By Abrah Arneson

Let the beauty we love be what we do. – Rumi

The sun’s warmth is generous. It is full of hope. The sun beckons us to emerge from shadows and bloom. The sun inspires the best in us. Northern people know this. On the first warm spring day, Northerners come out of their houses, turn their faces towards the sun, and smile.

In the north the sun is a goddess—gentle, loving, and healing. During mid-summer rituals when the sun rides high in the sky, Celts honour Aine, the Goddess of summer, love, and wealth. Our bright life giving star is named after the Norse Goddess Sunna, known for her kindness. Europe’s oldest sun Goddess belongs to the Sami, the indigenous people of Scandinavia. She is Beaivi, the Goddess who blesses plants, reindeer, and sanity.

The Sami do not anthropomorphize Beaivi. She is not a Goddess with long flowing hair and radiant beauty. Nor is she old and wrinkled. I am not even sure if we can give Beaivi a gender from a western point of view or even call her a Goddess. Beaivi is the gentle, glowing caress that thaws frozen waters, warms the earth, and awakens plants from their deep slumber. The Sami tell stories of the reindeer carrying Beaivi across the sky. The Sami call the reindeer, “The Heart of the Earth.”

One of the first plants to receive Beaivi’s blessing and awaken is angelica (Angelica archangelica). In early spring, while the north and south winds fight for sovereignty over the frozen earth, angelica rises like a flame and calls to the beloved sun Goddess, “I am here. Remember me.” Angelica reaches for the Sun like a lover long separated from her beloved’s touch. Angelica is a plant that belongs to the sun. And like the Sun, angelica is a generous plant. In early Spring when food is still scarce, angelica nourishes the reindeer who have wandered all winter long and the bear who has just awoken.

How angelica received its name is a well-known story. It was the mid 14^th century when the Black Death was sweeping across Europe indiscriminately harvesting the souls of the rich, the poor, man, woman, and child. Rotting corpses pile up at the edges of towns. People awoke in the morning feeling well and strong and were dead by nightfall. It was a terrifying time in the history of humanity. No one knew how to cure the Black Death.

Then a Benedictine monk (sometimes the story replaces the monk with an Italian Physician) had a dream. In the dream Archangel Michael (sometimes the angel is Raphael or Gabriel) appeared and showed him the plant to cure the plague. The plant in the dream was angelica. And so, angelica was named for an angel, and its profound healing virtues were endorsed by the church.

Before the plague years, angelica grew like a weed in ditches all over Europe. After the monk’s dream, it became precious and was coveted as the greatest remedy that could protect one’s soul from the Grim Reaper’s scythe. If you had a piece of angelica in your pocket, you were considered lucky, for it could not only save your life, it could make you rich.

As angelica disappeared from wild places, it reappeared in medicinal herb gardens. Laws were passed to protect the cultivated angelica. If a man was caught in another’s angelica patch, it was lawful to hit him on the head, knock him down, and take his clothes.

A hundred years later, in memory of those terrible years where 20 million souls were lost, English botanist John Gerard wrote this in his famous herbal: Angelica as a singular remedie against poison, and against the plague, and all infections taken by evil and corrupt aire.¹

Today research shows angelica’s volatile oils have significant antibacterial and antiviral actions. It is effective against Clostridium difficile, Clostridium perfringens, Enterococcus faecalis, Eubacterium limosum, Peptostreptococcus anaerobius, Candida albicans² and Staphylococcus aureus, and Escherichia coli³. It is effective against herpes simplex virus type 1 and coxsackievirus B3.⁴ These are just a few of the micro-organisms angelica supports the body in overcoming.

Before the angel appeared in the monk’s dream and before the plagues ravished Europe, angelica was named for the bear. Northern Europeans called the plant Bear Pipe.

Bear is the great herbalist of wild places. Bear knows where the medicinal roots grow and how to use their medicine. There is a North American plant called osha (Ligusticum spp.), meaning Bear Root in many indigenous languages, that grows in the mountains and foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It is very similar to European angelica. Osha is named after the bear because it is the first plant the bear seeks out when he wakes in the spring. After digging up the root, the bear chews it to a pulp and then spits it all over his body. He then rolls around on the ground to work the medicinal juices deep into his coarse fur. This kills off anything that might have made a home on his body while he slept long and deep. Once he is satisfied that he is nice and clean, bear seeks out a female bear and offers her a piece of osha root.

It is said if you dream of a bear, you will be able to learn the secrets of plant medicine. Bears are not only great herbalists. Bears, like monks, are also great dreamers.

Bear carries messages between worlds. Old folk songs from the mountains in Norway are about bear’s dreamtime journey during her long winter sleep. During the first part of winter, bear sleeps on her left side, sucking her left paw, dreaming of the past, gathering wisdom from ancestors to carry forward into the spring. On February 2^nd, the day the Celt’s marks as the Heart of Winter, bear turns onto her right side and begins the dream of spring. Bear dreams into being the first warm days when she will emerge from her den, cubs in tow, and seek out medicinal roots. Once refreshed from sleeping in a musty den all winter, she dreams of playing her flute.⁵ Her flute she crafts from the stem of the angelica plant. When Bear sends her breath through the long hollow tube of angelica’s stem, a deep, soulful melody ignites and floats through the forest, over the mountains, and to the sea beckoning the sun’s generous warmth to return and enliven the ground loving bearberry and the great oak, the tiny black fly and soaring eagle, the leaping salmon and crawling worm.

The Sami people still make flutes from angelica’s stems. They say angelica’s flutes know magical songs that guide those with a question to the land of the dead to find lost souls. Once found, the angelica flute’s enchanting music brings the souls home.⁶

Let me tell you a story.

Several years ago, I met a man named Ailo Gaup. He was a Sami man, a journalist, and a poet. He wore t-shirts with collars and blue jeans with a belt. He had a round belly, a handsome brown face, and sparkling blue eyes. He loved to play and laugh. Once when we were picking blackberries on a sunny July day, delighting in the berries’ sweet warmth, Ailo threw himself on the ground, rolled onto his back, and kicked his feet into the air growling like a bear with a belly full of berries. Ailo was a shaman. He carried Bear’s medicine.

There was a healing song Ailo sang. It was a timeless song, a song he learned from a very old woman with wrinkles like deep canyons and rivers carved in ancient land. He learned the song in Greenland. When Ailo sang this song, souls came home. This sacred song is the Bear’s Song. Its bittersweet melody rises and falls like a flute’s sorrowful call. The Bear’s Song travels far across space and spirals through time. The Bear’s Song unburdens the lost soul’s grief that sends them into exile, the hurt that cannot be explained, the horror that has frozen in their eyes. The Bear’s Song caresses the heart’s longing to be whole. When the song is over and silence fills all space, the soul is whole, and the heart radiates like the Sun.

Now let’s return to the years of plague and a very famous story of a flute player—The Pied Piper of Hamelin. There was a small village called Hamelin, and it was overrun by rats. There were rats everywhere. They were in the church, in the mill (especially in the mill), in the gardens, in the ale house, in the houses, and in the street. There were more rats than people and cats. The townspeople were frightened because they knew rats carried disease. Oh! The poor people of Hamelin, how were they going to rid themselves of the nasty, filthy rats?

Then one day a strange looking fellow arrived in the village. His clothing was too colorful, much too colorful for the devoted people of Hamelin. He wore bells that jiggled as he walked. (His walk was more like a dance.) The stranger was small in stature but a little plump and had a mischievous twinkle in his eye. The people of Hamelin became weary of this stranger for they did not wear colorful clothes, and they certainly did not wear bells. The people of Hamelin hoped he would not stay. He was too strange for the likes of them.

When the mayor asked the stranger his business, the stranger replied, “I have come to rid your village of the rats. For a price, of course,” the stranger added.
The mayor threw the man in colorful clothing a threatening look, “Do not make jest of the grave misfortune my people suffer.”
The stranger answered, “I assure you I am serious about my offer.”
The mayor’s wife, who was standing next to him, nudged her husband with her elbow. “What do you have to lose? If he can do it, you are a hero, and if he cannot, no one will blame you,” she whispered in the mayor’s ear.
The mayor puffed himself up as he prepared to negotiate, “If you rid Hamelin of the rats, what do you want in return?”
The stranger said, “Gold. A 1000 gold coins.”
The mayor coughed when he heard the strange man’s price, and his wife nudged him again, and the mayor agreed, “It’s a deal. If you rid our good village of the rats, we will pay your price.”
Shaking the mayor’s hand, the stranger promised, “By nightfall there will be no rats in this village.” And he took his flute from his pocket.

It was an eerie bewitching tune the stranger played on his flute. Its hypnotising melody floated through the cobbled streets of Hamelin, around corners and through windows. The tune mesmerized the townsfolk, and they stood listening as if frozen in time.

Suddenly a whirling, scurrying sound filled the village, and a thousand rats burst from every nook and cranny. The rats hurried towards the stranger enchanted by the music played on his flute. As the stranger walked towards the outskirts of the village, still playing his haunting song, the 1000 rats followed him.

When he arrived at the sea, the rats, spellbound by the music, raced into the water. Waves washed over them and pulled the rats out to sea. All the rats of Hamelin drowned.

When the stranger returned to the town of Hamelin, he expected a hero’s welcome. But that is not what the good people of Hamelin offered him. The people, while happy that the rats had left, were fearful of the magic the stranger had woven with his flute. They whispered amongst themselves that he was an enchanter. The mayor accused the stranger of being in the service of the devil and refused to pay the promised fee. The stranger, not happy that the people had turned their back on him and reneged on their part of the bargain, left with a scowl on his face but not before saying, “I will be back in one year. And you will be sorry.”

As the year passed, the people of Hamelin forgot bit by bit about the stranger and their broken promise. Then one year later from the very day that the rats drowned in the sea, the stranger returned. He walked through the village, his flute playing an eerie tune. The melody wafted through the streets, around corners, and into windows of the quiet village of Hamelin. One by one, the children of the village began to appear dancing to the bewitching music. And when the Stranger headed to the outskirts, the children followed him. None of the children were ever seen again.

This is a creepy story for a child’s bedtime. But aren’t most fairy tales creepy? What is chilling about this fairy tale is the truth in it. In 1282 one hundred and thirty children disappeared from Hamelin, and no one remembers why. The only record of this troubling loss is a shattered stained glass window in the town’s church. But there is no record of rats or a piper.

It was 250 years after the children disappeared that the rats and the Piper arrived in Hamelin, and the story became a warning about the plague and a treacherous stranger whose magic was for sale. Around the same time the Pied Piper appeared in Hamelin, Bear Pipe was renamed angelica, and monks began to plant it in their gardens to ward off witches. Meanwhile, women planted angelica to protect them from the inquisitor’s blood hungry eyes and accusations of witchcraft. The story of the Pied Piper was conjured during the burning times in Germany as traditional healers, herbalists, and midwives were hunted down, tied to a stake, and set on fire. Some villages were left with only one woman after the witch hunters rode out of town on their bloody horses with pockets full of gold after saving village after village from the women in cahoots with the Devil.

The curious thing about this fairy tale is that the Pied Piper becomes the villain in the story, while the mayor, who breaks his promise, and the townspeople, who turn their backs on the stranger, are viewed as reasonable. The story tells us it is okay not to honor traditional healing rituals and suggests it is better to live with the trauma we know than the healing we do not, or perhaps put another way, the devil we know rather than the angel we don’t. This fearful weariness of the unknown the story insinuates is not the nature of the Sun. Nor is it the nature of angelica. The Sun shines and brings warmth to all of life. It does not hold back its gifts for only the chosen few. Angelica, a plant that grows in ditches, offers medicine to all. This is the way of the Sun.

Try to imagine what it was like in the mid 1500s when the Piper and his flute were added to the horrible story of Hamelin’s lost children. The plague two hundred years earlier had killed entire families. A shoemaker from Tuscany wrote of the terrifying times:

Father abandoned child, wife, husband, one brother another; for this illness seemed to strike through the breath and sight. And so they died. And none could be found to bury the dead for money or friendship. Members of a household brought their dead to a ditch as best they could, without priest, without divine offices….⁷

In the 1500s, the plague was not killing as it did in the 1300s. The infectious disease continued to rise up as if from nowhere and carry away children and the elderly, but it did not spread as it had a century earlier. The ongoing fear of sickness and death, the horrors experienced just two generations earlier, must have left a hollow emptiness, a darkness, a terror, in Europe’s soul.

Three hundred years later, 20 million died on European soil again during World War I. T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men describes the emptiness in survivors’ souls.

The Hollow Men by T.S. Eliot

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us-if at all-not as lost
Violent souls, but only
the hollow men
The stuffed men.

It is unsettling that both the Black Death and World War I took 20 million European lives. Even more disturbing, as Europe mourned its dead, merciless killing of innocents took place. The plague was one justification for the death of 80,000 women during the burning times, and the trauma left behind by WWI lead to the horrors of the Holocaust. Both the murder of women and Jews⁸ followed a time of intense trauma. As corpses were disposed of in mass graves, both during the witch hunts and later the holocaust, it was said that the persecuted were the ones who brought the terrible suffering down on ordinary people. It was the other, the one who was different, that needed to be destroyed to ensure everyday people could live in peace and harmony. Is this what happens when ancient healing traditions are disrespected, demonized, and lost?

If there is ever a time when angelica’s medicine is needed, it is following mass trauma.

Herbalists say angelica’s hollow stem understands the medicine needed to heal the hollowness left behind by trauma. They say angelica is for the person who has become hollow. A hollow person has lost their will. They feel no purpose. It is like a howling wind ripped through the very core of their being and blew out the spark they carried—the spark that is a gift from the Sun. When someone is hollow, their heart has become cold. When a heart is cold, the soul is lost. The light of their inner Sun is extinguished.

I remember when a hollow woman came for help to the clinic. The skin on her cold hands had a blue twinge. Her hair was limp and dull, her body long and thin as sat rigid in the soft cushions of the chair. Her eyes scanned the room wide with fear. She opened her pale lips to speak, and no words came out.

“How can I help?” I asked.

She whispered, “I do not know. I feel hollow.”

She was a woman who had barely survived her childhood. Her soul was torn to pieces like one would tear rags from an old sheet. She no longer knew how to ask for help. She no longer knew what she needed. She no longer had words of her own.

I offered her angelica hoping its warmth would ignite a small flame in her heart, warming her once again. Angelica medicine carries the gentle warmth of springtime’s Su—the warmth that calls to the frozen longing for life hidden deep inside winter’s darkness. Angelica, like the Sun, knows how to awaken springtime’s seeds of hope, creativity, and joy. Angelic infused with sunshine brings lost souls home.

After a few months of tender encouragement, patient listening, and daily doses of angelica, she dropped by the clinic unexpectedly. This was a good sign I thought. Spontaneity is a kind of generosity that allows life to unfold uncontrived like a child’s summer day. She asked me to feel her hands. They were warm. She giggled and said, “Warm hands, warm heart,” and gave me a bear of a hug. She told me she was beginning to remember. Remember who she was.

Angelica has a special affinity for our energy body. The energy body is the fine channels and tubes that weave our mind and body together. Emotions flow through the energy body’s channels and tubes. Our energy body can be infused with the warmth of love or burn with passionate intensity. It can also freeze in hatred or become stagnant with depression’s coldness. It is the inner Sun’s vibrancy, or lack of it, that either brings lovingkindness and inspiration to our lives or a grey palate of distance and loneliness.

In the center of the energy body is a hollow tube called the central channel. The Persian poet and Sufi master, Rumi uses the metaphor of the flute to describe the central channel.

Body flowing out of spirit,

spirit up from body: no concealing
that mixing. But it’s not given us

to see the soul. The reed flute
is fire, not wind. Be that empty.

Hear the love fire tangled
in the reed notes, as bewilderment

melts into wine. The reed is a friend
to all who want the fabric torn

and drawn away. The reed is hurt
and salve combining. Intimacy

and longing for intimacy, one
song. A disastrous surrender

and a fine love, together. The one
who secretly hears this is senseless.⁹

without being nourished every day. But if someone doesn’t want to hear the song of the reed flute, it’s best to cut conversations short, say good-bye, and leave.

In meditation traditions healing begins by becoming aware of the hollow tube at the center of your being. The best way to become familiar with this hollow tube is with musical sound.

The Bear’s Song, like the flute, spirals though the central channel, rising to grasp the warmth of the Sun and descending, bringing home an ember of the Sun to rekindle life’s warmth. The Bear’s Song, like angelica, reignites the flame in the heart. Once lit, the flame offers light to guide the soul home and make it whole.

As the central channel, the hollow tube that runs down the centre of your body warms with the fire of your inner Sun,as light radiating from your core opens your heart, and generosity flows while your words carry authenticity’s sweet melody.

From the central channel the aura is formed. As the central channel becomes vibrant, the aura begins to grow radiant and glows. A glowing aura is protection. It is energetic immunity. A luminous aura supports you in doing what you love and loving what you do. The aura is your inner Sun bringing light into the world.

When the soul is fractured, there are holes, rips, and tears in the aura. Angelica, just as it tends to the central channel, has a long history of mending auras. Bathing in an infusion of angelica leaves repairs the aura and creates the strength and courage needed for healing and discovering the Sun that burns within your heart.

I think of those biting cold January days when my breath turns a loose strand of hair frosty white, and darkness comes early. Everything is hushed by the frozen air, and the sky is a crisp blue. On those days I stand in wonder as rainbows appear around the sun.

The ancient ones said the rainbow bridges between our physical world with its sorrow and loss with the world of spirit where bear dreams spring gentle warmth into being so they can play their magic flutes again.

 

¹John Gerard (1545-1612) cultivated a large herbal garden in London and illustrated each plant he grew and recorded the medicine they carried. The book goes by one of two names: Herball or Generaall Historie of Plantes and was published in 1597.

² https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24788027

³ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30428212

⁴ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28487231

⁵ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=shcsx9fqOyI

⁶ This is a video of a Sami man playing an angelica flute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVR1dVnJFjA

⁷ PLAGUE READINGS from P. M. Rogers, Aspects of Western Civilization, Prentice Hall, 2000, pp. 353-365.

⁸ It is important to note that men were also burned during the burning times as were Gypsies, Gays, and others deemed as impure who were sent to concentration camps during WW2.

⁹ The Reed Flute’s Song – Listen to the story, told by the reed, of being separated.

“Since I was cut from the reedbed, I have made this crying sound. Anyone apart from someone he loves understands what I say. Anyone pulled from a source longs to go back. At any gathering I am there, mingling in the laughing and grieving, a friend to each, but few will hear the secrets hidden within the notes. No ears for that. Body flowing out of spirit, spirit up from body: no concealing that mixing. But it’s not given us to see the soul. The reed flute is fire, not wind. Be that empty.” Hear the love fire tangled in the reed notes, as bewilderment melts into wine. The reed is a friend to all who want the fabric torn and drawn away. The reed is hurt and salve combining. Intimacy and longing for intimacy, one song. A disastrous surrender and a fine love, together. The one who secretly hears this is senseless. A tongue has one customer, the ear. A sugarcane flute has such effect because it was able to make sugar in the reedbed. The sound it makes is for everyone. Days full of wanting, let them go by without worrying that they do. Stay where you are inside, a pure, hollow note. Every thirst gets satisfied except that of these fish, the mystics, who swim a vast ocean of grace still somehow longing for it! No one lives in that