The Mysterium
Materia Medica In The Time of Wonder Reborn
by Kiva Rose Hardin
“What wonder can do for us is to reveal a deep truth about the more-than human natural world – that is, the natural world than includes but vastly exceeds us – in all the unfathomable specificity of its countless avatars. Not its… use value, the currency of disenchantment, but its intrinsic value. One way of expressing which is: Not for sale. And that is a healing truth. It is good for us to know, and its benefits for mental, spiritual, social or even ecological health aren’t only ours. They feed back into care for the Earth. Indeed, I don’t think we have any chance of stopping or reversing ecocide without the truths afforded by its natural enchantments.”
— Patrick Curry, The Work of Wonder
My kitchen apothecary is often overflowing with freshly gathered plants, purple-tinged juniper berries overflowing a wooden bowl, great sheaves of Sagewort barely contained by their baskets, painstakingly gathered Mullein blossoms macerating in moonshine, and the wintergreen scented roots of Ceanothus a dark red against the white tea towel they rest upon. The more clearly poisonous or toxic plants are kept separately, Silverleaf Nightshade plants hang from the beams, Datura seedpods occupy a large black granite bowl, and Amanita dries in slices on wide trays. Henbane seeps pain relieving medicine into rendered fat while Anemone flowers lose their color to high proof alcohol in half gallon jars.
I understand the chemical science of my interactions with the plants, in as much as they are actually knowable. I deeply value that knowledge, born of study, training, skill, endless hours of research, years of experimentation and observation. And yet, this is only a small part of the story. Every time, every single time, I crush the dried flowers of Russian Sage between my fingers I am overtaken by a sense of wonder, an overwhelming rush of sensory knowledge and pleasure born of earned experience that runs together with a child like sense of wonder as fresh as the first time I bent to breathe in these exquisite purple blossoms.
Knowledge may be quantified, but wonder never will be. Wonder is the domain of the mysterium, a wild weaving of what we are all tangled up in but can never completely know. The mysterium are the unknown elements that make up the world. We cannot name them, but we know they exist. A mysteria is a piece of reality we cannot define, cannot entirely break down into knowable elements. To acknowledge the unknowable is to give power back to enchantment, and to take one step closer to immersing ourselves in the awe that is the flow state we are all seeking.
From the first time I grew, gathered, and worked with medicinal plants as a child, I was overcome by their beauty. Chopping and infusing those just gathered Sage leaves and Rose petals into vinegar I felt a bodily connection not only with my ancestors who had repeated these same motions for more generations than can be counted, but also with the world of the green other, alive in the dark dirt and speaking languages humans can only guess clumsily at.
From a sensorial approach, their myriad colors, textures, and scents are not only indications of their actions and effects, but also contributes an undeniably addictive aesthetic to the work of the plant healer, a dynamic beauty that is at once both sacred and mundane. The kitchen spices of every woman’s kitchen, the incense of every holy temple, the sacred visions humans have always chased through the caverns created by fungi and roots, just as we nurse our babies with milk made rich and abundant by common aromatic herbs. The place of plants is a hedge, a liminal space where many worlds meet and merge in the hands of those who know them.
Soil’s Song: Engaging the Numinous
The current materia medica is sometimes seen like tools in a toolbox, those useful objects to be categorized by reliable action, stored away in standardized forms, and used as needed. This mechanistic, modernistic approach to medicine may work in a functional way as far as results, especially in the short term. However, like most reductionistic approaches within our industrial world, this approach lacks elegance, nuance, and depth. As such, it also lacks spirit, it has been removed from the mysterium.
When we forget mystery, we forget ourselves and our larger connection to a living world. Plants are made up of myriad phytochemicals. They contain, as it is said, multitudes. Their medicine is not just the manifestation of their own bodies, but also of other organisms such as fungal endophytes that not impact the action of the herbs, but are sometimes actually responsible for the primary effect of the plants themselves.
I became an herbalist because I sensed the numinous within the plants, because they spoke so loudly to me of a mystery I deeply longed to understand and know. And if not to know, then to experience in whatever way I could. Almost two decades into intensive training and practice, I now realize my relationship with the plants is primarily about delving deeply into the mycelial network, both figuratively and literally. My work has turned primarily to ecology, psychology, and mythology in an attempt to knit together our wounded psyches with the thread of the forest we all have our origins in. At the root of everything are the agents of wonder, the plants themselves, menders of what is broken and symbols of all that is right in a troubled world.
Whether we practice herbalism only within our homes or are professional clinicians, as herbalists our work is to know the plants, to understand their actions in a way that allows us to help others. Herbalism is practical work, deeply rooted in what is needed and what works. It is also inherently devotional and mystical work, a lifetime given to understanding beings both intensely sentient and ultimately unknowable.
The Woven Green: Animistic Biognosis
Healing is relational at every level. There is no isolation, even in illness. Behind the illusion of the separate self sitting alone in the dark is the network we belong to. Ephemeral flesh and glimmering psyche bound by the green and white filaments that make up the mycelial-like network that is all of us. And by all of us, I speak not only of humans, but of sentient life as a whole.
Relationships are defined not only by how each member is alike, but also in how they differ. By how vastly varied pieces are identifiable by the very differences that cause them to connect seamlessly to another element. Plant to human, we wrap ourselves in each other, react, respond, devour each other in the ever turning cycles of life. Where they touch us, we blister or mend, we drink them down and dream, dissolve, wake up again. From the mind bending transformations brought on by psychoactive substances such as Datura to the stimulating prickling of roasted Ilex leaves to the languid bliss of Mucuna we have evolved to be connected to, but different from, the plants. Plants are not human, they are the more than human.
So often, we feel the need to represent the other as more like us in order to understand or sympathize with it. And while this is understandable, it does not reach the truth of the nature of the other. Their nature is not ours. We are connected, related, sometimes symbiotic, but distinctly different. Therein is the beauty of the relationship between herbalist and herb, plants and people. When we can accept the other as a part of ourselves while still recognizing both overlap and divergence, only then will we begin to understand not only our own nature, but that of the green world we are so entwined with.
Talismans and touchstones, each plant in our materia medica is a seamless stitching of practicality and mystery. Yarrow guiding the behavior of blood in the body, Alder freeing stagnant lymph, Pulsatilla restoring peace to the troubled mind. In the patterns of release and stimulation, cessation and trigger, drawing in and pushing out, we find the psycho-chemical dance of healing between plant and person.
We are members of the mysterium, caught up in the wild enchantment that allows us to bloom.