Awakening and Sleeping
Last summer I presented on a concept I was developing called Herbal Theurgy. At the time I called it Theurgic Herbalism and my immortal beloved suggested I change the name, she also told me it was a book.
Behind Ayurvedic and Chinese (Daoist) conceptions of health is the idea that we want to live long enough to experience our “awakening”: moksha, soul immortality, realization.
Health is not only relief from disease, medicine is not only the treatment of symptoms. Health and Medicine is about expanding our physical capacities to hold greater awareness.
Awakening and enlightenment are dirty words these days. Everyone is going on their plant journeys (dietas) 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.
The sleeping end of the spectrum is not so different. Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious. “The Dreaming”, for the first nations people of Australia, references the time before history when the world was created and then also the ongoing creation of the world. Islamic traditions tell stories of dreaming imams and revelatory visions.
Lets escape the dualism of awakening and dreaming!
Here, I frame health and medicine as that which cultivates a greater capacity to hold and metabolize diverse experiences.
Theurgy
Theurgy is a ritual practice from the Greco-Roman world meaning the work of the gods, I interpret it as becoming godlike, or gods.
The rituals of theurgy emphasize 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 theurgy 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.
As far as I know though, theurgy concerns itself with ritual technologies for cosmic participation, but not with health itself.
My speculative move, my own potential history, is to reclaim a herbal lineage around practice of building capacity for cosmic wholeness. There is a speculative line: theurgy through alchemy and then a lost and now reconstituted herbal practice. If we go even farther back we can trace theurgy to the dream shamans of the eleatics, the earliest greek philosophers - like Parmenides, and perhaps further back still to the Melissae, the bees, the devorahs, the prophetess, priestess, oracles at Delphae.
Herbal Theurgy is a reclaiming of a lost herbal lineage around this specific tradition of building capacity for cosmic oneness. It is also a reconstitution of an alternate way of seeing that became rationalism and scientism, and perhaps even AI, as the rational tradition forked from plato to form theurgy at one end, and rationalist science on the other.
Modern Herbalism & Mantra/Yantra/Tantra
Traditional herbal practices are passed down by teachers in written Materia Medica, in gestures and practices, and in oral traditions and apprenticeships. One of my interests in a potential or speculative herbal theurgy, is integrating contemporary learnings from science such as: phytochemistry, physics, and laboratory techniques.
When I first presented this practice last summer in Crete, I thought with the South East Indian triad of mantra, yantra, and tantra, which I interpreted, somewhat loosely, as thought, device, and system.
How do we breakdown an herbal theurgy practice in to these three realms. The though of the plant, a plant meditation, a folk tale, or a materia medica. The mechanics and physics of the plant, or the graphical representations of molecules. The system of the plant medicine, tissue states or humours, the chinese organ system and metaphors, the ayurvedic doshas.
In contemporary science we have, the chirality of molecules, the way light refracts through living tissues, molecular structure, atomic structure, quantum indeterminacy, artificial life, alien life.
The magnesium that makes chlorophyll green. The iron that makes hemoglobin red.
What would practices capable of holding these different epistemologies and scales 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.
We looked at the mantra: learned the names of juniper, its lore, its material medica. We spoke the many names of jupiter. We engaged in organoleptic meditation. We touched the sprig of juniper, we ate the berry, we talked about laboratory techniques, distillation and the creation of Gin. We contemplate the words we use when we talk about Juniper, when we describe Juniper, when we tell stories of Juniper.
We looked at the yantra: the diagrams that represent Juniper, the mechanics of juniper, what causes the berries to be blue the leaves to be green, how it reproduces, its aromatics, its terraine. We put ourselves in asanas of various juniper molecules, holding different mudras to channel the different energies.
We looked at the tantra: the systems that include Juniper, the different traditions: eclectic, Ayurvedic, Chinese, Chemical, Biological, the different medicines of Juniper, the Chemical Pathways of Juniper Essential Oil: https://pdf.benchchem.com/1164/The_Chemical_Landscape_of_Eastern_Red_Cedar_Juniperus_virginiana_Essential_Oil_A_Technical_Guide.pdf
We jump from different scales and metaphysics and epistemologies, different systems to experience the one from the many and the many with the one.
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.
The practices are still emerging … in community …. with humans and more than humans.