Roots, Branches & Spirits by H. Byron Ballard

Author:H. Byron Ballard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: folk magic;folk magick;appalachia;appalachian folk magic;appalachian folk magick;american folk magic;north american folk magic;byron ballard;h. byron ballard;byron h. ballard;witch;witchcraft;witchery;pagan;paganism;pagan folk magic
Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide, LTD.
Published: 2021-02-01T19:25:48+00:00

[contents]

Chapter 6

Healing and Herb Lore

From the rivers to the ridgelines, this old place continues to delight and confound those who come to it to absorb its magic and indulge in its healing, which is legendary. There are still old tuberculosis (TB) sanitariums throughout the area because doctors encouraged TB sufferers to come to the mountains for the good air and the cool summers. I was born in a Seventh-Day Adventist sanitarium with a hospital unit in west Buncombe County. The current Veterans Administration Hospital in Oteen, North Carolina, was once the site of a large TB sanitarium. Some of the original buildings remain from those old days. When antibiotics came on the scene, the mountains here lost their reputation for a magical cure.

It is one of the great quests of any age—finding techniques and materials to effect healing in the body and spirit of our human family. In a culture dominated by Protestant Christianity, we’ll begin by looking at the healing power that comes from a personal relationship with the Divine, first through prayer and then through the healer’s body as a vessel for the holy powers, as a vessel for the Holy Spirit to work.

We like to think of healing as removing sickness from a body, mind, or soul. To be healed is to be made whole. That is the ideal: whether through prayer, medication, or herbal treatment, the illness is made to leave the body. But sometimes healing a situation happens through more extreme means: through amputation or debilitating chemotherapy and radiation. And sometimes healing comes through the doorway of death. To make a person whole requires us to widen our view of what healing is and the ways it can be accessed and applied. In the traditionally remote parts of Appalachia, the healing techniques that were used on humans were often the same ones used for sick or injured farm animals.

If you are a theist of any sort, you are familiar with the idea of entreating the Divine you honor to bring healing. Prayer in all its forms is one form of that profound communication. Prayer is often modified to allow the Divine to do the best thing, something that we as mortal supplicants may not know, as in “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

These old-style mountain healers were aware that they were vessels for heavenly power, that the skills that were brought to bear for healing came through the healer’s body from a pure and holy source. This led to the commonly expressed humility, the healer being fully aware that their hands were merely tools for this power. This attitude prevails among modern practitioners, regardless of their religious or spiritual tradition.

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