INTRODUCTION
THE WAY OF THE PLANT SHAMAN
The first act of awe, when man was struck with the beauty or wonder of Nature, was the first spiritual experience.
HENRYK SKOLIMOWSKI
Since the beginning of human experience, plants have been partners in the evolution of our species, not only by the provision of food and medicine but in our spiritual experience and developing consciousness. The form, beauty, enchanting scents of the plant world, its healing and spiritual qualities, all provide a gateway to the Great Mystery of nature that our Celtic forebears called “the visible face of spirit.”
Though our lands are no longer forested as they once were, we try to re-create this beauty and tranquility with our flower-filled gardens and parks. The green spaces within our modern cities give us at least a taste of nature with which we can sustain ourselves against the soulless backdrop of the steel and concrete jungles that most of us now call home.
For many people, plants are still the messengers of divinity, harmony, and beauty. They are also the source of our health and well-being, not just as medicines but by their innate ability to relax, refresh, or excite us. Many readers will remember making a home in the arms of great trees in the treehouses we built as kids, for example, or lying in lush meadow grass gazing up at a clear blue sky on some perfect summer’s day, and even the memories of these things can nourish us. They tell us there is still a possibility for poetry in our souls, no matter how mundane our lives have become.
Some deep part of us knows that the healing power is inherent in what plants are as much as what they do. We give flowers to friends who are unwell, for example, understanding in our souls, if not our conscious minds, that such gifts are uplifting and affirming of life. Flowers have a role to play, in fact, in all of our most primal celebrations of life and death—birth and birthdays, comings of age, marriages, illnesses, funerals. They are there for the beginnings of things, at the first “I love you,” and they are there for our endings too. Even after death our connection to the natural world continues, as our ultimate spiritual destination within many religious myths is some form of paradise often symbolized as the “heavenly garden,” or the Garden of Eden.a
Our relationship with the plant world is embedded within our consciousness, but since the advent of our materialistic civilization, we are often no longer aware of the mythic and spiritual connections to nature that we feel. In our synthetic world where, for example, we treat diseases with laboratory-developed chemicals, many people literally do not know that most of these drugs owe their existence and effectiveness, not to scientists in white coats, but to rainforest shamans and the plants that they work with. We have lost our connection to, and understanding of, nature—all that it gives us and all that we owe it—because, instead of remaining a part of nature, human beings have chosen to redefine themselves as the “masters” of nature.
MASTERS OF NATURE?
The earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the earth.
CHIEF SEATHL
This redefinition of ourselves as masters of the Earth has been most pronounced in the three hundred or so years since the start of the industrial revolution, but in fact goes back many thousands of years, to a time when we ceased to be nomads and became agriculturists, remaining in one place and harnessing nature to our needs.
The historical fact is captured in the mythology of the Bible where, in the book of Genesis, we read that we were “given dominion over all living things.” Some anthropologists argue that this reference was, in fact, a form of agricultural public relations, as the settlers fought a war for land with the nomadic tribes of the early Middle East. For these anthropologists, the Fall, when humankind was evicted from Eden, is symbolic of agricultural victory. The nomads, once an intrinsic part of nature, were no longer free to roam their gardens, for now the gates were guarded.b
Our separation from nature reached another critical point in the sixteenth century, with the birth of modern science and the work of the French philosopher, Rene Descartes. When he was a young soldier in the Hapsburg army at the siege of Ulm, Descartes had a vision in which a supernatural being (a giant winged angel) appeared to him and told him that “nature can be conquered by measurement.” This message transformed his life and led him to develop the rationalist philosophy that came to be known as Cartesian dualism. This is the belief that body and mind are separate and that human beings, and all natural phenomena, are merely physical entities. In this philosophy, the soul—which cannot be “proved” to exist, and so doesn’t—is quite unnecessary. And from this all science stems.
Of course, there is an incredible irony in this—that material science was founded on the words of an immaterial being. Nevertheless, it was the message of measurement that stuck and not the spiritual source of the words.
Where this denial of the soul, this separation from nature, and this fixation on measurement has led us is apparent. An estimated 100,000 chemicals are poured into our environment every day by companies operating within entirely scientific principles. Even our foods are not safe. Since we no longer trust nature to provide and care for us, millions of tons of pesticides are used on our crops each year. Millions more tons of toxins are released into the atmosphere through our food production techniques. We know that these are poisoning our immune systems because of the growing incidence of diseases such as asthma, irritable bowel syndrome, food allergies, yeast infections, Crohn’s disease, colitis, arthritis, anxiety, insomnia, and depression—and yet we seem unable to stop killing ourselves, using processes that are destroying our rivers, air, and land. As long as we can “measure” the outcomes of pollution, the pollution itself has almost ceased to matter.
To give just one example, the 109 wineries in California’s San Joaquin Valley have been calculated to produce 788 tons of smog-forming gases a year. This, according to one vineyard chief, is from an industry that “in general is for clean air. We are environmentally conscious.” When industry decision makers are asked to clean up their act, however, environmental consciousness often takes a backseat to profits. “The problem here is that this is going to cost millions of dollars, and it’s not even proven to work. And there would not even be that much of a benefit, because we really are not gross polluters.”1 How gross do you need to be? Apparently, 788 tons of smog per year is not gross enough.
As garden philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka puts it:
Suppose that a scientist wants to understand nature. He may begin by studying a leaf, but as his investigation progresses, down to the level of molecules, atoms, and the elementary particles, he loses sight of the original leaf. . . . Which is to say that research attempts to find meaning in something from which it has wrested all meaning.2
In other words, all the measurement in the world will bring us no closer to understanding the true nature of the world, or tell us how to behave responsibly, spiritually, and properly within it. Only we can do that.
Perhaps we need to differentiate between fact and truth. Our scientists can measure the facts of the natural world—that our rivers are ten times more polluted today than they were thirty years ago—but they cannot measure the deeper truths of the human condition and what it means to be a part of this polluted world. Nor can science tell us what to do about it. Only people—in touch with their souls—can know the truth.
PUTTING SOUL INTO SCIENCE
What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
In our cultural imagination and general view of the world, we are still part of an archaic science based on measurement as the determining factor for how we should live: as masters of nature and separate from it. Modern scientists, however, now believe the very opposite of this archaic view that still permeates our culture. They have broken ranks with old science and returned to old ways, where the world is not just material but “soul-filled,” alive, intelligent, and aware. The circle is almost complete as the serpent turns to eat its tail.
The current scientific model is quantum theory, which opens up a very curious universe indeed—one in which nothing can actually be measured, since the very action of doing so changes its nature, and the observer becomes the observed. In this universe, matter is made of particles and waves at one and the same time. To observe them, however, they can never be both. To measure (or even perceive) something, we must arrest the wave in space and time so that it becomes a particle. The wave we were looking at and aiming to measure then ceases to exist. It becomes something else: a wave stopped in time. Or we can continue to regard it as a wave, flowing, changing, and transient—but then it cannot be measured at all and, in fact, ceases to be physical as we understand the term, instead becoming energy in motion (or e-motion, a term that includes our feelings about it).
However we look at it, this “thing” we are observing does not exist in its own right. It is the choices we make and our behavior as observers that determines its reality, and even then, how we see it changes it. All we can really say is, “Things are, if we choose to believe they are,” which begins to sound more like metaphysics than physics.
To make sense of the world at all, our scientists are, furthermore, now forced to talk about a reality founded on the notion of ten-dimensional hyperspace—the idea that there are other dimensions or invisible layers beyond the world we know. There is no proof for this, of course; but only by this supposition does reality become feasible. Without it, the world as we think we know it could not exist. But by believing in something they have no evidence for, our scientists have, in fact become theologians. Their argument that “one day we will find these other dimensions and prove that the world is as we ‘know’ it to be” is about as defensible as the argument of a priest that “one day we will find God and prove that the world is as we ‘know’ it to be.”
What all of this amounts to is this: beyond the physical there is an energetic universe and we create it in our image every second of the day. This is no different than the shaman’s claim that the world is made of spirit, not matter; or that “the world is as you dream it,” as the Shuar people of the Amazon say. By “observing” a spiritual universe you create a spiritual universe; by seeing only the material as “real,” that, also, is what you get.
For many shamans, this act of world creation relies on the spirits of the plants, which provide a gateway to the energy beyond the physical, and to the cosmos as a whole: the oneness of creation that we are part of, not standing back from as “caretakers,” “conquerors,” or “measurers.”
Coming to terms with this concept can be a challenge for the rational Western mind. The proposition that a plant has intelligence or consciousness and we can communicate with it is something many regard as preposterous. For one thing, it requires an acceptance of the idea that plants can “speak,” not only among themselves but with animals and humans as well.c This is not an easy idea for us to understand or accept. It requires a leap of imagination for us to open to the possibility of a direct encounter with the “other” consciousness or spirit of a plant.
Another challenge to our rational minds is that the entrance to this magical world is mainly through dream language or an expansion of the senses. This is less of a problem for non-Western cultures. For example, Loulou Prince, a medsen fey (leaf doctor and shaman-healer) in Jacmel, Haiti, says this of his own work with plants:
I receive a lot of my knowledge in dreams. If I am treating a sick person, I often ask for a dream where I see the leaves I should give that person. In these dreams, the spirits come to me and tell me what to do, or I see that I am in the woods, and leaves are pushing up in front of me and these are the ones I should pick. Once I have this knowledge, I can make a remedy for the person who is suffering.
We in the West have tended to belittle our dreams. Our educational, political, economic, and legal systems are all based on measurement instead. Through these, we have become unused to working with our intuitive and imaginative selves and are often dismissive of them, regarding them as unimportant or in some way “second class.”
Nevertheless, dreams and visions are our doorways to plant consciousness, and if we stop to think about it, this is not such a stretch after all. Every great achievement—whether a tall building, a child’s birth, or a breakthrough discovery, such as Descartes’ invention of rational science—begins first with an idea, a dream, or the revelations of the spirit. It does not just suddenly appear in the world. “Imagination,” said Einstein, “is more important than knowledge.”
THE MAGIC OF THE PLANTS
Despite the challenges for the Western mindset, there has been a huge surge of interest in plant spirit medicines in recent years, and in the knowledge of these plants that indigenous peoples hold. There is a growing belief that plants comprise a kind of “medicine for our times,” offering new possibilities to people whom science has failed and providing inspirational solutions to the problems of civilization. In this book we look at the wisdom of our plant allies and show you how to work with them to develop your own communion with these great healers.
In chapter 1 we look at the range and scope of how plants heal. Healing is a concept that, in many cultures, goes beyond what Western culture normally regard as medicine (i.e., the administration of “physical cure” for a “physical illness”) into the world of the spirit, where we can hear the underlying message of our disease and heal it through understanding, divination, the blessings of the plants, a change of luck, and by entering new realities so we experience a world beyond the physical, where all things can be known and there are still great frontier adventures left. Chapter 1 also explains, in practical terms, the shamanic principles underlying these different approaches so you can use them to make spirit allies of your own.
In chapter 2 we look at the concept of the shaman’s diet, a body of practices that helps the shaman incorporate the plant spirit into his or her own. From this union, the plant itself informs and teaches the apprentice how to invoke its power so it can be used in healing. We also introduce some of the plants that shamans consider most important to develop a relationship with, such as ajo sacha and chiric sanango. All of these have psychospiritual as well as physical qualities that, interestingly, are able to adapt themselves to the needs of the culture and the person who diets them (i.e., ingests them in a disciplined and sustained way, with spiritual intentions). Thus, in the Amazon, where the diet is central to the training and initiation of the shaman, ajo sacha is used for hunting (to disguise the smell of the hunter and help him focus on his prey); in Europe and North America, however, this plant will help the dieter stalk (hunt down) more psychological, inner issues. The quality remains the same but the healing takes the form that is required.
Of course, knowing what happens in the Amazon or Haiti and what plants are available there is of limited value for a Western apprentice. For this reason, chapter 2 offers suggestions for more readily available plants or plant mixtures that will help you achieve the same effects, so you can heal yourself. (Also see appendices 1 and 2.)
Chapter 3 considers sacred hallucinogens. One of the ways that plants have always been used is (in Aldous Huxley’s words) to “open the doors of perception” into new and other realities. This is a form of initiation into self; new neural pathways open up through communion with the plant, and the dieter may gain unusual and important insights into the nature of his—and all—life. In this chapter, we look at the ceremonial use of ayahuasca in the traditions of the Amazon, as well as the San Pedro ceremonies of the Andes. We also discover how to work with the essence of the universe opened up by such plants, in a way that does not itself involve the ingestion of hallucinogens.
Chapter 4 introduces two important concepts in shamanic healing—those of soul retrieval and spirit extraction. Though little documented before now, through these two practices the world over, plants are used to return vital energy and remove negative influences. This chapter explains soul retrieval and spirit extraction and demonstrates how plants are our allies in this. Often this healing work does not require the ingestion of plants at all, but their use in other ways, such as in the Mexican “ritual of flowers,” the use of pakets in Haiti, which contain plants for sucking out spiritual toxins, the Amazonian use of chacapas (rattlelike bundles of leaves) to restore balance, and the Welsh sin-eating ritual of stinging with nettles to restore life and vitality. You will read how to make some of these medicine tools for yourself and how to offer a simple ceremony for the return of lost power.
Beautiful fragrances derived from flowers and herbs have long been used for healing and for visionary dreams—from the temple maidens of Egypt who danced with cones of incense to the floral baths of Haiti and Peru. Indeed, the word perfume originates from the Latin per fumer, “through smoke,” a reference to ritual incense.
However, as we see in chapter 5, what has not been widely reported is that flower aromas can be used to change physical reality by altering one’s “luck”—regarded as a real and controllable force in shamanic tradition. In the Amazon, specialists in this form of magic are known as perfumeros, and they are able to use smell, not just for adornment or in ritual, but for highly practical purposes, such as succeeding in business, winning court cases, and bringing back lovers who have strayed. There are parallels here to the Hoodoo tradition of New Orleans, which uses essential oils to similar effect.
These techniques are explained in chapter 5, and one of the best-kept (and most controversial) secrets of plant spirit medicine is also revealed: how the pusanga (the “love medicine of the Amazon”) really works. We teach you how to find and make your own pusanga using herbs and flowers growing locally to you and provide recipes for perfumed oils to change your luck in love, money, health, and magic.
Chapter 6 explores floral baths as another way of removing energy blockages and revitalizing the spirit. These, too, are used in numerous shamanic traditions, including those of Brazil, Haiti, Indonesia, and Peru. They are also alluded to in Celtic legend, which informs the old sin-eating practices and the myth of the Grail. Many such baths exist—from flaming kleren baths, where a person bathes in fire, to relaxing perfumed baths, which cleanse the spirit and draw in love. In all cases, they work on our energies to restore balance and harmony.
Chapter 6 explains the energy body, how and why it becomes “blocked” and unbalanced, and what you can do to restore and re-energize yourself. It also includes recipes for baths you can treat yourself to, using easily found herbs and oils.
Finally, having introduced some of the main concepts and ways of working with the plant spirits, chapter 7 offers suggestions for how you might expand your work with these allies. It explains, for example, how you might conduct a healing in a modern setting, so you can pass on your knowledge in the treatment of others.
In the appendices at the end of the book you will find charts of Caribbean and Peruvian herbs, listing the commonly used plants of each culture, their healing and magical uses, and analogues that will allow you to continue your explorations into the world of plant spirits. Also included are Hoodoo recipes for luck and success. Following the appendices is a glossary of terms used throughout the book.