Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants (9 page)

The alder (
Alnuss
pp.) is called
ellerkonge
(elf king) in Danish. The
Edda
relates that the first woman came from alder. Medieval dowsers used crosses of alder wood, which is allegedly drawn to water. According to Goethe the ghostly Erl King lives in the branches. In the folk medicine of lower Austria the inner bark of alder is cooked in wine and drunk as a remedy against magic potions. (Woodcut from Hieronymus Bock,
Kreütterbuch,
1577.)

Alder (
Alnuss
pp.)

The alder—also called black alder, red alder, owler,
Eller,
or
Else
—is well suited to the ecosystem of the meadows, marshes, and streambeds. Because, like members of the Pea family, it builds nitrogen-collecting knots at its roots, it helps feed the nutrition-poor soil of the moors. The seeds from the woody “cones” are outfitted with air cushions, and float in the water until they find a suitable place to germinate.

Wetlands where the alders grow are called “alder fences.” They have always been considered eerie, inhospitable places. Many a careless wanderer has been lured to his death by the ghostly will-o’-the-wisp in such places. Amphibians, otters, and saprophytes make their mischief there. The souls of suicide victims and drowned or unbaptized children float around as wafts of mist, and malicious elves dance in the moonlight. It is no wonder that an old saying postulates, “Red hair and alder don’t grow on good soil.”

These dark deciduous trees are just as strange as the places in which they grow. The pale wood turns red when it is struck. This red coloring—recognized today as the effects of the nitrogen—was once considered a sign that a sentient being lived inside the tree.
⁷

The hawthorn (
Crataegus monogyna
Jacq.) is an ancient Germanic fence or hedgerow plant. Hawthorn is a versatile and cherished heart medicine. Even with long-term use no side effects have been observed. (Woodcut from Hieronymus Bock,
Kreütterbuch,
1577.)

But what sort of sentient being lived inside the alder? The perceptive peoples of the olden days believed it was an elf, the elf queen, or the daughter of the elf king who lived there. It is she who bleeds and mourns when a human strikes the trunk with an ax. In the alder fence near Tegernfeld sometimes she can still be seen combing her hair by moonlight and rubbing honey, which she scrapes from the leaves, into her locks.

A Danish folktale sees her as the daughter of the elf king. Lord Olaf rides through the green land to invite guests to his upcoming wedding. He sees elves dancing in the moors. The elf king’s daughter stretches out her hand and invites him to join in:

Come Lord Olaf, dance a step with me,

Two golden spores I shall give to thee;

A shirt of silk, so white and fine,

My mother bleached it in the moonshine.

He refuses, saying, “I am not allowed to dance; I do not want to dance. Tomorrow is my wedding day.” Three times she asks him, promising him another pile of gold. When he nevertheless continues to refuse her, the daughter says,

And if Lord Olaf shan’t dance with me,

Scourge and disease for him shall be!

She hits him in the heart;

Oh, woe is me, full of fear and pain!

Then she lifts the pale lord onto his horse.

Ride and greet your little bride!

The groom barely makes it home. His mother is startled, and he responds to her query of what happened as he falls to the ground, dead: “Oh, mother, oh, mother, I was in the realm of the elf king, that is why I am so pale and weak.”

The knight Wolfdietrich had a different experience. The elf lady, the
rauhe Ilse
(wild or rough Ilse), desired to love him. She stood before him, wild, unkempt, and covered in moss. He avoided her, and she turned him into an animal. On the next day she asked him again, but he still refused. Then she placed a sleeping spell on him and cut off two locks of his hair and two fingernails. For half a year he had to roam through the forest and feed himself with herbs and roots like a wild animal. When she appeared a third time he took the wild woman in his arms and made love to her. Afterward she transported him to a magical land where she was the queen. She bathed in a fountain of youth and appeared in front of him as Siegeminne, the most beautiful woman in the world.

Behind the figures of rauhe Ilse and the elf king’s daughter hides the archaic Goddess. It is the same Great Goddess who, in her radiant youth, revealed herself in the bright birch and in the flowering hawthorn as the bride of the sun god. In the alder she is the goddess of death. Alder fences and moors have been considered places of the dead since Neolithic times. Folklorists have suggested that the ancient Germanic term for alder,
aluza
(Indo-European
alisa
), had something to do with a sacrificial cult. At the base of an alder a young man was chosen and sent to the Goddess as a bridegroom. According to Robert Graves, Alys was the name of the goddess of the burial island, similar to the Alycamps island in the Rhône River. The priestesses either buried the sacrificed on river islands such as these, which were covered in alder, or sank them in bogs. It is possible that the Elysian fields, the “islands of souls” of antiquity, were originally islands in similar rivers.

The story of the daughter of Helios, as told by Virgil in the
Aeneid,
also belongs in this context. The girl dared her brother Phaeton to hitch the sun chariot without the permission of her father, the sun god. Because Phaeton was not strong enough to control the horses, he scorched the earth and caused the world to catch fire. Zeus was furious and killed him with a bolt of lightning. When the sister mourned his death on the banks of the Po River in Italy, her tears became alder trees.

The Celtic people who invaded matriarchal, megalithic Europe identified the alder spirit not with the goddess of death but with Bran. In the Welsh “Battle of the Trees”
(Cad Goddeu)
it says:

The long staffs of alder on your shield,

Bran you are called, after the shimmering branches …

The long branch of alder in your hand,

Bran you are, after the branch which you carry.

Bran is a god of the dead, a god of the underworld. Carrion-eating ravens are his birds. The West, where the sun-hero sinks, bloodred, into his underworldly domain where the island of the souls lies, is under his rule. Bran is the god with the cauldron who brings the dead back to life, the one who transforms the past into the future. A dead person who is thrown into the cauldron in the evening will be alive again on the next day—returning as a “person from beyond.”

Oracle flutes were cut from the bones of the sacrificed victims and from alder wood (Ranke-Graves, 1985: 125). Shamans were also cooked in Bran’s cauldron and then put back together again. Thus, even though they still lived in the here and now, they were already from beyond, and like the bone and alder flutes they became an oracle giver from the dimension beyond. The cult of Bran was melded with the cult of Teutates, who also drowned humans in his cauldron in alder groves. Much later, during the Christian Middle Ages, the god was transformed into the Fisher King, the guardian of the Holy Grail who meditates on the depths of the waters.

Bran’s cauldron was, above all, an attribute of the Great Goddess of Paleolithic times. It was her womb, her vagina, that bore all life-forms and then took them back again. The chosen, the shamans and the warriors, were chopped up and cooked in her cauldron. She then put the bones back together and vivified them. This cauldron is a fountain of youth. The moors and the alder breaks in which life disintegrates and rejuvenates itself are also cauldrons of the Goddess. Bran and Teutates have not suppressed the Goddess; they are only her stand-ins, her sacrificial priests, the guardians of her womb.

This background clarifies certain customs and superstitions. We can now better understand why the Irish regard cutting down an alder a heinous act, and why the alder symbolizes departure and renunciation as well as rejuvenation. When vacating a house the Germanic people broke four alder branches and threw them in different directions. In the Middle Ages the breaking of a piece of alder wood over one’s head in court symbolized the complete severing of social relations with one’s family.

Throughout western Europe alder branches were placed on the doorsteps of unpopular girls whom people avoided. And in Mecklenburg it was said of the dead,
Hei is bie’n leiwen Gott, in’t Ellenbrauk
(“He is with his beloved God in the alder break”).

As a sacred and sacrificial tree that combines the element of fire (the red color) and water, the alder has not fallen into complete obscurity. Pious mothers see the red wood as an indication that this was the tree that the Savior bled on for our sins. In contrast, farmers believe that the wood turns red when peeled because the devil beat his grandmother with an alder branch until she bled.

In the wake of the Christian conversion of the European peoples, the image of the great alder goddess was distorted into that of a mean witch and the tree itself became a witches’ tree. In Thuringia the alder was called Walper tree (Walpurgis tree) because the witches ate the buds during their flight and used its branches to influence the weather. The people of the Allgäu region believed storms occurred when red-haired witches shook the alder bushes. But this superstition is a displaced memory of the abilities of the woman who found rebirth in the cauldron of the Goddess: Like all shamans, she had the power to influence the weather.

A fairy tale from southern Tirol also contains a similar primordial memory. Deep in the forest a boy accidentally came across a witches’ gathering. He hid behind a bush and watched as the witches chopped up an elder companion and cooked her in a cauldron until the flesh fell from her bones. When they tried to put the bones together again they realized a rib was missing. Because they could not find the rib they replaced it with an alder branch and they brought the witch back to life again as a young and beautiful woman. But she warned her sisters that she would have to die if anyone accused her of being an alder-wood witch. The next day the boy met the witch by chance on the path. She tried to bewitch him and made seductive eyes at him. But he recognized her and called her an alder-wood witch. At that she fell dead on the ground.

Folk medicine has found little use for the alder, probably because of its reputation as a witches’ tree. The Welsh physicians of Myddfai, heirs of the druids, prescribed an infusion of the leaves for dropsy and as a footbath for cold tired feet. To Saint Hildegard the tree was the symbol of uselessness. Nevertheless it was used to protect against witchcraft—
similia similibus curantur
(“like cures like”). The crushed leaves were strewn to protect against fleas, bugs, mice, and other bewitched or “alderlike” animals. The branches were quickly placed around the house on Walpurgis Night (April 30). The poor burned coal from the wood. Husbands carved wooden shoes out of it. The bark was used to tan leather black, and pigment was made from the cones. When mothers weaned their children they would place a wreath of alder leaves on their breasts and say that the witches had stolen their milk. Because the wood does not rot, the Neolithic people used it as stilts for their buildings. Venice was also built on alder posts.