Herba Mythica: Myths and Folk Tales of Sacred Healing Plants
This is a book of spells casting the reader into ‘Lands of the Ancestors, Avalon, Hesperides’, wandering ‘between the material world and the world of Gods’, in which ‘Goddesses can be seen as metaphors for the action of plants’. Healing herbs inhabit a vast, welcoming and generous domain and we come to them with knowing from many practices, interests, disciplines and cultures. ‘Herba Mythica’ presents mystical, magical, shamanic aspects of herbs in an assembly of sixty-three stories from thirty-one story tellers across twenty-seven countries in four continents. The stories are varied comprising myth, legend, personal reflection, historical and contemporary experience, folklore and more.
In ‘Snake Flowers’ from Wales Michael Harvey tells how coal came to the Rhymni Valley from the remains of a slain giant. Malcolm Green in his ‘A Walk with the Ash Tree’ looks closely at trunk, bark, buds, moss, roots and imagines Odin, an eagle, a hawk and new life. Xanthe weaves a story of birth, life and death as Acanthus grows through a basket of mementos placed on a child’s grave. Paola Balbi retells an Italian creation legend of Stone Pine in ‘The Magna Mater and the Pine Tree’. Laily Mahoozi relates her own story of fleeing and then returning to Iran in ‘My Grandfather was a Palm Tree’. Seema Anand gives us an Indian folktale of the Mahua tree when long ago ‘penises measured 12 cubits and vaginas were located beneath the underarm’. The Morgans of Avalon and Medusa of Ancient Greece are protagonists in Xanthe’s two stories of apple.
A section on symbolism follows every story. This can be a paragraph to a page that flirts with semiotics indicating components or subjects of the story that can have deeper and other meanings as well as giving historical interpretation and cultural context to the story. In this way it is revealed Primrose represents eternal love, treasure finding and happiness; Yarrow is for courage, love and psychic powers; Hawthorn signifies the bringing together of masculine and feminine energies; Rose is beauty, courage, healing, love and protection; Mugwort is magic, lucid dreaming and consecration. And so this compendium of told stories conjures an enchanting herbal landscape. A ‘compilation of leafy tales and plant magic’ as Lisa Schneidau, storyteller and author, describes ‘Herba Mythica’ in her foreword, with much to ‘tickle your imagination and reawaken your wonder in the natural world’.
Wonder is hobbled, however, as the stories are placed in a framework of plant taxonomy and decorated with thin paragraphs of ecology, botany and green pharmacy appended like trinkets. Stories are arranged in alphabetical order of botanical name of the fifty-seven healing herbs, from Acanthus mollis to Zea mays. Xanthe explains that this ordering is in honour to her mother who loved Latin. But now we lose the grounding of the vernacular. Tamar Eluned Williams’ story ‘Carys of Nant Carfan’ demonstrates that names carry power and in foregrounding scientific names for the plants the book shifts paradigm. I’m now unsure of my footing in this land and I’m perplexed about the need for botanical descriptions of plant ‘characteristics’ when, throughout, the book is replete with line drawings of herbs and full colour illustrations occupy the centre pages. Herb actions, healing virtues, are listed in technical language and there are recipes for remedy-making. I feel uneasy about the melding of myth with plant science and herbal medicine in this particular arrangement and presentation of ‘Herba Mythica’. I’m especially uneasy about the prominence of ‘WARNING’; with boxed text that appears every twenty pages or so entreating readers to be cautious or not to use the herb. Having drawn us so close to the herb, enticed by story and symbolism, we are repelled, warned off. The effect is jarring. Michael Holland, once Head of Education at Chelsea Physic Garden who wrote the ‘characteristics’ sections in the book, hints in his Foreword that these sections may indeed be ‘an[unnecessary]other dimension’ to ‘this already multidimensional and rich compendium.’
Discussion in our Herb Society Book Club in January enabled me to explore why I was uneasy with the juxtaposition of science and story in ‘Herba Mythica’. Group members on the Zoom call gave examples where numerous ‘dimensions’ of herbal healing (phytotherapy, contemporary western herbal medicine, cunning craft, tradition, culture, energetics, green-pharmacy, science, pharmacology, spirit, astrology, etc.) are brought together successfully: Dilston Physic Garden; the Seed Sistas, (Fiona Heckels and Kazz Goodweather). The strength in these examples is their confidence in the practice of herbal medicine. It works, herbs heal. Xanthe’s ‘Herba Mythica’ strength lies in storytelling. I would like the book (in it’s second edition) to be bold about myth and folklore, to celebrate storytelling unconstrained by alien framings. I would like to read a comprehensive introduction to guide us through the nature of storytelling, positioning what we will encounter in the stories within a context of the aural/oral tradition. Setting us up for the listening, the imagining. These are stories in text that are intended to be performed by storytellers. I found it difficult to even start reading as my own voice, in my head, is such a poor story teller and I longed to hear the author give life, to bring drama to the words. So, in this second edition, I would enjoy short biographies of the thirty-one storytellers/authors as well as illustrations of the stories, perhaps in graphic form.
This book of tales brings an essence of performance art to the page. That is its heart. If readers, inspired by herb story, want healing remedies they can be directed to recipes in Catherine Conway-Payne’s ‘A Physic Garden Pharmacy, Herbology’. And if they are inclined to field botany, to The Royal Botanic Garden Kew’s ‘Plants of the World Online’ website.
Myths belong to religious or cultural traditions and serve those traditions. ‘Herba Mythica’has stories of creation, grace, violence, misogyny, mutilation, love, sex, family, death, healing, earth, evil, land, magic, monsters, spirit, jealousy, home, peace and more. Enough variety for any reader to find one or two stories that will resonate with their own extant emotions as I did with ‘It’s all in the Name’, self-heal. My unease about retelling myths and folk tales of healing plants is not with the story but with the intention of the storyteller. Stories are seductive. Who is telling the story to whom and for what purpose? Are we amusing audiences that view, or come to view, stories of healing plants simply as curiosity? Something particular to the past that can be dismissed, denigrated even. Myths and lore as fictitious beliefs, not as ways into the wonder and mystery of healing plants. Audiences already set against herbal medicine are reassured, affirmed by a diverting entertainment. This is my anxiety.
Perhaps what I have come to, in pondering my encounter with the book, is confirmation that herbs and stories have power.