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

hunting bounty, and other delicacies when they return home, but they also tell tales of wondrous encounters, dangers withstood, and victories achieved.
    The stories that were once told by such people to a rapt audience by the crackling fire have been partially passed down to us in fairy tales and legends. These boundary walkers were initiates, not parroting believers like the throng of churchgoers and sect members of today. Nor were they initiates in the sense of our modern scientists, who train their eyes only on the external data of the senses, painstakingly measuring, weighing, and numbering them. No, the people we are talking about combined an astute, precise observation of nature with an ear toward its internal workings. In the mirrors of their souls they looked into the soul of the forest. This forest soul appeared to them in the form of fairies and moss-beings, who instructed them about the medicinal powers of the roots and crystals and also revealed the entrances to the realm of Frau Holle. The soul of the forest appeared as tree elves, fire spirits, grim trolls, talking birds, and radiant virgins, and had conversations with the people.
    Nearly all primitive peoples send their pubescent boys into the wilderness, to the source of power and wisdom, for initiatory rites. For only deep in the woods, in the caves, or in another place far removed from the village, beyond human time and its sorry efforts, beyond motherly protection, can the boys set aside their childhood and experience their own true natures and the meaning of their existence. Under the guidance of older men, with the help of poisonous herbs and empowered by fasting, pain, and deprivation, the boys’ everyday consciousness dies. Themselves having become spirits, they encounter beings from beyond that will be their teachers. They meet their totem animals, they learn to recognize their animal helpers and befriend their own primordial, wild nature that has been untouched by society. Through this animal—the natives of Central America call it the nagual —they experience a power they have never imagined: It awakens the instinct of the jaguar, the sacred rage of the warrior, the intuition of the healer, the enthusiasm of the singer, or the spiritual energy of the thinker. It lets them dive into the depths or fly into the bright heavens, where they encounter gods. An unshakable self-confidence emerges through this experience in the regions beyond the thorny hedgerow.
    The experience of initiation is one of death and rebirth: Like wild game, the initiates are killed, chopped up, and cooked in the cauldron of the Great Goddess. They are reborn with a new personality, a new name, and a more mature outlook. They are born twice: the first time from their human mother and then again from the Great Mother. Only in this way can they truly become men, able to take over responsibility for the women and children, for the old and infirm, for the clan and the whole tribe.
    The initiation has been different for girls and usually not as dramatic. The most important secrets of womanhood were passed on through the course of the daily work with the grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and other female blood relations while gathering wild plants, sowing, hoeing, weeding, spinning, sewing, and cooking. The actual initiation was, and still is among many peoples, the first menstruation. Many Native Americans send the women to a menstrual hut outside the village where they learn the mysteries of the female body and fertility. As the fairy tale of Rapunzel suggests, we once had menstrual huts for girls in puberty under the care of an old “witch” (Diederichs, 1995: 267). Marriage and the birth of the first child were further initiations.
    Methods using psychedelic plants and traumatic pain (wounding, hunger, pulling teeth, tattooing and scarification, cutting), which catapult the soul into the beyond, play a less important role in the feminine mysteries because, according to the