🍄Poisonous Plant Medicine 🍄
Week 6 | Mandrake & Amanita: The Lost Wisdom of Shamanic Lineages

Mandrake and amanita muscaria are perhaps the most mythologized of all plant world beings.

Mandrake even makes an appearance in Harry Potter (yes, those screaming mandrakes are based on real plant lore!)

The red and white caps of amanita muscaria, also known as fly agaric, are perhaps the most easily recognized symbol of psychedelic plant medicine 🍄Most Christmas lore is actually rooted in amanita muscaria lore. Shamans of Northern Europe would wear red and white capes, going door to door to bring divinatory messages during the winter months - sound familiar? Reindeer are known to eat these little mushrooms, hence the mythology of flying reindeer and Rudolph’s red nose.

In the final class of this series we will speak about the forgotten shamanic lineages tied to these plants and discuss as much of their endless lore as we can fit in!

I'll be teaching this class tomorrow at @animamundiherbals and online on March 31st and April 28th.

🍄Poisonous Plant Medicine🍄
Week 5 | Yew & Hellebore: Meeting The Crone

Meetings with the Crone are inevitable on the poison path. The Crone is a wise elder archetype who has wisdom she wants to pass down to us… but she does not allow for anything less than authenticity. Think Baba Yaga. I seem to meet her most often when I’m hanging around with hellebore or yew. Today we’ll talk about what to expect (the unexpected) when working with The Crone.

Last winter a fence fell on top of my yet to bloom hellebore plant and I wasn’t able to fix the fence for 6 weeks. I assumed it was a goner. But to my surprise when the fence was finally lifted, that little hellebore not only sprouted new leaves but had over 10 new flowers blooming - all whilst in near complete darkness! If that isn’t the most beautiful metaphor for the human experience, I don’t know what is.

The yew tree is thought to be the mythic Yggdrasil, or World Tree. They can live to be thousands of years old and are among the oldest of all living organisms on the planet. They are often found in old cemeteries where their roots intertwine with the skeletons of the dead.

I'll be teaching this class at @animamundiherbals this Thursday night, and online on March 17th and April 7th 🖤✨

🍄Poisonous Plant Medicine🍄
Week 4 | Foxglove, Monkshood, & The History of Witches Flying Ointments

Did you know that the image of witches flying on broomsticks comes from a psychedelic folk practice from the middle ages? Unfortunately, we have lost all documentation from the folk herbalists using this type of divinatory medicine during that time period. The only written accounts we have are survived in court records of witch trials where one of the main ingredients of witches flying ointments was said to be the fat of Christian children… sigh. In this week’s class we will talk about how we can recover and reclaim this ancient practice - free from false dogma!

We will also discuss the lore surrounding foxglove and monkshood - two very deadly poisons whose extracted alkaloids are used in some of our modern Western medicines.

If you are local to Brooklyn you can drop into this class this Thursday at @animamundiherbals, otherwise I am teaching it online on March 3rd and March 24th.

I’m currently at the library getting some work done and I remembered a thought I had earlier this week as I sowed my *deadly* poisonous aconite seeds:
How is this plant, called “the most prompt of all poisons” by Pliny the Elder, perfectly legal yet things as medicinally, psychologically, and spiritually beneficial as cannabis, psilocybin mushrooms, and ayahuasca illegal?

Unfortunately, I think we all know the answer to that. If aconite were safely ingestible and consciousness awakening it would be promptly outlawed. Plant can kill - no problem. Plant can cause you to question reality - it’s a danger to society and must be stopped at all costs.
This is not to say that aconite is not a magical plant with the power to shift our consciousness. We can do a lot of deep inner work on the plant spirit level but we have to know how to support that work in ourselves. Learning how to journey inwards without the use of consciousness shifting plants is a skill I hope that everyone has the privilege to learn in their lifetime.

This image is a page from Veneficium by Daniel A. Shulke

Thrift store find ✨ Monkshood aka aconite aka wolfsbane ✨

Experimentations with Amanita Muscaria 🖤🍄🖤

Trying to learn the best way *for me* to work with this ally. The spirit of fly agaric is strong and my normal course of action would be to just work with it on a plant spirit level. But from the first time this mushroom appeared in my dreams it seemed to be encouraging me to ingest. Last week I had an ancestral healing session with @adrienne_sloan where I met an ancestor who showed me images of Amanita tea and asked for offerings of it. I never thought Amanita would be a central ally for me, but here we are.

Today is the last day to sign up for the Poisonous Plant Medicine series. The next time I offer this course, I will be raising prices for it. Tomorrow we will be learning about plant spirit communication and poison as medicine - the foundations for my work with poisonous plants! You can drop into each class individually or take the whole 6-week course. Week 6 is when we will learn from Amanita Muscaria.

🍄Poisonous Plant Medicine🍄
Week 3 | Datura & The Persephone Myth: Healing Trauma Through Psycho-spiritual Death & Rebirth

“God’s presence is there in front of me, a fire on the left,
a lovely stream on the right.
One group walks toward the fire, into the fire, another
toward the sweet flowing water.
No one knows which are blessed and which not.
Whoever walks into the fire appears suddenly in the stream.
A head goes under on the water surface, that head
pokes out of the fire.
Most people guard against going into the fire,
and so end up in it.” – Rumi

Persephone is both the Greek goddess of flowers and Queen of the Underworld - what a beautiful dichotomy! After she was kidnapped by Hades, he created a shade garden of plants able to grow in the darkness of the Underworld, filled with the plants included in this course. The Persephone myth is a powerful analogy for what happens when we walk through the fire of our pain and emerge on the other side, newly reborn. In today’s class I will share the Persephone myth and explain how we can apply its lessons to our own lives.

Datura has historical uses that span the globe, from being holy to Shiva worshippers in India, to being included in some of the brews of ayahuasca shamans, to being worshipped as a God by tribes of Western North America and the Huichol of Mexico.

I may be most excited about Week 3 of the Poisonous Plant Medicine series. The Persephone myth is deeply important to me (duh) and Datura has been an incredibly ally and mentor to me over these last few years.

If you are local to Brooklyn you can drop into this class this Thursday at @animamundiherbals, otherwise there is 1 spot left for the February 17th online class, and a few more for the March 10th online class.
If you'd like to take this course in its entirety there are still a few spots left for the second group whose first class is *this Sunday*!

This is your last chance to take the course at this price point. When I offer this class again next I will be raising the prices. Don't worry, I will still be offering sliding scale pricing for those who need it!

🍄 Poisonous Plant Medicine 🍄
Week 2 | Belladonna & Henbane: Sex, Death, & The Unknown

Sex, death, and what is unknown are generally considered taboo topics of discussion. Poisonous plants will lovingly take us right into those oft avoided places. Almost all the poisonous plants we will discuss through this series of classes are aphrodisiacs. Why would so many plants be connected with both our entry into life and our exit? These plants suggest that there is little separation between life and death, pleasure and suffering - and the best way to understand this is to go right to the places that seem the scariest to our conditioning!

Belladonna, aka deadly nightshade, literally means “beautiful woman,” her latin name Atropa comes from the Greek fate “Atropos” whose job it was to decide when each human life was to come to an end.

Henbane has many myths associating it with the Underworld, including its use in the wreaths that crown the souls of the dead as they descend to Hades. In European folklore it was used to attract lovers, and is still used for divination in communicating with the spirits of the Underworld.

Spots are still available for the Poisonous Plant Medicine online course. Thursday night will be the second class at @animamundiherbals!
All of these classes can be attended as the full 6 week course or you can drop in for individual classes.

Pictured above is a little painting of Belladonna I made about a year ago for a poisonous plant zine called "Persephone's Plants" that is due for a reboot soon