Herbal Therugy - Awakening, Sleeping, and Integrating
A Transmission from Eon Meridian
Awakening and Sleeping
Last summer I presented on a concept I was developing called Herbal Theurgy—at the time I called it Theurgic Herbalism.
Behind Ayurvedic and Chinese (Daoist) conceptions of health is the idea that we want to live long enough to experience our awakening: moksha, immortality, realization.
Health is more than relief from disease or the treatment of symptoms. It is about expanding our physical capacities to hold greater awareness.
Awakening and enlightenment are somewhat dirty words these days. Everyone is going on their plant journeys looking for awakening. A scholar friend of mine likes to say that perhaps we should stop talking about awakening altogether. Maybe what we need is to learn how to sleep.
But the other end of the spectrum offers the same movement. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. The Dreaming names the ongoing creation of the world for many First Nations peoples of Australia. Islamic traditions tell of dreaming imams and revelatory visions.
Lets escape the dualism of awakening and dreaming!
I frame health or medicine as cultivating a greater capacity to hold and metabolize diverse experiences.
Theurgy
Theurgy
Theurgy is a ritual practice from the Greco-Roman world. It means the work of the gods—or perhaps, work toward becoming godlike.
Its rituals seek union with the divine, a kind of Greco-Roman response to the Dao or to Moksha.
As a Jew from America I often wonder: is this another inheritance of empire? Should I return to Kabbalah? Should I wait for some new download from outer space?
For now, I am staying with theurgy.
In my admittedly limited understanding, theurgy concerns itself with ritual technologies for cosmic participation more than with health itself. My speculative move—my own potential history—is to reclaim a herbal lineage around this question of building capacity for cosmic wholeness. Theurgy through alchemy and today an herbal reintegration - an herbal theurgy.
Herbal Theurgy is a reclaiming of an herbal lineage around building capacity for cosmic oneness.
Modern Herbalism & Mantra/Yantra/Tantra
Traditional herbal practices are passed down by teachers in written Materia Medica and in gestures and practices in oral traditions and apprenticeships. One of my interests in a potential or speculative herbal theurgy, is introducing contemporary learnings in science and plants, phytochemistry, physics, and experimental methods - for example.
When I first presented this practice I thought through the triad of mantra, yantra, and tantra, which I interpreted, somewhat loosely, as thought, device, and system.
The chirality of molecules.
The way light refracts through living tissues.
The magnesium that makes chlorophyll green.
The iron that makes hemoglobin red.
What would practices capable of holding these different scales actually look like?
What are the asanas of Herbal Theurgy?
What are its mudras?
Its rituals?
Its experiments?
How might a body learn to think simultaneously with cells, forests, ancestors, chemistry, and stars?
That we are truly light bodies.
Juniper
In my original presentation I worked with an herbal theurgy of juniper because there happened to be a juniper tree outside my window.
Only later did I discover that the day of the presentation was Saint Juniper’s feast day.
The Experiment
The experiments continue.
Herbal Theurgy has become an ongoing investigation into how we hold multiple scales of reality at once: the molecular and the ecological, the quantum and the planetary, the body and the cosmos. It is cultivating the capacity to inhabit these different scales and the wandering among them.