PREFACE

SINS, SOULS, AND SUN FLOWERS

DISCOVERING THE POWER OF THE PLANTS

By Ross Heaven

In the County of Hereford was an old Custom at Funerals, to hire poor people, who were to take upon them all the Sins of the party deceased . . .

The manner was that when a Corpse was brought out of the house and laid on the Bier; a Loaf of bread was brought out and delivered to the Sin-eater over the corpse, as also a Mazer-bowl full of beer, which he was to drink up, and sixpence in money, in consideration whereof he took upon him all the Sins of the Defunct, and freed him (or her) from Walking after they were dead.

JOHN AUBREY, 1688

When I was a young boy, about nine years old, my family moved to the Herefordshire countryside, a place of mystery shadowed by the Welsh Black Mountains and the soul of Celtic myth.

At the edge of the village, alone and isolated from the rest of the small community, there was a cottage, long fallen to disrepair; it was a place I was warned to stay clear of. For in this cottage there lived a madman, unsafe and undesirable to the village. It was said that his house was haunted and a “place of strange lights.” Of course, I found my way there almost immediately.

His cottage stood at a crossroads, just back from the road itself, and was surrounded by tall bushes and trees. It was a walk of about a mile from the village and there were no other houses near it. It looked and felt like the fairy-tale cottage of a witch, a place you stumble upon in error, after which your life cannot be the same.

As I stood looking at this mysterious cottage whose lopsided architecture had begun to take on the form of the land itself, the door opened and its single inhabitant emerged. He was old, dwarfed with age, and thin, dressed oddly for the times (the 1970s) in a white collarless shirt, black trousers, and waistcoat, like an old-fashioned country doctor or the cinema version of a period railroad signalman. A gold chain and fob watch hung from his waistcoat.

So this was the madman I had been warned away from. His name was Adam, and he began to talk to me about flowers and herbs and the story of his life. He had been a sin eater.

There is little written or known about sin eating, beyond that it was an ancient profession, once practiced in many countries of the world but now largely gone. As a healing tradition, it supposedly derived from the scapegoat ritual described in Leviticus, where the wrongdoings of the people were ascribed to an innocent. In the Biblical reference, Aaron confessed the sins of the children of Israel above the head of a goat that was then sent into the wilderness, carrying their wrongdoings and releasing them when it died.

In a similar way, a sin eater would be employed by the family of a deceased person, or sometimes by the church, to eat a last meal of bread and salt from the belly of the corpse as it lay in state. By so doing, it was believed, the sins of the dead would be absorbed by the sin eater himself and the deceased would have clear passage to the Kingdom of Heaven. The sin eater was given a few coins for his trouble, but other than that, he was avoided like the plague by a community that regarded him as sin filled and unclean because of his work. That is why sin eaters lived at the edge of the village and children were warned away from them.

The role of the sin eaters was, in essence, that of shamanic healers. Their job was to remove the spirit of disease from the dead (and often the living) and make the gods available to them. Their teachers in this work were the spirits themselves and the natural world.

Many sin eaters, because of their closeness to nature and rural location, were also skilled in folk medicine, “root doctoring,” or herbalism, and they worked with both the medicinal properties and the spirit of the plants.

For example, vervain was known, medicinally, for its relaxing qualities and its ability to lift depression and restlessness. Adam, however, would interpret such symptoms as diseases of the soul, which were caused by guilt or by the shame of being in the presence of sin.^a The spirit of vervain did more than heal the body, therefore; it eased the burden of the soul and drove away “evil spirits” (the effects, or the aura, of sin). By the same token, marigolds could be used to treat skin rashes, inflammation, and ulcers—but these were often also considered sin induced and symptoms of a deeper pain. Because marigolds were “bright like the sun” (“sun flowers,” as Adam called them), they would soothe and uplift the soul.

A sin eater might also offer his patient advice from “the land of the dead” (the spirit world) for how his or her sins could be atoned for. This advice was often of a practical nature, the belief being that sins need to be reversed in this lifetime, not in the hereafter, and with action in the world, rather than prayers for forgiveness. The penitent might therefore be advised to make an offering, not to the spirits, but to the person he or she had wronged. The word atonement was key in this, such recompense being not a punishment but a means of rebalancing the soul so the patient could come back to at-one-ment.

In this way, sin eating—a practice thousands of years old—anticipated a mind-body-spirit connection that modern science is only just starting to notice, for its rituals and plant medicines worked not only on the patient’s body, but also on the mind and emotions—and always on the troubled soul.

The introduction to this new realm was a fascinating adventure for a young boy and, as a result, I developed an enduring interest in plants and the spiritual, psychological, and emotional reasons for their use. When I grew up and began to travel, I explored other indigenous ways of working with plants. What I found among traditional healers was a remarkable consistency of approach. Whether in Greece, Turkey, North America, Haiti, Ireland, or Peru, wherever plant work was done by a healer rather than a medical doctor, it was the spirit of the plants that mattered and not their chemical properties.

Of course, the plants themselves varied (but then, not always—rosa sisa, or marigold, is used in the Amazon, for example, to “call back the soul” in the same way Adam had used these “sun flowers” in his quiet Hereford village) but the approach remained the same: “The plants tell us how to use them,” these healers would always say.

And how do they do this? “They talk to us in dreams, in visions, and in journeys.” This is a totally different way of working from the way a medical doctor might go to some dry book to look up the effects of a synthetic medicine derived from a plant, without once going near the plant itself—perhaps even without realizing that the pills he or she gave out were developed in a lab to synthesize the actions of a plant.

The exact means of using plant magic might also vary among healers—in Haiti, as we will see, the shaman uses a pouch of herbs called a paket to draw out illness from the body of a patient, while in the Amazon the shaman uses a bundle of leaves called a chacapa to stroke or gently beat a patient and achieve the same result—but these are cultural nuances. What is more amazing is that healers on different continents, who have never heard of each other, practice much the same methods—and they do so, not because they’ve read it in a book, but because the spirit of the plants taught them how.

Eventually, I came across the work of another writer who had explored the world of plant spirit medicine, Elliot Cowan. His observations of Mexican Huichol practices were the same: “The spirit of that plant must come to you. It [plant medicine] won’t work for you unless the spirit of the plant tells you how to prepare it and what it will cure.”¹ It is always the spirit that heals.

My interest, then, is the cross-cultural use of plants and the intriguing possibility of distilling all of these approaches to their essential core to discover how this healing works. I am sure there is much more to learn, but the message I have received so far, in its simplest form, is this: Listen to the plants and they will teach you all you need to know. This is good advice, and we will practice it throughout this book.