Crab-Apple Magic

‎"Our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from cultivated stock." -- Henry David Thoreau

My people aren't from here.

But my bones are.

My biological ancestors come from places where the invaders began clearing the forests and outlawing traditional religions 500 years before that same genocide reached the shores of this continent.

My great-grandfather came from "beyond the Pale" -- the line that separated the "civilized" English speaking parts of Ireland from the "wild" Gaeltacht. He was a Captain in the IRA who left at the age of 21 with a price on his head. The last person in my line to be born in his ancestral homeland.

So when I invoke the magic of my blood ancestors, I am invoking the magic of places I have never known.

But I have lived all my life in New England. The water I drink, the air I breathe, the food I eat are of this place -- every cell of my body comes from this land.

I've known these forests and fields and swamps and this seashore since I was born. The bullfrogs and spring peepers sang me to sleep throughout my childhood.

It was in the forests of Maine that my adult self first realized that the trees and lichens were speaking to me. And it was in the swamp behind my parents' house in North Andover, MA that I realized Skunk Cabbage had been singing to me in my dreams since before I could speak.

So as a pagan who believes that the world is alive where do I look for the ceremonies and rituals and magic that shape my practice? And as an herbalist what traditions do I look to guide me in connecting with the wild medicines around me?

The gods of my ancestors come when I call them, they recognize something in my blood. But their traditional rituals are connected with the stones and water and forests of another time and place -- forests that were burned or cut over a thousand years ago.

Their healing traditions teach ways of approaching and understanding plants, but the plants that I find when I am out wildcrafting are a hodge-podge of European and North American species.

The traditions that do come from this place belong to people who have survived genocide and are living under occupation (much as my great-grandfather did) and understandably don't want descendants of Europeans appropriating and claiming their medicine and ceremony as their own.

And yet, as someone who has devoted my life to serving the wild and feral plants that are themselves ancestors of mine from a time before humans knew such divisions, it behooves me to pay attention to the healing and ritual technologies of the people who have lived on this land the longest.

Its a fine line to walk -- honoring the traditions of my blood ancestors while understanding that to be true to their spirit I need to find new forms that fit this time and place. Looking to the knowledge of those who best understand the physical and spiritual geology and ecology of the place where I live without claiming their traditions as my own.

Like my great-grandfather's people, I've put myself beyond the Pale, outside the wall that defines the border of the civilization that dominates the world around me. But unlike them I am an interloper on this land.

My body, and my spiritual, magical, and herbal practices are very much like a Crab-Apple tree -- ancestral seeds from Europe planted in North America, their DNA changed by the place where they take root.

I trust the wind and water and soil to guide me in that process of becoming something new.

Stuck in the mud with snow on the ground : Digging Skunk Cabbage roots

This post is part of the "Adventures in Herbalism" Blog Party hosted by Darcey Blue French at http://www.gaiasgifts.blogspot.com/

Sometimes the things that make a plant so amazing also make it extremely hard to gather.

So it is with Eastern Skunk Cabbage (Symplocarpus foetidus).

Autumn would theoretically be the best time to harvest roots in a swamp in New England. The trouble is that by that time, the leaves of the Skunk Cabbage have died back. So why not just mark the location of the plant earlier in the season and then come back to it?

Skunk Cabbage has contractile roots -- and those roots allow the plants to move slowly across the swamp.

So if you want to dig the roots at the point when the plant's energy is concentrated underground, you have to do it in spring.

The trouble is that what a Skunk Cabbage calls spring in New England is quite different from what we call spring.

You see, Skunk Cabbage in a thermogenic plant. It generates heat to melt the ground around it.

So the flower of the Skunk Cabbage begins to appear when the ground is still frozen and there is often still snow on the ground.

And the time to harvest the roots is when the bud of the flower is still green -- before it opens and turns purple.

So that means slogging out over thin ice into a still frozen swamp.

When you find a bud peaking up through the frozen muck, its time to begin digging it up.

As you dig, the chilly water the plant melted begins to flood the hole and try to suck the plant back down.

And with a shovel its hard to really find how far the root goes down.

So once you have broken the ground, you really need to reach down and start digging with your hands, grasping the plant at its base with one hand, and beginning to extract the long tendrils from the mud.

Some of the plants can be hundreds of years old. And even a fifty year old plant has pretty big roots. And on the surface the one year old plant and the 300 year old plant look just the same. The only way to choose which one to harvest is to ask the plants. And sometimes its the old Grandfathers that will most want to provide their medicine.

So you soon find yourself stooped over in the swamp, almost elbow deep in the muck.

In order to be able to feel the roots you don't want anything thicker than a pair of rubber kitchen gloves. And they don't offer much insulation. And they only reach to your wrists. So you get cold fast. And after a while the tannins in the swamp mud begin working on your skin too -- along with the oxalate crystals of the Skunk Cabbage itself.

And when you are done digging that one plant and are ready to get up and move on to the next, the swamp sucks at your feet. Last March I lost the sole of one of my shoes after digging the roots of one Grandfather and finished the day's harvest with my foot wrapped in a garbage bag.

So I guess it says something about the kind of herbalist that I am that I look forward to the Skunk Cabbage harvest all year long.

Because part of the medicine comes in the harvest.

Harvesting any root is an act of connecting with the Underworld.

Harvesting Skunk Cabbage is almost an Underworld initiation in its own right.

It forces you outside your comfort zone, bringing you bodily into the world beneath the surface of the swamp that you would normally never see.

And you come back with a medicine that helps to dredge up the things that keep you from being fully present in this world -- be it phlegm deep in the lungs, deep depression, or fluid built up anywhere in the body where it doesn't belong. And it calms the tremors and convulsions of that birth -- be it coughing, epilepsy, or uterine spasms.

You can't be born again without going through a dark, wet tunnel.

Harvesting Skunk Cabbage can bring you to the entrance of one passage that will carry you through.

NOTE: Since writing this, I've heard from an herbalist whose family has been harvesting Eastern Skunk Cabbage roots in summer for several generations. Apparently drying the roots in an oven will eliminate enough Calcium Oxalate crystals to make the roots safe to use in a decoction.

Never the less, I do still think early Spring is the best time to harvest the roots -- the plant's energy remains concentrated in the roots at that early point before flowering.

Wendy Snow Fogg tells me that William LeSassier taught his students to harvest the roots in early spring by putting a knife into the center of the spathe.

Ghost Pipe (Monotropa Uniflora)

Ghost Pipe (Monotropa Uniflora)
Family: Ericaceae
Common Names: Indian Pipe, Ghost Pipe, Fairy Smoke, Ice Plant, Corpse Plant, Birds' Nest, Fit Plant, Convulsion Root7
Energetics: Cold, Relaxing
Herbal Actions: Nervine, Antispasmodic/Anticonvulsive, Diaphoretic
Flower Essence Indications: "Expanding awareness of the presence of universal love; [ . . .] seeing and feeling the love in every moment." -- David Dalton

I felt myself beginning to get sucked into the existential whirlpool of panic that has a way of pulling me down into debilitating depression. So I went into the woods.

A short way up the trail, I stopped and sat down in the cradle of the roots of a very old White Pine. Leaning back against the trunk, I began to feel grief and fear and its companion, doubt well up, overwhelming me. Where did I belong in this world? What was my work? What if my life amounts to nothing?

At the edge of panic, I opened my eyes, and about fifteen feet away from me saw the othreworldly white stalk and bell-shaped flower of Ghost Pipe. Just two days earlier, I had scoured the forest and Ghost Pipe was nowhere to be found. I felt a cool euphoria spread from the center of my chest throughout my body.

I walked over to the plant and knelt down and offered Tobacco. and soon saw that there were clusters of Ghost Pipe spread out all around me throughout the forest. The plant sang to me:

Pray for the medicine and it will come,
pray for the medicine you must become.

Grateful to the point of tears, I began gathering the stems and flowers of the plant. Walking deeper and deeper into the forest, I felt my panic subside, my grief dissipate, and my doubt disappear.

And it struck me that that's the essence of Ghost Pipe's medicine: its the medicine that pulls you back from the edge.

(Of course, in the process I got incredibly lost in woods I thought I knew well, and found my way home after three hours that felt like 45 minutes -- the price of the kind of clarity a medicine like this brings often involves the loss of bearings in space and time. That truth is as old as the oldest stories of Faery.)


Exaggerated claims of toxicity

Before going further I want to address the sudden panic some of my readers might have had when they read that I was gathering the stems and flowers of Ghost Pipe.

Going back to the late nineteenth century, herbals and field guides have routinely warned that the stems and flowers of the plant are toxic and that only the roots can be safely used.

But the only recorded case I have been able to find of a significant adverse reaction attributed to the plant is one from the late nineteenth century involving a woman who had handled but not ingested the plant and then developed a rash. The author of the account, A. H. Young, had consulted a physician after seeing the woman and hearing her story, and the physician had concluded based on his description of the symptoms that she had probably come into contact with Poison Ivy (Rhus toxicodendron). Young insisted this was impossible based solely on the fact that the woman claimed "that she was not susceptible to Rhus poison."

Despite the fact that there is no clinical evidence of Ghost Pipe ever having caused any more serious poisonings, many insist that it is potentially deadly because the plant contains a glycoside called andromedotoxin, and people have become seriously ill from consuming honey made by bees that have pollinated other plants containing the same compound.

Yet the aerial parts of the plant were traditionally used internally by the Cree and the Mohegan.

And a number of contemporary herbalists have worked with the aerial parts as well. Ryan Drum reports eating an "ounce or more of the young flowers and stalks" and feeling only "slightly nauseous." And I know several herbalists who have been working with the whole plant tincture for years.

As any herbalist knows, a plant is more than the sum of its chemical parts, and the mere presence of a potentially toxic constituent does not a poison make.

The first time I harvested the plant, I gathered and tinctured only the aerial parts. After reading and learning more, I set that batch aside and made a new one, using the entire plant. When I ran out of the whole plant tincture, I decided to experiment with the tincture made from the aerial parts only, and I found its actions identical to those of the whole plant tincture. I gave some to another clinical herbalist to experiment with and she found the same thing.

So now I spare the roots, taking a few stems and flowers from any given cluster of Ghost Pipe in hopes of leaving a viable cluster behind.

So, having dealt with the issue of toxicity, lets move on first to the ecology and then to the medicine of the plant.

Physical and Spritual Ecology

Ghost Pipe is a plant without chlorophyll that obtains water, nutrients, and carbon dioxide by tapping into the symbiotic mycorrhizal networks of the plants and fungi of the forest.

From a strictly materialistic standpoint this appears to be a purely parasitic relationship.

My own belief is that there is no such thing as pure parasitism.

Ghost Pipe to me is the distillation of the consciousness of the forest -- of the deep peace that comes from complete integration in the cycles of birth and death to the point where the distinction ceases to have meaning. Simultaneously, it is a watcher at the edge, taking in all it perceives without judgment and feeding information back into the mycelial networks that form the nervous system of the forest.

As such, it also seems to have an affinity for other liminal spaces as well -- especially the borders between life and death and embodiment and disembodiment.

My first encounter with Ghost Pipe two summers ago along a dirt road in Sumner, ME illustrates this.

Finding the ghostly plant by the side of the road, I got down on my knees to inspect it more closely. The flowers smelled of pickling vinegar. The stem seemed a tunnel to the world beneath the forest floor.

I felt my breath slow and deepen and a cool, mild euphoria come in through my chest and move up and down along my spine, radiating throughout my body. I smelled and felt rich, moist forest soils.

The plant told me to put one of his flowers in my mouth. I chewed on it for several minutes, and felt a tingling in my mouth. I spit it out and stood up slowly.

I was very clearly in another state of consciousness. I was acutely aware of the forest around me -- especially of the vast interwoven network of roots beneath the surface, and the communication across them.

I began walking down the road, deeply grateful for the worlds Monotropa was opening to me.

About fifteen minutes later I became very hot and began sweating profusely.

It occurred to me that I knew next to nothing about the flowers of this plant and that I might have poisoned myself.

And I began to imagine my death I knew that I had a four or five mile walk home down roads that don't see much traffic. I imagined collapsing and rolling down the bank and then rotting into the forest floor, becoming food for the life around me. And I felt completely at peace with that possibility.

And at the same time, I was acutely aware of work I wanted to do in the world, of experiences I wanted to have. So I began negotiating with Monotropa, saying that I wanted to go back into the world to be a voice for the forest.

The whole experience felt like a kind of initiation -- and I was left with the understanding that anyone doing healing work needs to become comfortable in the space between life and death.

Several people I've shared Ghost Pipe with have had similar experiences, suggesting that this is one aspect of the plant's medicine that presents itself in the right time and place.

Putting the pain beside you

It comes as no surprise, then that Ghost Pipe is a medicine most known for its action on the nervous system -- and particularly the ways our bodies deal with sensory information.

In its physical form, Ghost Pipe resembles a spinal column and a brain stem.

And one of the gifts Ghost Pipe offers is its ability to keep us from being overwhelmed by pain.

In the 1898 edition of King's American Dispensatory, Eclectic physicians, Harvey Wickes Felter and John Uri Lloyd noted that the powdered root could be used "as a substitute for opium, without any deleterious influences."

Tommy Priester, the herbalist who introduced me to Ghost Pipe, told me that he uses the tincture to help people in excruciating physical pain put the pain "beside them" -- they remain intellectually aware that the pain is there, but don't feel its overwhelming sensation. He works with the tincture of the whole plant, and told me that with the first dose you give someone 3 drops and see if that works. If 3 drops don't help, 5 or 10 won't, so you jump right up to a 30 drop dose. I have found similar effects with the same dosages of the tincture of the aerial parts.

My current theory is that the medicine works with the sensory gating channels -- limiting the amount of information processed as sensation, but allowing the information the brain needs to assess the situation to pass through.

I see the medicine as having potential in helping people come off addictive opiate pain-killers.

Putting your problems outside you where you can see and work on them

Of course, our bodies use the same mechanisms to process both emotional and physical pain and fear.

Last summer, when I first began working with Ghost Pipe, I told a lot of my friends about the amazing ways this plant could help people deal with pain. So my friend S. made a batch of her own tincture.

Our mutual friend, C. was visiting S. when he received some emotionally devastating news. He began having a panic attack. When S. walked in and saw him doubled over, she asked him what was wrong, and the only words that he could utter were "The pain! The pain!" She assumed he was in physical pain and gave him a dropperful of Ghost Pipe tincture.

C. said that the medicine helped him put his worries and problems outside of himself where he could look at them and work with them without feeling their full emotional impact.

C. came to visit the next day and told me the story. I told him about what Ghost Pipe does for physical pain, and said that his experience told me that it does the same for emotional pain. I gave him a formula of nourishing nervines and adaptogens to help him deal with chronic anxiety, but suggested that since Ghost Pipe was working so well for him, he should continue using it for acute panic attacks.

A month or two later, I ran into C. and asked him how the herbs were working for him. He told me that he had continued using Ghost Pipe whenever he felt anxiety coming on for several weeks after that first incident. Then one day he went to reach for the tincture, and he heard the plant telling him he didn't need the tincture anymore. He managed to call up the memory of the frame of mind the medicine put him in and put his worries outside him by himself. The plant had taught him a new means of dealing with pain and terror.

Since then, I have given the plant to a number of people dealing with acute anxiety attacks. All have had great results with it, though none have gone through quite the transformation that C. did. Sometimes the right plant is just the right teacher for a particular person at a particular time.

I have also begun experimenting with using the plant in combination with Holy Basil for trauma survivors in situations where their memories of trauma are being triggered. Early results are promising.

"Bad Trips" and Vitus Dance

In addition to helping people put their physical and emotional pain outside their bodies, Ghost Pipe can help bring people back into their bodies.

Part of my practice involves doing first aid work at festivals where a lot of people are under the influence of a lot of different mind-altering chemicals.

I always end up dealing with men in their late teens or early twenties who are having their first experiences with LSD, find old traumas triggered, and become agitated and disruptive.

When I first began researching Ghost Pipe, I came across Ryan Drum's account of using the medicine to help sedate a man who was having a psychotic episode.

Based on that account, and based on my own theory that psychedelics work in part by opening the sensory gating channels to a degree we don't normally experience, I decided to start using Ghost Pipe in these cases.

In every such case where I have used it, a 30 drop dose of Ghost Pipe has rapidly worked to slow the onslaught of sensory information coming into the subject's brain. Pupil dilation and response to external stimuli change in matter of minutes.

In most cases, the men in question either become calm and coherent, or fall asleep quickly and wake up hours later, calm and coherent.

In a few cases I've witnessed though, the LSD had brought underlying issues to a head, and the men found themselves experiencing what a shamanic practitioner would call spirit possession and a psychiatrist would call a dissociative episode. In these cases, physical cues told us that the drug was no longer acting on the brain, but disturbing behaviors continued -- in one case "speaking in tongues," in others, physical violence and endless shouting of threats and profanities.

In the cases where these men were physically violent, the phrases they kept repeating suggested they were remembering childhood sexual abuse -- an experience with up-regulates norepinephrine. We also later learned that all of these men were on Adderall. My working hypothesis is that their Post Traumatic Stress Disorder caused them to act in ways that led them to be misdiagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperacticity Disorder. LSD made them more susceptible to having their repressed memories triggered, and the stimulation of Adderall coupled with the sensory overload of the LSD experience pushed them into a fearful and violent state.

In cases like these, further measures are necessary, and those fall outside the scope of the article.

An interesting side note -- Ghost Pipe was used widely in New England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to treat a condition called "Vitus Dance" -- that involved spasms and convulsions often attributed to divine or demonic possession. Most of these cases were likely rheumatic fever, and here Ghost Pipe's traditional uses as an anticovulsive/antispasmodic and as a diaphoretic likely came into play. But in some cases Vitus Dance was likely an effect of Ergot poisoning -- Ergot is a fungus that grows on Rye that can causes hallucinations and convulsions when ingested. Ergot is also the source of Ergotamine, the chemical from which Albert Hoffman derived and synthesized LSD.

Its also worth noting that St. Vitus is the patron saint of mushrooms.

Perhaps early New England root doctors were using Ghost Pipe for the same indications for which I now administer it at the festivals?

Various and sundry other medicinal uses

David Winston notes that Ghost Pipe is a diaphoretic and was traditionally used by the Cherokee for fevers accompanied by pain and for febrile seizures. I've not used the plant this way before, but after eating the flowers I have certainly felt its profound diaphoretic effect.

The juice of the fresh plant has traditionally been used as a remedy for inflamed eyes, sometimes combined with Rose water. Earlier today I crushed a flower onto my closed, inflamed eye and rubbed in the juice and felt rapid relief. Jean Auel made this use famous in her novel, The Clan of the Cave Bear.

Lloyd and Felter note that the juice combined with Rosewater can be used to treat "inflammation and ulceration of the bladder." I've not explored this possible use yet, but may soon, as it explained why I got an intuitive hit on Ghost Pipe when I was wondering what plant to use for the people I've been seeing at the festivals who are having bladder problems from Ketamine use. Prolonged recreational use of this horse tranquilizer can lead to inflammation and scarification of the bladder -- and eventual bladder failure. (Of course another important part of the therapy may involve pointing out that it is difficult to dance with a urinary catheter.)

Magical correspondences

I associate the medicine of Ghost Pipe strongly with Obatala -- an Orisha of the Ifa, Santeria, Voudun, and Hoodoo traditions who is cloaked in white and helps to "cool the head," bringing calmness and clear judgment to those who work with him.

Ghost Pipe also clearly has a strong association with the Fey, given its association with the boundary between worlds. Fairy Smoke is one common name for the plant, a name likely given by Scotch-Irish people in Appalachia who would have afforded such a name to a plant with great care, noting its connection to otherworldly states of consciousness.
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Photo by Darcey Blue French

This Root Doctor does not intend to diagnose or treat medical conditions . . .

When I first began practicing as an herbalist, I resented the standard disclaimer we are all taught to put on our intake forms and our websites -- "These products and services are not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any medical condition."

I felt like these words diminished the importance and power of the work I was doing. And it seemed somehow dishonest given that many of my first clients were people who were eschewing the medical system altogether, people for whom I was the primary health care practitioner.

But the deeper I have gone into this work, the more I have realized that my work has nothing to do with diagnosing or treating medical conditions -- though occasionally the protocols I've recommended have probably helped to cure them.

You see, contemporary medical science and practice for the most part, views the human body as a collection of parts. Diseases and injuries are identified by their symptoms and surgical and pharmaceutical strategies are developed to correct these particular symptoms by manipulating particular chemical and mechanical functions in particular organs and systems.

This approach works remarkably well to reverse symptoms in acute situations -- resuscitating someone who has had a heart attack or stopping an aggressive blood infection. We can do these things with herbs too, but medical procedures have a higher success rate here.

But the longer a condition persists and the longer a treatment is continued, the less predictable the outcome will be, and the more unintended consequences begin to develop. Steroid inhalers do a great job of opening the airways of an asthmatic in the short term, but over time lead to problems with the adrenals that contribute to the underlying autoimmune condition.

Some herbalists would suggest that the problem is that pharmaceutical drugs are too biochemically crude and that herbs can work better for chronic conditions because the plants that pharmaceutical drugs are derived from often contain chemicals that counteract side effects of the isolated compounds used in those drugs. And this is certainly true to a point. Many then take the next step and say that herbs can be used to replace pharmaceuticals in the treatment of chronic medical conditions and that we need to identify which herbs can most reliable be used to treat which diseases using which chemical pathways. And then find ways to standardize their cultivation, processing, and use.

This is where I take a sharp turn in another direction.

Because to me medical conditions are nothing but taxonomic descriptions of particular states of particular organs or systems in particular moments.

And they are meaningful only when the primary focus is on addressing the immediate symptoms.

But just as the laws of physics change when operating on different scales of space and time, so too medicine's description of the workings of the body and the actions of certain medicines in the body tends to break down when you change the frame of reference.

The body turns out to be more than the sum of its parts -- it is a living, self-organizing system. And changing a particular aspect of the operation of that system can have a host of seemingly unpredictable consequences to those who apply strictly mechanical and biochemical models to a dynamic system with a complex logic of its own.

I align myself most strongly with the rural New England Root Doctors of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who, working with insights gleaned from European folk medicine and what knowledge they could gather of Indigenous traditions, worked to treat the person, not the disease, attempting to understand and work with what the body was trying to do to heal itself and bring itself back into balance.

Their philosophy was best articulated by some of the heirs of their tradition, the great Physiomedicalist physicians of the middle and later nineteenth century. Dr. William Cook wrote in 1869 that ""The living body is held in life and action by a living force" and healing is best promoted by supporting the actions of that force. His contemporary, Dr. T.J. Lyle said that "in the art of curing disease we can but influence to contract and relax with varied degrees of rapidity and energy in imitation of nature's way of using these structures in health."

In doing so, its necessary to find the imbalance -- the obstacle to cure -- that is preventing the body from healing itself, and remove it through an equal and opposite corrective action. Lyle wrote:

"In the work of restoration the attempt must be to restore to some extent the opposite condition of that abnormally existing. If the parts are congested apply heat and relieve the circulation. If the body is emaciated give proper food and sustain digestion. If there be too much relaxation, stimulate to the relief of such abnormal relaxation. If there be too much rigidity, relax to the relief of that rigidity."

The simplest ways to do this involve meeting the body's unmet needs for sleep, exercise, hydration, and nutrition.

But sometimes its necessary to bring in outside agents to effect change by warming or cooling, moistening or drying, stimulating or relaxing, in accordance with what the body itself is trying to do. This is at the core of my work.

Because plants have bodies remarkably similar to ours, they are constantly developing strategies for dealing with stresses remarkably similar to those experienced by our bodies. Like our bodies, theirs are trying to obtain or maintain balance. So plants that live in wet areas develop strategies for dealing with excess moisture. Plants that live in hot, dry conditions develop strategies for cooling and moistening their tissues.

And like us plants are more than the sum of their parts. In the laboratory it may be possible to identify particular compounds that produce particular results in particular conditions, but these are not the whole of the plants' medicine.

Plants operate as deep teachers to our bodies, helping us learn new strategies for correcting imbalances.

My work as an herbalist is the work of connecting people with plants that can help them find physical, emotional, and spiritual balance.

Any resemblance to work intended to diagnose or treat medical conditions is purely incidental.