are mixed with wine and made into a compress, the herb soothes chest pain.
In a German farmhouse a healer falls into a trance in order to find the origins for the toothache of the patient in the right foreground. (Detail of a steel-plate engraving, c. 1870.)
THISTLES AS MEDICINE
The habitat of the prickly thistle (
Carduus
spp.; see illustration on page 154) symbolically corresponds to the realm of the witch, who usually lived on the edge of the village near the uncultivated wilderness. Lonicerus included various species of thistles, which as a rule are of medicinal value only in the post-bloom stage. In women’s medicine the dried herbage of the teasel (
Dipsacus silvestris
L., syn.
Dipsacus fullonum
L.p.p.) helps prevent discharge and heavy menstruation. Since the
Materia medica
of Dioscorides (around 20 C.E.), teasel crops up in similar manuscripts as a remedy for eye complaints, dyspepsia, and muscle tension, and for stimulating the milk flow in pregnant women. In folk medicine a decoction of thistle was used for worms, melancholy, and “inner pricking,” as is indicated by the doctrine of signatures.
TOAD HERBS
According to medieval understanding the
Krott
(toad) or the
Krottenalp
(toad elf) was responsible when a woman miscarried. The toad became the symbol of a sick womb. In order to heal such a problem or to protect themselves from miscarriages women either left pictures of toads as offerings in church or gathered the so-called toad herbs. Included in these are dandelion (
Taraxacum officinale
Web., syn.
Leontodon taraxacum
L.), also called toad bush; chamomile (
Chamomilla recutita
[L.] Rausch, syn.
Matricaria chamomilla
L.); and navel herb (
Umbilicuss
pp.).
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NETTLES AS MEDICINE
In antiquity stinging nettle, which was widely distributed, was used as a drastic aphrodisiac. A common name in German for
Urtica dioica
L. is
Teufelskraut
(devil’s herb; see appendix). Nettles appear in the witch trials as one of the final painful martyr materials, for the witches were dressed in nettle shirts when they were led to the funeral pyre. This also signified that they were in league with the devil. In 1578 Lonicerus included a mixture of ground nettle seeds and honey wine as a cough remedy. Of the numerous therapeutic uses of the nettle species named in that text, only a few are mentioned here. When externally applied, nettle seeds encourage the healing of wounds. Ground nettle leaves laid on the stomach are said to have soothing effects on the womb and to hasten birth. Nettle roots soaked in wine are said to dispel lumbar stones, while the seeds are more effective for bladder stones.
MONKSHOOD (
Aconitum napellus
L.) AS MEDICINE
The witches inherited the sacred plant of Hecate, which was (and is) feared for its poison. The wildflower with the blue blossoms that look like hoods appears as an ingredient in witches’ salves. Lonicerus wrote that monkshood is a “destructive poison and deadly herb” that stimulates vomiting when used externally, and the root of the plant helps against poisoning, is expectorant, and kills worms. The Frankfurt doctor refrained from suggesting any further medicinal use.