Poisons and Cures

Poisons are always more interesting than cures (for evil always makes better copy than good). But that is not to say that there were not many powerful cures the witches used. From antiquity onward, witches were both healers and poisoners, the two functions inextricably bound. They must be bound because often the same herbs are curative in small dosages and poisonous in larger ones. Venefica, or female poisoner in Latin, came to be the word for witch in most Romance languages. This is an index of how deeply witches were associated with poisonous herbs. And they still are today.

Most of the poems in this section deal with those herbs that are richest in legend and lore: mandrake, henbane, deadly nightshade, thorn apple, monkshood. But witches were also the first physicians (and for the peasantry, the only physicians during much of human history). Witches discovered the majority of the drugs in the modern pharmacopeia—from digitalis (purple foxglove or Digitalis purpurea) to ephedrine (Ephedra distachya), both of which are currently in use today, one for the treatment of heart disease, and the other for the treatment of hay fever and asthma.

The principal drugs still used in the management of labor and delivery—ergonovine (from ergot) and atropine (from belladonna)—were also discovered by witches. In fact, one of the most persuasive theories of the suppression of the witch holds that witches were female peasant healers who did not come under the jurisdiction of the Church and thus were ruthlessly persecuted in favor of a male medical establishment that did pay homage to Church authority. There is much wisdom to this theory, for the healing legacy of the witch is no less than the very foundation of modern obstetrical (and other medical) practice.

The seizing of the practice of obstetrics from midwives or wisewomen (sage-femme is still the name for midwife in French) and its transference into the hands of male accoucheurs undoubtedly cost hundreds of thousands of female and infant lives. The male accoucheurs, who rose to power in the late seventeenth century, not only delivered women blindly (a sheet was tied around the practitioner’s neck and thence draped over the woman’s body for “modesty’s sake”), but they brought to the bed of birth all the diseases of the sickbed. Their medicine was theoretical and Aristotelian, not practical and grounded in the observation of nature. Their attack on the midwives was political and pecuniary. It set back the cause of women’s health at least two and a half centuries—until Semmelweis’s introduction of antisepsis in childbirth put an end to the ravages of childbed fever.

Only today are women beginning to rediscover the wisdom of the midwives (and the male medical establishment is now reluctantly responding to women’s demands to be in control of childbirth). We still have far to go. But as we unearth our heritage of female healing, we discover again and again that those often denigrated “old wives’ tales” frequently have more curative power than all the artificial chemicals in the doctor’s little black bag.

If, as Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich suggest in Witches, Midwives and Nurses, the suppression of female healers was a powerful motivation for the witch-hunts of the early modern period, then we suddenly understand another of the underlying causes of the witch-craze that swept Europe from the 1400s to the 1700s. University-trained, Church-approved male doctors wished a monopoly on medical practice (for those who control health, in a sense, control the world). In order to monopolize health, they had to dishonor, discredit, and do away with those peasant-healers (often called witches) on whom the people had depended for centuries. They stole from the witches whatever was useful—digitalis, belladonna, ergot—and denied them licenses to practice medicine, admission to universities, literacy itself. When those things did not suffice, they burned them at the stake. For birth was too politically important a process to be left in the hands of women. The witch’s healing arts were appropriated by “professional” doctors and only her reputation as poisoner remained. It was easier to externalize evil (whether plague, storm, fire, or famine) and blame it upon the witch than to find evil where it usually lurks—within the self.

Bitter Herb

If you would poison your mind

with the bitter herb of self-hate,

nothing can save you:

not the lover who comes in the night

smelling of pitch & brimstone,

not the husband who comes in the light

smelling of hay & the golden turds of mares,

not the mother with her poisoned apple,

not the daughter with her wreaths of roses & opium poppies,

not the sister with her rosemary & rue

nor the brother with the mandrake root.

Having driven out the demons of the past

we find them now within.

No witches burn in the market

but our minds revolve upon their own spits;

no crucifixion upon Calvary

but a daily torture in the hills of the skull,

no smell of burning female flesh upon the heath,

but the acrid odor of the heart slowly smoldering.

What witchcraft will it take

to bend this world to our will?

Must we burn poisonous herbs

to kill the poisons in the streams?

Must we wear poultices of Henbane

& Deadly Nightshade

against the very air?

O take this garlic rosary,

this token of death’s breath,

this possessed vegetable,

this bulb of dried desire.

I am sick of haunting myself

from within

like an old house.

I would be happier

as a hunted witch.