With the 3rd leading cause of death being IATROGENIC (death by medical error), we are experiencing a global renaissance back to the wisdom of plant spirit medicine— the return of the Feminine.
Over the years I have immersed myself in the mysticsm of wortcunning— not a word you often hear brandied about in contemporary medical circles! What is Wortcunning you may ask? To understand the meaning let’s lean into the etymology.
Wort comes from the old english ‘wyrt’, meaning root, herb, vegetable, plant, spice. And Cunning comes from the old english ‘cunnan’, meaning possessing knowledge, to know, the art of wisdom.
Such that Wortcunning is the knower of plants, the artful skill of communing with the wisdom & spirit of the botanica realm.
A wortcunner is not just a botanist or a knower of herbs, but one who has the occult, hidden, or secret power to see into the origin of things, to see beyond the surface. He or she has a relation of kinship and kindness to the worts, knows their names, and knows the words, chants & mantras with which to call upon the spirits that inhabit the plant world.
A root-knower [wortcunner] is a seer.
He or she knows the root of the illness that strikes a human being down and knows the root of the cure: the wort, which unfolds as secretly in the dark as the very malaise it will heal.
—Storl, Wolf D, The Herbal Lore of Wise Women and Wortcunners
Light in our Hearts
Every plant is a child of the Earth, nourished through the family of the four elements. A child with innate intelligence, dancing with the rhythms of life and flourishing through the great cosmic choir. The conductor of the choir is LOVE.
Roots burrow down deep into the Earth, absorbing the intelligence of Earth’s Minerals & the Wisdom of Water. Leaves breathe in the song of each day as they harness the energy [information] of the Sun, and Flowers unfold their sweet nectar and connect us with beauty, the spirit of all things, the light in our hearts.
When I smell a plant I hear her unique Soul Song with life. When I gaze/meditate with a plant I feel into her medicine. And when I touch a plant, I am somatically immersed in her healing light.
My relationship with plants has been this away my entire life, even as a child I played with the nature spirits, my fairy friends & plant spirits. This devotion to wortcunning has in fact been a rich & nourishing part of my world for many life-times.
Whilst a modern day medical practitioner may perceive my gifts as airy-fairy, inferior to the science of today, or even the stuff of old-wives tales— I beg to differ!
The question I would ask in return is— why has the modern day medical practitioner sold their souls to the science of materialism, profit, big-pharma— and as a result dimmed the Light in their Hearts, the Light that Heals, the Light that engages the spirit of the wortcunner?
Plant Intelligence
Plants have been used by cultures around the world since the dawn of light for healing, health & wellbeing. In fact, throughout herstory, plants have been revered as sentient beings, that are alive and living on purpose. They are part of the web of life, and are here to serve in reverence to life itself.
As I share in depth in my Lightrition your Life™ Course, plants can talk. They don’t necessarily speak like humans do (though that could be the topic of a whole different post), plants communicate through a universal language, a language of symbol, synchronicity, signature, and community with other life-forms. And plants do in fact even have a brain, a highly developed neural system that even produces neuro-transmitters just like humans do!
Yet our modern schooling & medical system diminishes plants to their physical botany and their chemical constituents— forgoing how plants holistically are so much greater than the sum of their individual parts. Plants are so much more than mechanical components, they are in fact 4th Dimensional Astral Gateways of healing through our Hearts.
Take for-instance glorious Willow trees [incidently the Willow traditionally embodies the wisdom of the Moon & Mondays]. Willow has a long historical use for pain relief, fever & inflammation, either by chewing on the bark—its very bitter!— or by boiling the bark and drinking the tea. This holistic use of Willow medicine not only brings ease to the physical body, but also helps us to converse with the spirit of Willow in understanding the source of our pain, and guides us to heal from the root (wort) cause.
However in 1852, the active constituent Salicin was chemically extracted from the bark of Willow and later in 1899 the German company Bayer patented Aspirin— a chemical synthesis of acetylsalicylic acid. Aspirin as a drug has been known to cause Reye’s syndrome, intestinal bleeding & allergic reactions to name a few.
For every human illness…
Scientists estimate that Earth is home to 8.7 Billion species of plants & animals, and astonishing 86% of all plants and animals on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be named and catalogued. WOW. So basically, our known scientific (mind) knowledge of Earth’s plants is very very limited indeed!
I love this quote from philosopher Rudolph Steiner, to me it really sums up the sacredness of life, and the service of plants to life itself:
For every human illness, somewhere in the world there exists a plant which is the cure. I believe that there is a healing potential locked inside plants which is integral with their evolution, just as it is part of human evolution to learn to tap this wonderful gift of Nature.
Return of Feminine Healing
Whilst the intellectual study of plant medicine has a place, it must be woven with the feeling, heart, intuitive & sacred art of plant spirit medicine— Feminine Wisdom— to be of greatest service & a most cherished ally for health, healing & vitality.
Our bodies have an innate intelligence, every cell in your body has the capacity to heal. Plants are sacred gateways that help us access our healing capacity. Plants hold us in their loving arms bringing relief to our symptoms whilst guiding us to make the changes necessary— in our light(nu)trition, our emotions/mental state, environment etc— that catapult us into thriving states of wellbeing. We heal.
Plants are spirit guides. They help accelerate our personal/planetary evolution.
When we learn (re-remember) how to listen/feel/intuit/understand the language of plants, we open the doors to access her intelligence. We connect with her plant spirit medicine, a medicine that is healing, restorative and in sync with the systems of body, the heart-mind & soul.
Plants empower us to know ourselves— fanning the flames of the Light in our Hearts that enables us to trust ourselves, our intuition, our all knowing capacity to heal through the wisdom of Earth’s intelligence. And plants remind us that we don’t need to out-source our healthcare to so-called authority figures that use fear as tools/weapons of compliance.
Plants don’t need to control— for LOVE knows no fear.
I am sipping on a cup on Chamomile tea as I bring this post to a close [incidentally Chamomile is associated with the Sun, accessing your internal LIGHT, astral travel & prophetic dreams].
And the spirit of Chamomile is asking me to remind you all that EVERYONE is a Wortcunner at heart— as we too are all children of the Earth. All we need do is make space in our lives to commune with nature & multi-sensorally (I think I just made that word up) experience the grace of her medicine.
This Article is also published on Simone’s Radiantly Human on Substack.
