{"id":12750,"date":"2022-03-23T05:30:52","date_gmt":"2022-03-23T11:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12750"},"modified":"2022-03-23T11:26:44","modified_gmt":"2022-03-23T17:26:44","slug":"the-making-of-an-ethnobotanist-in-a-1960s-university-scene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12750","title":{"rendered":"The Making of an Ethnobotanist in a 1960s University Scene"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/8GRL_xPQYA8\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>One of the books on my ethnobotany shelves is <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3wxTg38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Witchcraft Medicine:Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants<\/em><\/a>, a colloboration between Wolf Dieter Storl, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Claudia_M%C3%BCller-Ebeling\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Claudia M\u00fcller-Ebeling<\/a>, and <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Christian_R%C3%A4tsch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Christian R\u00e4tsch<\/a>, all three anthropologists and ethnobotanists.<\/p>\n<p>M\u00fcller-Ebeling and R\u00e4tsch are married and live in Hamburg, but Storl was born in Germany in 1942 and came with his family to Ohio in 1953. Now he goes back and forth but lives primarily in Germany with his American wife.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3L1AZPR\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft wp-image-12752\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/storl.jpg?resize=276%2C409&#038;ssl=1\" alt=\"\" width=\"276\" height=\"409\" \/><\/a>Despite the cover and and subtitle, &#8220;A German ethnobotanist&#8217;s wild roots in the Psychedelic Sixties,&#8221; what\u00a0 Storll&#8217;s memoir, <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/37QF0IL\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Far Out in America<\/em><\/a>, really describes is the pre-psychedelic late 1950s and early 1960s, the time when only a few university students would have heard of LSD and \u2014 lacking a connection to certain psychology professors or a father working in the right section of the CIA \u2014 would have had no idea how actually acquire some.<\/p>\n<p>Storl himself describes <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3L1AZPR\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Far Out in America<\/em><\/a> as a story of personal adventure that would be &#8220;told in the hall of the gods.&#8221;\u00a0 When not in school, he sets out on epic hitchhiking adventures, passing through every subculture from Appalachian moonshiners to civil rights activists to Chicano adventurers to seasonal workers in national parks.<\/p>\n<p>I liked the two half-assimilated German beatniks, sons of German scientists brought to the US after World War Two &#8220;to continue their reearch on miracle weapons, rockets, antigravitational objects, and jet fighters.&#8221; They introduce college freshman Wolf Dieter to the music of Bob Dylan, whose 1963 album <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Freewheelin%27_Bob_Dylan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>The Freewheelin&#8217; Bob Dylan<\/em><\/a>, Storl says &#8220;expressed the feeings of the times, the <em>Weltschmerz<\/em>, world-wearienss, and all that was stirring young hearts.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For a bright young Ohian, Ohio State University is an obvious choice, and he goes off to Coumbus to study botany and agriculture, only to discover that he has enlisted in the Green Revolution, learning to &#8220;export high-yield &#8216;miracle seed&#8217; to backward peasants in Asia, africa, and South America,&#8221; as one of his professors explains. The program is totally about large-scale, mechanized, monoculture farming guided by technocrats like he was being groomed to become.<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 169px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/paulbourguignon.com\/images\/ErikaBourguignonheadshot.jpg?resize=159%2C169&#038;ssl=1\" width=\"159\" height=\"169\" \/><p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Erika Bourguignon in the 1970s.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>He drops out. After other false starts, he ends up in anthropology, where one of his professors is <a href=\"https:\/\/cfs.osu.edu\/news\/remembering-erika-bourguignon\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Erika Bourguignon (1924\u20132015)<\/a>, who taught more than forty years at OSU, and who was one of the few anthropologists to take &#8220;woo&#8221; \u2014 excuse me, &#8220;extraordinary states of consciousness&#8221; \u2014 seriously.<\/p>\n<p><strong>She published a lot, and when I was in grad school myself, her books and article were widely cited.<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7925\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Nikki Bado,<\/a> my friend and former Pagan-studies book series co-editor, was one of her students.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Another was Felicitas Goodman (1914\u20132005),<\/strong> whom I met in the 1990s and thought of as sort of the European <a href=\"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=9017\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Michael Harner.<\/a> She came to OSU as a middle-aged student, another one whose family emigrated to America after WW2, and earned a PhD there. She also started her own school of (neo)shamanism, The Cuyamungue Institute, in New Mexico, but also taught classes in Denmark, Germany, and other countries.<\/p>\n<p>When I edited <a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/37IuLpH\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Witchcraft and Shamanism <\/em>(1994)<\/a> for Llewellyn, I was thrilled to get a chapter from her, &#8220;Shamans, WItches, and the Rediscovery of Trance Postures.&#8221; For the whole story how how she managed postures depicted in ancient and and indigenous pictures and sculptures with different sorts of trance experiences, read her book <span id=\"productTitle\" class=\"a-size-extra-large\"><a href=\"https:\/\/amzn.to\/3L1Dsd5\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><em>Where the Spirits Ride the Wind: Trance Journeys and Other Ecstatic Experiences.<\/em><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<p>Wolf Dieter Storl has numerous YouTube videos, about two-thirds of them in German and others in English.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the books on my ethnobotany shelves is Witchcraft Medicine:Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants, a colloboration between Wolf Dieter Storl, Claudia M\u00fcller-Ebeling, and Christian R\u00e4tsch, all three anthropologists and ethnobotanists. M\u00fcller-Ebeling and R\u00e4tsch are married and live in Hamburg, but Storl was born in Germany in 1942 and came with his family [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,30,83,8,318,93,420],"class_list":["post-12750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-anthropology","tag-education","tag-entheogens","tag-ethnobotany","tag-germany","tag-ohio"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-3jE","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":55,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=55","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":0},"title":"Witchcraft Medicine","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants is a collaboration between three German anthropologists: Claudia M\u00fcller-Ebeling, Christian R\u00e4tsch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. I ordered it because I'll read anything that R\u00e4tsch has written, and, unfortunately, not enough of his work has been translated from German to English. (The translator\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13059,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13059","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":1},"title":"The Passing of Christian R\u00e4tsch, Magical Ethnobotanist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"I heard Christian R\u00e4tsch (1957\u20132022) speak in person only once, at a conference in England in the 2000s, shortly after I had bought a book he co-wrote, Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants. I also treasure a recorded lecture of his on henbane beer and such topics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ethnobotany\"","block_context":{"text":"ethnobotany","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ethnobotany"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Ratsch-300x211.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1330,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1330","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":2},"title":"Witchcraft Medicine","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants is a collaboration between three German anthropologists: Claudia M =\u00fcller-Ebeling, Christian R\u00e4tch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. I ordered it because I'll read anything that R?tsch has written, and, unfortunately, not enough of his work has been translated from German to English. (The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1345,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1345","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":3},"title":"Witchcraft Medicine","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants is a collaboration between three German anthropologists: Claudia M =\u00fcller-Ebeling, Christian R\u00e4tch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. I ordered it because I'll read anything that R?tsch has written, and, unfortunately, not enough of his work has been translated from German to English. (The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1360,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1360","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":4},"title":"Witchcraft Medicine","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants is a collaboration between three German anthropologists: Claudia M =\u00fcller-Ebeling, Christian R\u00e4tch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. I ordered it because I'll read anything that R?tsch has written, and, unfortunately, not enough of his work has been translated from German to English. (The\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"entheogens\"","block_context":{"text":"entheogens","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=entheogens"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":305,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=305","url_meta":{"origin":12750,"position":5},"title":"Hiding out in the valleyBlogging\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 12, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Hiding out in the valleyBlogging has been a minimum lately. On Friday the 5th, I set off for three days in the San Luis Valley, winding up here, where the sandhill cranes far outnumbered people, and where Jack the Chessie got to make a couple of \"hero dog\" retrieves.Duck-blind reading\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12750"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12762,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12750\/revisions\/12762"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}