The first talk I did on Saturday was entitled 'Reclaiming Our Herbal Heritage.' It's a theme I often return to especially after a glass of wine and a bucket of bitter chocolate
...ahem... well, when I started researching for my book I began to notice certain themes recurring time and again. And the more I looked, the more I found.
Basically, my theory is this - that the early Christian Church did it's best to either appropriate or suppress the use of plants in pre-existing pagan rituals, particularly in northern Europe (which, let's face it, is the area I know best.)
For many of us Pagans plants symbolise the cyclical nature of existence: birth, growth, death, rebirth and metamorphosis. Christians on the other hand weren’t all that interested in what plants symbolised because they believed everything – life, death etc. was controlled by their God.
But it wasn’t easy for the early Church to convert people to this new way of thinking. They used two main methods to overcome this:
The first thing they tried was using the plant to promote Christianity. Like St Patrick and the shamrock. Basically they changed any link between plants and pagan deities and nature spirits into links with Saints. We’ll call this Christianisation.
But Christianising didn’t always work. Plan B was to preach that the plant was a home to devils, witches or demons; or that it was somehow dangerous. This was to frighten people away. We’ll call this Demonisation.
Now the fact that the Christian church actually did these things at all helps answer our first question – did we have a herbal heritage? Obviously we did or they wouldn’t have needed to subvert it. They could have just ignored it. But it was clearly too important to ignore.
And this helps us see that we do indeed have to reclaim our herbal heritage - because much of it was either Christianised or demonised.
We simply have to work backwards from whatever scraps of information we can find.
And the first place to look isn’t in the fields or hedgerows, but actually in the records of early Church edicts. For example, in 452CE at the Second Council of Arles, the Church passed a decree that prohibited burning lights near trees, rocks, crossroads and springs. Any Bishop who allowed it to continue was to be excommunicated.
That’s interesting. The senior clergy had to be threatened! Paganism wasn’t going quietly. And Pagans in Europe were burning lights in places they must have considered sacred. And one of the places mentioned is ‘trees.’ It’s easy enough to reclaim that idea. A couple of tea lights, a box of matches and head off to your nearest tree… why not?
In another edict around the same time, the Emperor Theodosius II ordered that sacred groves should be cut down “unless they had already been appropriated for some purpose compatible with Christianity." That shows how their minds were working. If you couldn’t Christianise it or demonise it then you just chopped it down!
And still, they couldn’t stop people venerating trees even though the early Church did its damndest to cut down sacred trees all over Europe.
In the next century – that’s the 6th century - the Council of Nantes ordered the destruction of Druidic Stones and holy trees. So people were still visiting these holy sites. And threatening the bishops hadn’t stopped them.
In the late 8th century – over 200 years later, the Emperor Charlemagne issued some more edicts - almost identical. In the 11th century King Canute had the same problem in England. And what this shows is that the Church found it almost impossible to eradicate Paganism. And this is good news for us. It means we might be able find some of our herbal heritage even though we have to look for it under a layers of Christianity.
Because you can knock down shrines, you can smash statues… but you can’t get rid of the plants.
I'll try and blog some more on this subject tomorrow....
