The Magic of Herbs

by David Conway

Overview

Like many who were reared in a rural setting, David Conway came to know about healing arts that relied on a deep knowledge of herbal decoctions, tinctures, and poultices. In The Magic of Herbs, he shares the knowledge of herbs he gained in his early training in the hills of the Welsh countryside. Studying with a master herbalist near his boyhood home, he absorbed the practical and occult properties of the herbs and plants found in the surrounding environs.

In this book, David presents an updated tome detailing in plain language a concise natural history and illustrated guide to the world’s most beneficial plants. Also treated are the occult properties of each of the plants described. Chapters include: Botanical Medicine, Herbalism and Astrology, Doctrine of Signatures, Preparation of Herbs, Tonics and Physics, Cosmetics and Narcotics, Wines from Herbs and Flowers, Language of Flowers, Herbal Materia Medica, and Index of Ailments and their Herbal Treatment.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781881098553
Publisher:	The Witches' Almanac
Publication date:	09/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	180
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

David Conway is a mystic, magus, and author whose profound knowledge, unique insights, and clear writing style have affected literary esoterica since the early 70s. The seventh child of a seventh child, David was reared in seaside city of Aberystwyth, Wales, and its surrounding environs. His education in magic began at a very early age, studying with a local farmer, Mr. James, a magician he encountered in the Welsh countryside before embarking on his own inner Journey. David brought magical herbal training to the forefront by publishing The Magic of Herbs very early in his adult life. This book provided a concise approach to occult and practical herbalism in time where there were few resources.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

BOTANICAL MEDICINE

Herbalism is perhaps the earliest form of medicine. In human beings the knowledge that plants can cure disease is probably instinctive, for even animals seek out the appropriate herb when unwell. For thousands of years medicine depended almost exclusively on flowers, barks or leaves and only recently have synthetic drugs replaced them, some of these carbon copies of chemicals identified in plants. Well into the last century pharmaceutical companies sponsored expeditions to remote corners of the world in search of medicinal plants, just as Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt (1479–1458 BCE) dispatched court botanists on similar missions. Today, clinical experience repeatedly vindicates the confidence our forebears placed in many of the plants they traditionally favoured.

The study and therapeutic use of plants is by definition the concern of herbalism. It is, as I said, no less the concern of orthodox medicine, which puts similar faith in the curative value of certain plants. And yet, although the continued use of plant remedies in standard medical practice demonstrates the worth of herbal therapy, herbalism itself is often regarded nowadays as a quaint aberration, fit only for quacks, fools and hypochondriacs. From the outset, therefore, we had better ask ourselves in what way herbalism differs from respectable pharmacology.

The answer herbalists would give is that their method is more natural than that followed by their rivals. They imply, like advocates of healthy eating, that "natural" somehow equals "good" — a dubious implication, if only because of the difficulty in deciding what is natural and what is not. After all, a herbalist who grubs about in hedges is really no more "natural" than a chemist at work in his laboratory. Nor are the botanical infusions of the one necessarily any better than the medicines of the other: both are natural and both may do good.

In my view, herbal medicines are more natural only in the sense that their preparation is less complicated than that of most modern drugs. In traditional herbalism a plant is simply eaten raw or else infused in alcohol or water. In orthodox medicine, on the other hand, the same plant may be subjected to umpteen chemical processes before its active ingredient is extracted, refined and made ready for consumption. Instead of more natural, therefore, we should perhaps say that herbal-ism is the simpler, even cruder, method of the two.

The advantage of the orthodox method is that it identifies and then employs only the beneficial part of each plant. (This substance may then be copied in order to produce a synthetic alternative that is cheaper and more readily available.) Another advantage is that the active ingredient can be administered in concentrated form, thus ensuring that it acts quickly and with maximum effect. But this has its drawbacks for by their swift and certain action many such drugs cure illness without requiring more of the patient than an immediate physiological response. As a result, the patient's collaboration in his or her treatment, whether conscious or not, is kept to a minimum.

Herbs, on the other hand, may achieve results more slowly, and in that time the body has a chance to help them in their fight to cure its ills. Thanks to its involvement, the body does not lose — from want of practice — its natural ability to heal itself. In this way, too, it builds up a resistance to disease and learns how to cope with sickness on those occasions when herbs or other medicines are unavailable.

Apart from these differences in method, the development of medicine may help us better understand why herbalism is relegated to its outer fringes. The earliest physicians were herbalists and one of these, Hippocrates, has left a precious account, possibly compiled by his pupils, of the plants in use throughout the classical world. Many remain popular today, among them balm, basil, horehound, ivy, rue and sage. Other major figures such as Galen and Aulus Cornelius Celsus were likewise fond of herbal simples, but the ancient doctor most committed to them was Pedanius Dioscorides who, in the first century of our era, produced a materia medica in which over five hundred plants are catalogued.

In medieval Europe the practice of medicine was largely undertaken by religious orders, some of whose hospitals and herb gardens became famous throughout Europe, as did the illuminated herbals produced around this time. In the latter virtuous plants are catalogued, and beautifully — if at times imaginatively — drawn. More herbals began to appear once printing was invented, their illustrations conforming more closely with the appearance of the plants they catalogued. These early herbals enjoyed considerable success and included not only new editions of antique works like that attributed to the Greek Apuleius Platonicus, but originals like the famous Hortus Sanitatis or great Herbal — possibly the first ever written in English — of William Turner (1510-1568 CE) a man dubbed the Father of English botany.

The circulation of these herbals enabled those who could read to indulge in self-medication when they felt the need for it, something the poor had been doing all along, in their case relying on a fund of herbal lore handed down from one generation to the next. For, unlike other forms of medicine, herbalism required no special skills or expensive apparatus: provided the patient knew which plant best suited his condition, he had only to obtain it from the hedgerow. It was easy, it cost nothing and it worked.

Here, then, was a form of therapy that was recognized by science but could be applied by those who lacked scientific training. There thus came into being two sorts of 'green' medicine, the one carried out by qualified physicians as part of their medical practice, the other by men and women with no formal training. Each developed more or less independently of the other, though they shared much in common, with the term "herbalism" increasingly used to describe the activity of the lay practitioners.

The gulf between herbalism and orthodox medicine has since widened, the advances of the latter seeming to make obsolete all rival forms of treatment. But such advances have often derived from knowledge obtained from other sources, and herbalism, though overtly despised, was plundered more than most.

Thus cancer researchers, taking the hint from herbalists, possibly as far back as Pliny the Elder who recommended mistletoe in the management of the disease, have found that its juice may well inhibit the growth of tumors, at least in experimental mice, possibly by boosting their immune response. Meanwhile in Anthroposophical medicine, derived from the observations of Rudolf Steiner, a mistletoe extract commercially known as Iscador is similarly employed, with the type of tree favoured by the plant an indicator of its relevance to particularcancers. Similar benefits have been noted from administering extracts of garlic and bloodroot, two plants traditionally used in herbalism to treat cancerous conditions. These results do not, of course, mean that contemporary herbalists know how to cure cancer, but they do indicate that their predecessors may not have been wholly misguided.

Nor can science afford to fault many other herbalist prescriptions: wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) is a traditional cure for worms, and from its cousin santonica (Artemisia cina) pharmacists now obtain the vermifugal drug santonin (just as pyrethrum, an insecticide, is extracted from wormwood's cousin the chrysanthemum); the tranquilizing drug reserpine, widely used as an antipsychotic, was discovered through observing the success Indian herbalists had in treating "madness" with a plant called snakeroot (Rauwolfia serpentina). But the classic case, though often misrepresented, is the discovery of digitalin, a glycoside present in foxgloves, after a Shropshire doctor, William Withering, heard how country folk used "foxglove tea" to cure dropsy. Dr. Withering's own experiments confirmed the plant's worth, something herbalists in and out of Shropshire had known since the time of Dioscorides. It was then left to another medical man, Dr. Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, to publish an account of the plant's virtues, quickly making it the standard treatment for congestive heart failure and arrythmias.

So far we have seen that what distinguishes herbalism from orthodox medicine are its simpler methods and the lack of formal medical training among those who practice it. We have seen, too, that these characteristics do not render it invalid. On the contrary, experience suggests that science may still have much to learn from the corpus of herbal knowledge we possess. Every day, cures — some of them little short of amazing — are attributed to the use of herbs, and here, ofcourse, is the real test of their worth. It is a test readers of this book may conduct for themselves.

Before then, however, there are two more aspects of herbalism to be considered. They provide, I am afraid, two further reasons why herbalism has fallen into disrepute. Not content with merely using herbs, our ancestors philosophised about them, inventing theories to explain why a particular plant cured the disease it did. For a long time astrological reasons were given to explain the different actions of various herbs. When reading about them, however, you should bear in mind that in medicine results alone count — and as you will discover, herbs give the results expected of them, astrology notwithstanding.

CHAPTER 2

HERBALISM AND ASTROLOGY

To understand how herbalism fell under the influence of the stars, we need to look very briefly at the history of astrology. We shall then see why in so many of the older herbals a planet or zodiacal sign is attributed to each of the herbs listed, and why an authority like Culpeper can describe a given herb as curing any condition "adversely influenced by Saturn in any part of the body governed by the Moon or Cancer, where the herb will cure by sympathy."

The practice of astrology is believed to have originated in Mesopotamia, probably in Babylon, some two thousand years before the commencement of our era. There, zealous priests first set about recording the behavior of the heavenly spheres. Having noted that five visible planets existed besides our Sun and our Moon, they related the apparent movements of these to the major events of their time. The nature of such events enabled these early astronomers to accredit the planets with certain general characteristics: thus to Ishtar, our Venus, were attributed the qualities of love and harmony, while their opposites, war and disruption, where the property of Nergal, our present-day Mars. Another important discovery of the same period was the celestial zodiac, a circular path or ecliptic, along which the planets, the Sun and the Moon were then believed to travel.

Soon after its discovery, the Zodiac was divided into twelve equal parts, each corresponding to a constellation along the ecliptic and each endowed with its own characteristics. In the meantime these new ideas were being carried along the trade routes to India whence they spread rapidly throughout the Far East.

Between 700 and 200 BCE the mass of astronomical data gathered by the Babylonian priesthood continued to grow and the first horoscopes were cast. At the same time the starry wisdom spread to other Middle Eastern peoples, among them the Jews and Egyptians. The latter adapted the Babylonian system to their own needs, although there is evidence that astrology of a sort flourished in the kingdom of the Nile long before then. There is evidence too of an astrological system remarkably like the systems of the Old World among the Aztec and Mayan civilizations in Central America. We can only speculate whether this was an isolated development or whether the people of both hemispheres had access to a common store of knowledge.

But it was above all the Greeks who turned astrology into the unified, and given its premises, logical system with which we in the West are familiar. Although astrology was known to them from very early times, it was the invasion of Mesopotamia and subsequent contact with Babylon that stimulated fresh interest in the subject. Soon, its principles were assimilated by the major philosophical schools, the Stoics in particular laying stress on the influence of the stars on human affairs.

In ancient Rome astrology flourished as never before, despite the jibes of opponents like Cicero, Cato and Juvenal. This was still the position when Christianity, generally hostile to astrology, became the official religion of Rome. Even afterwards, astrological beliefs persisted among the Gnostics and Neo-Platonists. Meanwhile, as the might of Rome declined, so a new Arab civilization came into being in North Africa. There astrology was studied by the greatest scholars of the Muslim world and it is from there, in the twelfth-century, it returned to Europe, much the richer for its exile.

By the time of the Renaissance, the popularity of astrology was more widespread in Europe than at any time before and the stars were now deemed to rule all human affairs. Then, suddenly, physicians discovered that the planets might also have a part in the treatment of the sick. One of the first to develop this theory was Marsilio Ficino (1433–99 CE), both priest and physician, who, in his De vita libri tres, informs his readers which zodiacal signs rule different bodily parts and what effect the planets have on each of them. Paracelsus, whom we shall be meeting later, likewise strove to reconcile medicine with astrology, comparing the "inner stars" of Man, the microcosm, to their stellar counterparts within the macrocosmic scheme. On a more practical level this involved analysing the astrological significance of an illness, and prescribing for its treatment a substance whose astrological virtues suggested a possible cure. This was how mercury, once deemed the only effective remedy for syphilis, first came to be prescribed for that condition. The reasoning here was that a "mercurial" substance would alone curb the nefarious influence of the "heavy" planets causing the disease. (It probably killed more people than it cured.)

Astrology remained successful regardless of the astronomical discoveries of stalwarts like Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler. Indeed, Kepler was for years a professional caster of horoscopes, though at times inclined to dismiss astrology as the foolish daughter of astronomy. Only in the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, did astrology finally lose favour, and not until two hundred years later did it start to regain it. By now, as everybody knows, astrology is as popular as it ever was.

The traditional defence of astrology is that our solar universe is part of a gigantic cosmic pattern whose characteristics are discernible from the position of the planets at any given moment. In other words, astrology depends on the assumed unity of the universe in which we live, a unity that postulates the interdependence of its constituent parts. This means that anything happening to one of these parts will to some extent affect the rest, the actual extent being determined by the closeness of their relationship. What astrologers have done, therefore, is attempt to codify the relationship obtaining among various things within the universe, the occult connection, so to speak, between the planets and assorted scents, colors, precious stones and plants. These connections, known as astrological correspondences, are of immense value to the occultist since they provide him with his key to the understanding of nature. For the occult-minded herbalist, part of a sizeable minority, they are, in addition, the means of knowing which plants to prescribe for different ailments.

Before we lose ourselves in esoteric theory, let me attempt to make things clearer by explaining how I learned the rudiments of astro-herbalism from my mentor, Mr. James, Tan'rallt.

Herbs, he told me, conform, like everything else, with the general and unifying pattern we call nature. In their case each plant is related to one of the twelve signs of the Zodiac or else lies under the influence of a particular planet. All of which struck me as whimsical until Mr. James produced from his pocket a small fern-like plant. Its name I have since learned is adder's tongue (Ophioglossum vulgare), but what I learned from Mr. James was that its celestial ruler is the Moon. The same planet, he explained, is the ruler also of Cancer, so that in this instance the herb falls within that sign. Now, the human body, like the rest of nature, can similarly be related to the signs of the Zodiac, each of which governs a different bodily part or function. Cancer, for example, governs the breast and stomach so that, by sympathy, a Cancerian herb should relieve afflictions in those parts of the body. For that reason, adder's tongue has been prescribed in many cases of indigestion, where its antacid properties work to good effect. Likewise, pain and soreness in the breasts were often soothed by an ointment containing the same herb. This ointment, known as Charitable Oil (Oleum Caritatis) has long been a trusty reliever of all forms of localised inflammation and bruising.

(Continues…)

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Copyright © 2019 David Conway.
Excerpted by permission of The Witches' Almanac, Ltd..
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Table of Contents

Introduction,
1 Botanical Medicine,
2 Herbalism and Astrology,
3 The Doctrine of Signatures,
4 The Preparation of Herbs,
5 Tonics and Physics,
6 Cosmetics and Narcotics,
7 Wines from Herbs and Flowers,
8 The Language of Flowers,
9 Herbal Materia Medica,
Index of Ailments and their Herbal Treatment,