Müller-Ebeling Claudia - Witchcraft medicine: healing arts, shamanic practices, and forbidden plants

Acknowledgments

Although the three of us have brewed up a new magical potion, like three witches, the idea to write a book about witches medicine came from our publishers and friends Urs Hunziker and Heinz Knieriemen.

We are particularly grateful to our dear friend and pharmacist Patricia Ochsner. Her ideas and her expertise were important ingredients.

More wonderful additives were provided by Anupama Grell and Roger Liggenstorfer, Wolfgang Kundrus and Janine Warmbier, Conny and Hartwig Kopp, Daniel Delany, Margret Madejsky and Olaf Rippe, Daniela Baumgartner, Andrew Sherrat, and Peter Linzenich.

For the English-language edition we appreciate the contributions of our translator, Annabel Lee, and our editors Susan Davidson, Robin Catalano, and Doris Troy.

Greatest thanks!

To your health. In the name of Hecate!

Introduction: Is Witchcraft Medicine Good Medicine?

Wolf-Dieter Storl

Witchcraft medicine is the medicine of the earth. It is the oldest medicine of humankind, the healing art still used by the last remaining primitive peoples. Witchcraft medicine is primordial wisdom, primordial memory, and the true religio . It is the legacy of our Stone Age ancestors, which has been passed down in a continually shifting form through the Neolithic agricultural period, through the Bronze Age, and through the Iron Age, into the era of the Christian Middle Ages and their belief in miracles. The Inquisition did its best to destroy this ancient wisdom. But neither the threat of torture nor that of being burned at the stake, neither the ax of the so-called rational Enlightenment nor the reductionist straitjacket of a soulless, positivistic science has been able to permanently damage natures medicine. For this medicine not only lives on in decaying, dusty traditions, but is nourished by the clear spring of wisdom, by the immediate inspiration of the devas, and by the inspiration of the spirits of the plants, animals, stones, stars, and elements as well.

Witchcraft medicine is based on the understanding of the healing powers of our inner and outer natures. Witchcraft medicine is more than a factual knowledge of medicinal herbs, poisonous plants, psychedelic compounds, or gynecological preparations. It is the ability to converse with the animal and plant spirits and to forge friendships with them, an ability that has been suppressed in most people. It is the ability to achieve the ecstasy that makes communion with these beings possible.

While this natural medicine includes the power plants, the ones that cause intoxication and ecstasy and that humans reach for when they want to obliterate their mundane state of existence and catapult themselves into the world beyond, it mostly emphasizes the gentle plants that capture cosmic harmonies and convey them to humans so that the people may be healed. Only when humans radiate happiness and health can nature be happy and healthy. This is why Mother Gaia has powerful herbs and roots ready at hand.

Witchcraft medicine transcends clinical medicine, which, being bound in the corset of experimental natural science, proceeds only by measuring, documenting, and blindly testing what is tangiblethe superficial matteraccording to the principle of trial and error. Witchcraft medicine recognizes the inner being of the illnesses, the little worm without skin or bones, the worms of hate and envy that wriggle their way into us and suck out our life energy. This healing art understands the magical bullets and destructive memories that bore deeply into our physical and spiritual bodies. In order to heal the wounds caused by such ethericastral entities and negative occult energies, the practitioners of witchcraft medicine, the shamans, call on their alliesthe plants, the stones, the animals, the water, the fire, the earth. These also have a deep dimension as spirit beings, angels, and devas. You can speak with them; they can respond.

Witchcraft medicine understands the vitality of existence and knows about the souls and the spirits of all creation. Witchcraft medicine is magical, and for this reason it causes discomfort to those whose souls are dead and frightens those whose spiritual eyes are blind. It scares them because it is a reflection of their powerlessness. To the bigoted inquisitors the efficacy of this medicine was granted by the devil himself. Thus the women who guarded this ancient wisdom were considered evil seductresses. To the schoolmaster of the Age of Enlightenment, witchcraft medicine was an annoying superstition based on erroneous thinking that had to be eradicated from the minds of the country folk. To the masters of modern ideology, witchcraft medicine, with the special powers of communication it entails, is simply not a matter important enough for discussion; it belongs to the realm of a schizophrenic, a mentally unstable person, or, at best, a hopeless romantic. But in the end it might just be witchcraft medicine that leads us out of our current ecological and spiritual crisis, for its roots reach deep into the earth and tap into the healing waters of primordial wisdom.

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.

LAO TSE, TAO TE CHING

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 kings daughter (Anima) and the kings son (Animus) celebrate their marriage. Their wedding symbolizes the discovery of the self, the process of healing and becoming whole.