Free Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants by Claudia Müller-Ebeling, Christian Rätsch, Ph.D. Wolf-Dieter Storl

for alder, aluza (Indo-European alisa ), had something to do with a sacrificial cult. At the base of an alder a young man was chosen and sent to the Goddess as a bridegroom. According to Robert Graves, Alys was the name of the goddess of the burial island, similar to the Alycamps island in the Rhône River. The priestesses either buried the sacrificed on river islands such as these, which were covered in alder, or sank them in bogs. It is possible that the Elysian fields, the “islands of souls” of antiquity, were originally islands in similar rivers.
    The story of the daughter of Helios, as told by Virgil in the Aeneid, also belongs in this context. The girl dared her brother Phaeton to hitch the sun chariot without the permission of her father, the sun god. Because Phaeton was not strong enough to control the horses, he scorched the earth and caused the world to catch fire. Zeus was furious and killed him with a bolt of lightning. When the sister mourned his death on the banks of the Po River in Italy, her tears became alder trees.
    The Celtic people who invaded matriarchal, megalithic Europe identified the alder spirit not with the goddess of death but with Bran. In the Welsh “Battle of the Trees” (Cad Goddeu) it says:
     
    The long staffs of alder on your shield,
    Bran you are called, after the shimmering branches …
    The long branch of alder in your hand,
    Bran you are, after the branch which you carry.
     
    Bran is a god of the dead, a god of the underworld. Carrion-eating ravens are his birds. The West, where the sun-hero sinks, bloodred, into his underworldly domain where the island of the souls lies, is under his rule. Bran is the god with the cauldron who brings the dead back to life, the one who transforms the past into the future. A dead person who is thrown into the cauldron in the evening will be alive again on the next day—returning as a “person from beyond.”
    Oracle flutes were cut from the bones of the sacrificed victims and from alder wood (Ranke-Graves, 1985: 125). Shamans were also cooked in Bran’s cauldron and then put back together again. Thus, even though they still lived in the here and now, they were already from beyond, and like the bone and alder flutes they became an oracle giver from the dimension beyond. The cult of Bran was melded with the cult of Teutates, who also drowned humans in his cauldron in alder groves. Much later, during the Christian Middle Ages, the god was transformed into the Fisher King, the guardian of the Holy Grail who meditates on the depths of the waters.
    Bran’s cauldron was, above all, an attribute of the Great Goddess of Paleolithic times. It was her womb, her vagina, that bore all life-forms and then took them back again. The chosen, the shamans and the warriors, were chopped up and cooked in her cauldron. She then put the bones back together and vivified them. This cauldron is a fountain of youth. The moors and the alder breaks in which life disintegrates and rejuvenates itself are also cauldrons of the Goddess. Bran and Teutates have not suppressed the Goddess; they are only her stand-ins, her sacrificial priests, the guardians of her womb.
    This background clarifies certain customs and superstitions. We can now better understand why the Irish regard cutting down an alder a heinous act, and why the alder symbolizes departure and renunciation as well as rejuvenation. When vacating a house the Germanic people broke four alder branches and threw them in different directions. In the Middle Ages the breaking of a piece of alder wood over one’s head in court symbolized the complete severing of social relations with one’s family.
    Throughout western Europe alder branches were placed on the doorsteps of unpopular girls whom people avoided. And in Mecklenburg it was said of the dead, Hei is bie’n leiwen Gott, in’t Ellenbrauk (“He is with his beloved God in the alder break”).
    As a sacred and sacrificial tree that combines the element of fire (the