How plants show us our fucked up past : Belladonna

Today we will talk about the privatisation of knowledge carried out to assert domination, through a peculiar anecdote about witchcraft and the Inquisition.

But first, let me give you a bit of medicinal context.

Since the dawn of time, humans have relied on various plant-based remedies in order to heal themselves. Used in the form of beverages, ointments or tinctures, herbal medicine was the treatment of choice for a wide array of afflictions throughout history.


Evidences of the medicinal use of plants have been traced down to the Palaeolithic era, some 60’000 years ago. In Ancient Greece, the work of thinkers such as Theophrastus or Dioscoride documents the medicinal use of herbs and the different remedies one can concoct from them.

If some plants are medicinal at low dosage, some may become toxic or deadly once you up the dose. Nevertheless, such plants were still used as an anaesthetic in medium dosage, as well as spiritual and ritualistic tools at higher ones. A memorable example is the one of the oracles of Delphi, who are presumed to have inhaled the smoke of burned nightshades to attain the trance-like state necessary to their prophecies.

Plant use was an inherent part of the everyday life of humans throughout the Antiquity and up to the Middle Age. Thereafter, herbal medicine was used, especially in the most rural parts, still strongly attached to their pagan tradition. With the rise of the Church and the extension of its dominion, pagan rites and customs were slowly demonised, forbidden, and their practitioners ostracised. The Inquisition started raging, drowning rural population in the fear of being mistaken for a witch. Thus began the decline of the rural use of plant-based remedies, and the shift of power dynamics surrounding medicine. Up until then, since the vast majority of the population was illiterate, the transmission of knowledge — medicinal one as well as others — was orally based. The techniques known by the ancestors were passed down to the following generations. The healing knowledge was owned by the people, it was accessible to all, a part of the collective imaginary, it was free. But then began the Inquisition, and in its effort to occult everything that was not orthodox, it severely broke the transmission of those customs in rural social groups.

However, these skills were not attacked in the higher social spheres.
 Members of the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the monarchy preserved the knowledge of traditional medicine, and while the inquisition was raging, the Renaissance was blossoming.

The social elites of Europe started to take a deeper interest in Ancient Greece’s texts and ideas, translating and studying books such as the Materia Medica of Dioscoride’s mentioned earlier. If this was presented as an attempt to extend the Occidental grasp on medicine, it was in fact a privatisation of knowledge, in order to further assert the hierarchical order established. Now Church-accepted healing techniques had to come out of books and academies, things, of course, reserved to the higher social classes.

You had, at the same time, the celebration of the dominant class and the execution of the popular one, both resulting from the exact same practices. This as you can imagine, led to surrealist episode, much like the one I am about to relate you.

In 1550, a Spanish physician named Andres Hernandez de Laguna, well known throughout Europe for his commentary of Dioscoride’s Materia Medica, is called to see the duke of Lorraine, in France. The reason of this summon is that the Duke is sick, and in his quality of great doctor and medicinal thinker, H. De Laguna is thought to be able to cure him.
 After several failed attempts to heal the duke, Laguna began to investigate in the city, until he heard a rumour saying that a couple of old peasants, living in a forest not far from the town, are witches.

After their due capture and interrogation (torture) the old couple finally « confess » to everything, saying that they cursed the duke, and are the only ones capable of curing him.

The woman is burned at the stake while the man is kept alive in the hope of having him heal the duke. Both he and the duke died the following weeks.


After this unfortunate turn of events, Dr Laguna was able to go back home, but not before paying a visit to the old couple’s cabin, and taking with him a jar, half-filled of a greenish ointment, that he identified as a populeon — a salve made from nightshades such as Atropa Belladonna, Datura S. or Hyoscyamus Niger — used as a pain-killer and an anaesthetic since at least the Ancient Greece.

Once back home, Laguna used this ointment experimentally on women, to try out its effects, and thus elaborate his analysis of Dioscoride’s book.

This anecdote shows the double-sided access to knowledge, as well as the process of its privatisation. Hernandez de Laguna, a rich man born in the aristocracy, lived off his research on Ancient Greece medicinal customs, notably through Dioscoride’s work, in which you find ointments such as the populeon mentioned earlier.

His social status, as well as his education, allows Laguna not only to use and research plant based medicine, but also to build his wealth and reputation around it. At the same time, he takes part in the torture and execution of two peasants, both illiterate and of modest up-bringing, who live off traditional knowledge, passed on to them by their ancestors.

The exact same practice, that causes their death, gives wealth and respect to Laguna. Even worse, he uses their work, their knowledge, and present it as his own, to privatise it and assess his status.

This is what the whole Inquisition period is about. Imposing the Church’s dominion by eradicating Europe’s pagan traditions, appropriating the ones too deeply rooted, or useful. Transforming them so they fit catholic beliefs, privatising them so the people have to rely on the hierarchical system, forbidding them so vocally-transmitted knowledge decays and vanishes. This insures the control of those currently in power, and continues the long process of the monopolisation of knowledge and skills, still in place today.

Meïko.

Essay on mechanisms of domination and privatisation of knowledge - rearranged excerpt of “Contes d’une Solanacées” - 2023 - Meïko