Myddfai Herbs

 

A transcript of the launch of A Welsh Herbal given by Stella Byrne, BSc (hons), MNIMH,
on the 18th July 2009 as a part of the Llandeilo Music and Flower Festival.

 

We chose the Llandeilo Music and Flower Festival as a very appropriate time to launch our A Welsh Herbal interactive CD-Rom, for though the Music and Flower Festival is a recent invention to draw attention to Llandeilo, it does have a very ancient heritage; that taps into our ancestral wealth of the medicinal value of plants and flowers that surround us.

It is a great honour to have worked in South Wales as a medical herbalist for, as I hope to illustrate, this area has a long and distinguished heritage of herbal medicine, going back 4,000 years. This heritage still has the potential to help us in our years to come. It is a unique cultural heritage. The Myddfai area, through its long history of herbal medicine with its links to Italy and the Middle East, inspired and instigated the best of Western herbal medicine.

How can we learn from changes in the past?

Herbs have been used in this area for as long as pre-historic times, we know this from the burials of our earliest ancestors. However, herbal knowledge was passed down via word of mouth and so no other records of our earliest past remain.

To start at the beginning of recorded history, is to go back to the time of the Celts. We know that the Celts for 2000 years before our common era used herbal medicine, from the writings of the Roman historian Pliny. The Celts did not write anything down deliberately as their knowledge was so imbued with spiritual and intuitive wisdom that it could only be taught to the gifted by the experienced. They had three revered components to their cultural structure; the bards, the druids and ovates.

The Bards were involved with poetry, story telling and music, and were thus instrumental in passing on knowledge from one generation to another through the oral tradition. The Druids were the priests and celebrants who utilized their knowledge of geomancy, astronomy and astrology in their rituals. The Ovates were the healers and midwives who utilized herbs and cared for the sick in the community.

We know from history that this area was important, as the Black Mountain is the highest point in South Wales. It was a place where the sacredness of Mother Earth was celebrated. It is interesting that women in cultures all over the world offered bread and cakes to lakes to invoke fertility for themselves and their families. The story of the Lady and the Lake, which we included in our A Welsh Herbal, is a way of passing down information in legend form of the sacredness of healing and herbal medicine.

In this part of Wales there was a stable community here who used plants of the area and thereby discovered what herbs worked and what did not. They also used certain plants in their ceremonies as they celebrated the turning of the wheel of time, at certain key points such as solstices, equinoxes and their midpoints. Again more of this knowledge can be found in A Welsh Herbal.

Then the Romans arrived, just after the beginning of the 1st century. Many of the Celts fled to Ireland where their traditions continued and where we have the best information of the use of herbs in ceremonies. Here in Wales there was bloodshed as the tribes fought courageously for almost 100 years before final defeat came in Anglesea.

The Roman soldiers killed the druids and destroyed the sacred oak groves where the Celts worshipped. Somehow herbal medicine still survived, probably due to the need of herbal knowledge for treating their injured soldiers. Many Celts were taken as slaves to toil for the Romans and so they would have also kept the knowledge alive. The Romans traded information with the community healers and the tribes people who survived. Pliny, the noted Roman historian wrote about their extensive knowledge and how the druids were much feared. After the Romans left in the 5th century the tribes people continued to trade with Italy.

In the 7th century Taliesin penned the first Welsh language script enabling knowledge to be traded. By the 8th century trade routes from Wales were established between Baghdad and regions of Italy. The Myddfai area being the spiritual focus we know from prescriptions used.

The writings of Hippocrates, Galen and Dioscorides were captured by the Arabs and stored in Baghdad at the House of Wisdom in the 5th century. In the 9th century these were translated and the knowledge traded with the School of Medicine in Solerno, which contributed to the community rich knowledge of the Myddfai area.

In the Gothic era of the 12th century, Lord Rhys built Strata Florida in mid Wales and Talley Abbey, just up the road, where physicians were trained, recipes written down and the legends of the Physicians of Myddfai and the Lady of the Lake begun to be told and retold. This cross fertilization between the Myddfai community, the Solerno School of medicine and the House of medicine in Baghdad greatly contributed to a flowering of herbal medicine. The absorption of this knowledge into the monasteries laid the basis for modern medicine as we know it.

The murder of many of the community based women who practised herbal medicine was a determined effort by the state to remove knowledge from the people and write it down in Latin and burn their books so the common people would become disempowered from their traditional skills and knowledge. THIS SAME PATTERN IS HAPPENING AGAIN TODAY. By looking at the past we can learn for the future.

So what can we learn from the past to help us today?

Hasn’t modern medicine moved on? Yes is some respects it has – that is undeniable. I often think of the technological advances we have made and with my scientific hat on – I am impressed. However with my herbalist’s hat on I often think of the saying, “that modern medicine rescues people from the jaws of death then kills them slowly with drugs.” However to quote from HRH Prince Charles’ recent Dimbleby lecture talking about technological change, “In all cases we were losing something of vital importance – we were disconnecting ourselves from the wealth of traditional knowledge that had guided countless generations to understand the significance of Nature’s processes and cyclical economy.”

What I believe we can learn from our past is to value our environment, our earth – in a word Nature. It is important to see ourselves once again as an integral part of nature. We are lucky here in Wales and especially the Llandeilo area as we have one of the richest and most diverse environments in Britain, not to mention one of the most beautiful. I believe it is why so many nature lovers have moved here, as environmental refugees.

To quote Prince Charles again, “What worries me is that at the moment there is not a lot of attention given to the way we perceive the world. We take our mechanistic view of it for granted and believe that the language of scientific empiricism which so dominates our discussion is the only form of language we need to guide us.”

He continues, “But let us also recognize that this progress was only possible because of an earlier and crucial shift which took us away from a traditional sense of participation in Nature to the claim of mastery and exploitation over the natural order that has reaped such a troubling and bitter harvest….No matter how sophisticated our technology has become, the simple fact is that we are not separate from Nature – like everything else, we are Nature.”

We are uniquely privileged to live in this area, but like the air we breath, the water we drink, our food and our medicine, we do not live isolated from the rest of society. And we all know that although science has served us and the capitalist system in the past, we now see its failings.

Just as in the past with the burning of women herbalists and the herbal books that have helped us, globalisation has plans via the multinationals to disempower us again. This time however it is with the destruction of the environment and the global chaos all around us, to add to the suffering. This move by the multinationals requires our urgent response. Their plan is to control not just herbal medicine, but also vitamin and mineral supplements, even, via GM, the very food we eat. Their document – the Codex Alimentarius – needs your attention and more especially your resistance to it.

To draw from Prince Charles’ lecture again,
“It seems to me that one of the problems of a form of globalization that relies entirely upon maximizing the economic rather than the social and environmental values of markets leads us to a frightening state of uniformity, and perhaps “conformity,” to a model that we now know cannot be sustained…..So, with that in mind, how could we better empower all sorts of communities to create a much more participative economic model that safeguards their identity, cohesion and diversity – one that makes a clear distinction between the maintenance of Nature’s capital reserves and the income it produces?

I agree wholeheartedly with the Prince. Our section on philosophy in A Welsh Herbal echoes his thoughts. It is certainly very symbolic that the Prince of Wales has recently chosen the village of Myddfai for his Welsh home.
We need to learn how to see the world through the eyes of our ancestors. We belong to the natural world and herbal medicine belongs to the people. It is our traditional medicines that have served us well for thousands of years in good times and bad.

The pharmaceutical companies with their propaganda have deliberately instilled fear about herbs as they seek to control their supply and profit from their usage. In a post oil driven society, the pharmaceutical companies will be hard pressed to produce the same volume of their chemical drugs. Oil provides the source of raw material for the synthesis of many drugs, such as asprin, while their production and distribution is exceedingly energy intensive. So consequently we believe that they are trying to take over herbal medicine now.

To get back to nature, natural medicine and clean food is to own our own destiny. We must stop globalisation from taking natural medicines from as us, as has occurred in the past, by popular appeal and owning its usage. On our interactive CD-Rom, A Welsh Herbal we have tried to present herbal medicine in a most accessible way. We have imbued stories and legends from all over Wales with herbal lore – the way this knowledge was traditionally passed down from one generation to another. Many of these stories will appeal to a younger audience.

In the herbal there 40 herbal profiles of the most commonly used herbs, with growing tips. These herbs have been safely used for thousands of years and are easily grown in Wales. These profiles can be accessed interactively by an A-Z of common ailments, making reference quicker and easier. The herbal is lavishly illustrated with over 400 images, including photographs of herbs, places in Wales and digitally restored woodcuts from 16th century herbals.

A Welsh Herbal is designed to be entertaining as well as informative. We have tried to overwhelm the reader with the beauty of the natural world, intrigue them with the wisdom and history of our craft and inspire them not only to try the remedies for themselves but to safeguard their rights to use herbal medicine for themselves, their children and their children’s children. We sincerely hope you will enjoy the beauty and music of the CD-Rom.

References:
The full transcript of Prince Charles’ “Facing the Future” can be downloaded from the link;