Julia Graves - The Language of Plants: A Guide to the Doctrine of Signatures

2012

LINDISFARNE BOOKS

An imprint of SteinerBooks / Anthroposophic Press, Inc.

610 Main Street, Great Barrington, MA 01230

www.steinerbooks.org

Copyright 2012 by Julia Graves

Book design: William Jens Jensen

Cover concept: Mary Giddens

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Lindisfarne Books.

Printed in China

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Graves, Julia.

The language of plants : a guide to the doctrine of signatures / Julia Graves.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-58420-098-7 eBook ISBN 978-1-58420-103-8

1. Materia medica, Vegetable. 2. Medicinal plants. 3. Holistic medicine. I. Title.

RS164.G673 2011

615'.321dc22

2011008410

M y foremost acknowledgement must go to Wilhelm Pelikan, through whose books The Healing Plant (volumes 1 to 3) I was able to teach myself the doctrine of signature at age eighteen and learn to converse with nature. I would like to thank my friend and colleague Lise Wolff for asking me to teach a class on the doctrine of signature, which made me realize I had enough to say about this topic to fill a book; my friend and colleague Peter Schell for his help in finding the relevant literature in the Chinese pharmacopeia; Jacquelin Guiteau for ongoing help and encouragement; and Sandra Lory for allowing me to use many of her beautiful photos. My greatest thanks go to my dear friend and master teacher herbalist Matthew Wood, who inspired me on the path of herbalism in ways beyond description.

Dedicated to Mother Nature

for nurturing me with her breath

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

T he following book on the doctrine of signatures is the most thorough and systematic text written on the subject to date. It unites wisdom gleaned from plants through the ages, revealing that signatures are the universal underpinning of all traditional systems of plant healing. In doing so, The Language of Plants is a remarkable achievement. It goes far beyond the narrower culturally restrained term doctrine of signatures, enlarging it to become a script for plant knowledge that goes beyond culture.

There are two basic approaches to the doctrine of signatures. One is via skillful sensory perception, the other via intuition. The former has a long history, coming down to us via the works of Goethe and Steiner; the latter includes an approach that Native North American might call dreamtime. These two may be causally related. If we train our sensory perception carefully, it will become a faithful servant (to paraphrase Einstein) to the holistic insight called intuition. The ability to glance at a jumble of facts or objects and recognize a meaningful pattern is called intuition. The rational mind provides a cause-and-effect explanation, but intuition shows us the big picture behind it. This is also called holistic thinking. The intuitive approach looks for the pattern that brings the pieces together into a meaningful whole. This book lays out a path on how the phenomena we perceive with our senses become the basis for this holistic perception. According to both Eastern and Western mystics, it is a well-trained mind relying on well-trained senses that leads to genuine intuition. It is possible to cultivate the intuition via sense perception, and that is what this book is about.

The English language, dedicated as it is to logic and materialism, has been purged of the terms and perspectives needed for intuitive education. Nonetheless, through many centuries, holistic thinkers have developed terms for naming and explaining their perceptions. One of the terms used by intuitive thinkers is signature. When one who thinks holistically looks at a collection of sensory perceptions, that person is seeking signatures that indicate the patterns behind the information or a characteristic that matches something else to which it is analogous. The signature is a tag or sign through which the meaning, or pattern, that unites the phenomena is expressed. The intuitive approach clearly sees a pattern in the signatures and thus becomes a principle, or doctrine.

The doctrine of signatures is largely a medical or medicinal doctrine. It teaches us to look for a sign in a plant that describes its medicinal properties. The short story is that the signature resembles an organ or pattern of health or disease. For instance, the bud of the peony looks like a cranium with suture lines running across its surface. Thus, it is used for the brain and head and is indeed a traditional remedy for epilepsy, minor fits in children, and brain injury. It is also a medicine for healthy delivery. A baby arrives head first, with the head squeezed in a process similar to incurring a concussion. The use of peony for epilepsy goes back to Galen during the second century CE. This type of thinking is politely called analogical thinking by rational science and dismissed as naive and superstitious. However, what is dismissed by conventional science-based culture was once a mainstream view and persists around the world.

I have used this method in my practice as an herbalist and found it to be of utmost importance and relevance to the practice of clinical herbalism today. It has led me to discover many new uses for herbs, to confirm traditional uses, and to explain the energetics of plants more clearly. Energetics is another word coined by intuitive and holistic thinkers. It refers to the energy pattern, or basic configuration, of energy in a plant, animal, or human being.

If rationalistic science has thrown this method of thinking away, then why should we revive it? There are several answers to this question. First, the lack of holistic understanding has resulted in the development of a lopsided environmental and social edifice that is not sustainable in its hostility toward nature and, ultimately, toward life. Science, as practiced today, is based on the destruction and exploitation of nature, reductionism (the microscopic rather than the macroscopic view), materialism rather than spirituality, and corporate greed in place of a sustainable social contract. Holistic thinking such as the doctrine of signatures can offer us a way out of this cul-de-sac.

Second, many non-Western cultures think intuitively, holistically, or analogically. If we seek a balanced and wide view of culture, others, ourselves, and ultimately truth, we should not value one cognitive method over another. I remember an Anishinabe Ojibwe elder asking, How can we understand Nature if we do not even know how to think properly [about her]? The Anishinabe term to describe the proper way of thinking, though difficult to translate, could be rendered as intuitive or pre-cognitive.

Third, the holistic perspective has not been eliminated completely and is still sought out, learned, and practiced within Western culture, including in science, even if ignored.

Holistic thinking goes hand in hand with imagination, or holistic seeing, so to speak. We need to be able to see with our mind's eye and to let our perceptions play with the sensory data to find underlying meaning. I don't think like you do, said one of the old doctors. I let my imagination play about the case. This book is an eyeopener, showing us with many examples how to