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S2E23 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm one of your hosts Yucca. 

Mark: and then the other one, Mark.

Yucca: And this week we are talking about herbs, about plants, about Wildcraft all that good stuff. 

Mark: Yeah, exactly. You know, I was saying before we started to record, if you think about the stereotypical, which is hut, you know, they're out there in the woods, right. You know, all dripping with Moss and everything, and you step inside the threshold and you look up what you see are the rafters hung with bundles of various kinds of plants and herbs that are drying.

Right. So pretty much a part of the whole tradition and archetype of the witch or the healer or the, the pagan to be to be working with our local herbs and. and to do that with, for a variety of different reasons. So we're going to address that today with the caveat that neither Yucca nor I is either a botanist or an herbalist.

So we're just kind of nibbling around the edges of this, but wanted to make our listeners aware of it and give you our thoughts.

Yucca: exactly. I think that that image, that archetype is really interesting in today's conversation because very, very few of us live in that context anymore. That archetype, that image comes from at least as stories about times in which we lived in much smaller communities when we've lived much closer to the rest of nature.

And for many of us today, we live inside of, of very large urban areas in which the connection with the rest of nature is not so visible to us. Of course, we're still part of these cycles. We're alive. There's no way of getting out of that, but our society is set up in such a way that many of us are simply consumers.

By what has already been produced. And then it just magically goes away, whether that's a flush of the toilet or you put it in the bin and that gets taken away by the garbage truck. And we just, aren't part of the production element, let alone the death part and the decay, which we'll come back to in the fall.

When we come back to talking about compost and all of that good stuff, just cause we like to do things seasonally. But I think given that the, the connection with plants and of course not just plants, but fungi and, and all of the other very interesting

types of life that there are that I, think that that can be really, even more potent in our lives today because it's missing. 

Mark: I agree. I, I think so. And one of the things that struck me as you were talking about our urbanized environment is that the other thing that's happened is that we have really farmed. The expertise in various skills like medicine. And that's not to say that Western medicine is somehow wrong because generally speaking, it's not, it's very effective at what it's good at, but 

Yucca: that's another conversation of, it's very good at it. Certain things not so great at other things. And hopefully we can start to address that. 

Mark: right. But it used to be that medicinal activity was mostly the purview of yourself, yourself and your family. You kind of had to take care of this yourself. So if you didn't know anything about. The kinds of herbs that might help you, if you have, you know, a really terrible sinus cold or something like that, then you were just going to be miserable and maybe things would deteriorate from there.

But if on the other hand you knew that elderflower is a really effective tincture for head colds and congestion and stuff like that. Then you could remedy your situation and improve your symptoms. So, that image of the, the herbs drawing in the rafters yes, it's part of the whole witchy aesthetic which is cool.

We're into the witchiest. But it's also a reflection of a time when people just had to be much more self-sufficient because services were not as available.

Yucca: and, and today it's, it can be 

Mark: Cool.

Yu