{"id":1330,"date":"2003-10-29T18:25:00","date_gmt":"2003-10-29T18:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1330"},"modified":"2011-08-24T14:19:17","modified_gmt":"2011-08-24T20:19:17","slug":"witchcraft-medicine-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1330","title":{"rendered":"Witchcraft Medicine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants<\/em> is a collaboration<\/a> between three German anthropologists: Claudia M =üller-Ebeling, Christian Rätch, and Wolf-Dieter Storl. I ordered it because I’ll read anything that R?tsch<\/a> has written, and, unfortunately, not enough of his work has been translated from German to English. (The translator here is Annabel Lee, whose work also appears in the journal Tyr<\/em> — see the October 18 entry.<\/p>\n

The book is more a study of cultural transformation using texts and art work. The three “explore the demonization of nature’s healing powers and sensuousness, the legacy of Hecate, the sorceress as shaman, and the plants associated with witches,” to quote the back-cover blurb. <\/p>\n

This book is more historical than hands-on; from a practitioner’s position, I would rank it behind Dale Pendell’s<\/a> work. But it’s still fascinating and inspiring. <\/p>\n

One warning: don’t trust anthropologists making etymological arguments. “Cathar” (the heretics) does not derive from the German word for “tomcat.” (Storl gets it right: it’s from the Greek word for “pure.”) Nor does Boogie-Woogie, I will bet, derive from the same Indo-European root as the Russian Bog<\/em>, “god.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants is a collaboration between three German anthropologists: Claudia M =üller-Ebeling, Christian Rätch, 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 translator here is Annabel Lee, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[8,25],"class_list":["post-1330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-entheogens","tag-herbalism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-ls","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":55,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=55","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"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":1345,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1345","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":1},"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":1330,"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":13059,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13059","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":3},"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":2564,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2564","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":4},"title":"Occultism and Mushrooms","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 17, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"Not necessarily psychotropic mushrooms. To learn more about them, read Andy Letcher's Shroom or the works of Paul Stamets, Dale Pendell, etc. These are metaphorical mushrooms\u2014or mushrooms as metaphor\u2014from an article by Wouter Hanegraaff on the German scholar of esotericism Will-Erich Peuckert (1895-1969): To me, [Peuckert's] book [Pansophie] breathed\u00a0 an\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"occultism\"","block_context":{"text":"occultism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=occultism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1927,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1927","url_meta":{"origin":1330,"position":5},"title":"A Ritual Against Hitler That Really Happened?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Via the Pagan Newswire Collective (should I just have a dateline with \"PNC\" in it?) comes this link to a witchcraft ritual reportedly performed against Adolf Hilter and the Nazi regime in Maryland in January 1941, which is almost a year before the United States officially declared war. It was\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"England\"","block_context":{"text":"England","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=england"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1330","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=1330"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3154,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1330\/revisions\/3154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}