12 Jan 2004
Witchcraft Medicine

Jordsvin posted this review to several Heathen mailing lists this morning: it was so good I had to reproduce it here.

Witchcraft Medicine written by the eminent ethno-botanist and anthropologist Christian Rätsch Ph.D., the art historian Claudia Müller-Ebeling Ph.D., and the poet-gardener-herbalist Wolf Dieter Storl Ph.D. has been recently published in English by Inner Traditions. The translation was done by Annabel Lee.

Quote from the back cover from Daniel Pinchbeck:

"Witchcraft Medicine is a work of brilliant and passionate scholarship, fabulously illustrated, that recovers the lost knowledge of the European shamanic tradition. It is both a guide and an enthusiastic ode to the visionary edge of the botanical realm."

The book is lavishly illustrated throughout. It divided into three distinct sections, the first is an overview on the history of Europeans, their medicines, and their relations with plants and the worlds beyond. It begins in the Stone Age and ends in contemporary Southern Germany with organic farmers in the Black Forest influenced by Rudolph Steiner. He discusses the symbolism and ritual use of the most important and popular plants of Central Europe and how they were/are used in midwifery, for births and deaths, for medicine, for protection, for animals, fertility, and for pleasure.

The second part, by Rätsch, examines places in texts - about Hecate's and Medea's activities in antiquity through the three witches in Macbeth where transformations, rituals, healing, medicine, and spells are mentioned and ponders which plants might have played a role. Contrary to popular modern scholarship, Rätsch believes that shamanism, religious experience, and heathen rituals were inseparable from the sacred "plants of the gods" and he seeks to establish which plants were being referred to based on decades of personal experience and scholarship. He also discusses, and provides speculative (but certainly useable and potent) recipes for, many different traditional European shamanic blends, in particular the notorious "witches' salves" and "flying ointments" along with the "elixirs of youth."

The third section considers the different ways in which witches and the Virgin Mary are depicted in northern European art of the renaissance and which plants were associated with both. Müller-Ebeling shows how all that was wild, natural, uncivilized is depicted in the realm of the witch and all that is chaste and cultured in that of Mary. She discusses how the church demonized nature's healing powers and how artists were able to address the otherwise forbidden ideas of the natural forces in paintings of witches. The transformation from the goddess of fate into the disease-bringing witch is an underlying theme throughout this section.

The last section, "From the Inquisition to the Drug Laws" by Rätsch is rather a rant on one of his pet peeves - the demonization (initiated by christianity) of the traditional sacred plants of Europe, in particular hemp and poppies, which, as he points out, could be easily grown in anyone's window box, providing people with a near complete medicine chest made up of plants he considers to be the birthright of the Europeans. He questions who profits from the drug laws.

The outstanding characteristic of the plants and substances that are banned by the drug laws is their powerful effectiveness. They are some of the best medicines discovered by humans. They are not junk, like the medicines that are shoved over the counter at the pharmacy for a lot of money. They are potent... Opium is the best pain medication in the world. Hemp is probably the best anti-depressive... But who makes money from the healthy people - off the underlings who heal themselves with plants from their backyard or balcony gardens...? Ineffective medicine is a more certain source of income...

00:00 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link