Nicholas E. Brink's Blog

3-31-21 THE POWER OF ECSTATIC TRANCE
Ecstatic or Shamanic Trance opens the door to the world beyond ourselves, the world of the spirits that was so important to our hunting-gathering ancestors for giving them direction in living. There are many ways to access this world of the spirits as seen in the indigenous traditions around the world with their trance inducing dances, chants, and drumming. One way is the ritual of ecstatic trance as developed by the anthropologist Felicitas Goodman, the founder of the Cuyamungue Institute in New Mexico. I discovered the work of Felicitas Goodman and became a certified instructor of ecstatic trance in 2011 after 40 years of using hypnotic trance as a psychologist.
Felicitas was born in Hungary and educated as a linguist in Germany. Upon coming to the United States she settled in Columbus, Ohio where she became valued as a translator of scientific literature on the Ohio State University Campus. She knew an estimated twenty languages. In 1965 at the age of 51 she met the O.S.U. anthropologist Erika Bourguignon who was studying ecstatic trance in 486 small indigenous cultures around the world. Professor Bourguignon became Felicitas’s advisor when she decided to pursue her doctorate in anthropology. In this pursuit Felicitas realized that the speaking in tongues as experienced in the Apostolic Churches was a form of ecstatic trance, so she went to Mexico where she studied what brought some of those in the congregations of the Mayan and Spanish speaking churches to this trance experience. She concluded that there were four factors, the belief that speaking in tongues was a pleasant and normal experience; that it happened in a sacred space, i.e. the church; that the mind was quieted through prayer; and that the stimulation of rapid hand clapping to the nervous system brought about the state of trance.
Returning to her students at Denison University where she was then teaching, she created a more indigenous ritual that included these four factors, first a discussion of the pleasant nature of a trance experience, second, the sacred space was created by smudging and calling the spirits from each direction; the mind was then quieted by following one’s breathing for five minutes, and finally the nervous system was stimulated through rapid drumming or rattling at approximately 210 beats per minute. With this ritual she found that the students went into trance but the trance was without direction. In the church the belief that speaking in tongues was being moved by the Holy Spirit gave the parishioners direction. Sometime later she read an article by the Canadian Psychologist, V. F. Emerson, who was studying the effect of body postures on the meditative experience and found that the meditative posture had a direct effect on such physiological factors as breathing rate, heart rate and bowel motility. This led Goodman to search libraries and museums to find what she believed were postures used by shamans of the hunting-gathering cultures. She found approximately 50 such postures that she brought back to her students at Denison. Using the ritual she had previously developed, she added these postures during the period of drumming or rattling and found they gave direction to the trance experience. Some postures brought healing and strengthening energy into the body, while others were for divination to find answers to some question. Some were for metamorphosis or shape-shifting, and others postures were for spirit journeying into the three worlds, the underworld, the middle world or the upper world. Then there were the initiation or death-rebirth postures that provided experiences of the death of some unhealthy part of the individual with rebirth into greater health.
These postures with the direction they provide are effective in individual healing as well as in going beyond the individual to journey with the ancestors, the Earth spirits, and give direction in healing the Earth as reflected in each of my books. My book, The Power of Ecstatic Trance: Practices for Healing, Spiritual Growth, and Accessing the Universal Mind, introduces the use of ecstatic trance for healing, for spiritual growth, and for journeying into the New Age, the Time-Free Transparent Era of Consciousness. On the cover of this book is an image of a Jama Coaque Posture from Ecuador, a divination posture.

What to do with Your Ecstatic Trance Experiences
Periodically we need to be reminded what we should do with our ecstatic trance experiences to benefit the most from them. We need to frequently return to them to learn what they have to say to us at their many different and deeper levels.
For the first twelve years of teaching ecstatic trance I had the participants write their experience on index cards, collected the cards at the end of the session, took them home, and transcribed them into computer files. Then several days later I would send them back to the participant, asking them to correct and add to my transcriptions. In this way they had the opportunity to re-read them several days later. I collected well over 3000 experiences from the many people in my groups, a collection that led me to write the books I have published. This collection of index cards I have sent to the Institute to archive. Upon moving to NY I decided not to spend all the time I used in transcribing the experiences and suggested that the participants could email them to me. Several people have taken this clue and have been sending me their experiences. I expect that they have their own computer files of their experiences that make it easier for them to return to.
As with nighttime dreams, the experiences are frequently in the language of metaphor, a language that is not immediately understood. By repeatedly returning to an experience over time the meaning and deeper and deeper levels of meaning is revealed to the person. These experiences have something to teach, teachings that help in overcoming troublesome issues in your life and lead to personal spiritual growth. Often they concern issues beyond this personal nature, issues that show us how to live within our families and communities in a healthier and more sustainable way. With the global climate crisis and its present manifestation that we see in the crisis of the pandemic, the experiences likely show us where we have gone wrong in our greedy destruction of the planet. They can show us how to live sustainably as our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived in protecting all life on the planet by not taking more that is needed at the moment and making sure that enough is left to regenerate for the next season. I believe that these healthy ways are being revealed in the ecstatic trance experiences of our current Friday and Tuesday Zoom groups. By frequently returning to our previous experiences this picture of a sustainable future becomes increasingly clear, thus please return frequently to your trance experiences and live by them for the sake of us all on the planet.

The Snake Woman of Faardal
We have continued our ecstatic trance sessions twice a week during the corona virus pandemic over the internet using Zoom. We began in these virtual group sessions on March 27 using the Couple of Cernavoda posture for sending healing energy out to strengthen and heal those with the virus. From there we used the Tlazeoteotl posture for cleansing, the Chiltan Spirits Posture, the Ecuadorian Woman Posture and then the Empowerment Posture, each healing postures that we direction to dealing with the pandemic, each posture used for both the Friday and the Tuesday sessions. The groups have had from ten to twelve people in each, frequently from as far away as the State of Washington, Montana, North Carolina and Germany. Then in using the Danish Posture the Snake Woman of Faardal the direction of the sessions took a change of looking to the future. Where are we going as we move into a new world, a new age? If you know the Snake Woman, a Danish figurine found in Jutland, she is holding up her right arm with her fingers forming a circle. Some people have thought that this circle of fingers originally held a spear. My last session with her was especially powerful.
I tried the image of holding the spear but quickly put it down knowing that I did not want to see violence or war in the New Age. I found myself walking around a corner to the left of my visual image and saw a large group of people looking towards me. With my right arm up with fingers encircled, they all raised the right arm in the same manner. The encircling fingers sent the message of love and peace, a circle that encompasses the diversity of the broad range of people, of all life, who we now live with. This diversity is needed to fill what each of us do not know or cannot do. Whereas the handshake used to be the greeting and showed others that we did not have a weapon in our hands. Now with our need for social distancing, carrying this into the new age the raised arm with fingers encircled shows us the love and appreciation for diversity. As we shall see with the next posture, The Rodez Torque, the circle becomes important in the new age.

My New Spirit Guide
My blog of last Monday spoke of the importance of listening from the Heart. I am most concerned with what it means to return to normal after the struggle with this pandemic. The new world needs to be much different from the old normal that has centered on greed and has brought us to the impending destruction of the Earth as we know it. The pandemic is a vision of this impending destruction, so what do we need to do differently in our lives? One thing is to listen from our Heart rather than from our brain that only considers what is real as coming through our five senses. We need to return to our rightful place in the evolution of all life of which we are only a small part and leave behind the belief that we have dominion over the Earth. This belief has led us to taking indiscriminately all that is of the Earth to greedily increase personal wealth. Such wealth will not save us from the impending destruction. We need to look at all other life knowing that we are dependent upon it for our survival.
In my most recent ecstatic trance journey a new spirit guide came to me, a guide that we generally cannot see though I have seen many pictures of it, the coronavirus. The virus is saying to me that it provides us with an opportunity, an opportunity to practice the new way of living, of finding those things in life that we can do to live in harmony in our interdependency with all that is of the Earth. Personally, what it shows me is the importance of our gardening and of listening to and nurturing all the medicinal and edible herbs that surround us, herbs that can sustain us as they did our hunting and gathering ancestors. In this new life we need to leave the fossil fuels in the ground and learn to love the sun and wind that can keep us warn and take care of us. Though so much of technology is taking from the Earth in the greed of seeking wealth, I am finding value in using Zoom to bring people together, but hopefully there will be a time that we can put such technology behind us as we come together in mutual support and love. Living in our brain has brought us to this state of separation from all that is of the Earth, while living from our heart can bring us to live in harmony and love with all that is around us as diverse as it may be. This diversity that was not experienced by our hunting and gathering ancestors but is a reality now we need to appreciate it for all that it has to offer us in so many ways. I need to see the value in what my new spirit guide is offering me.

LISTENING WITH THE HEART
The heart is not just a pump to pump blood throughout the body. It is also an organ that receives and processes information from the world around you which many of the people of the world depend. When asked where within ourselves are we, in our Western culture most of us would point to our head, our brain. But the indigenous and ancient hunting-gathering cultures would point to their chest, to their heart. In living within our brain and not our heart we have lost much of what is so important in life, we miss hearing what other life, plants and animals, have to say to us and have to offer us. We need to practice moving our attention downward from our head to our chest, and listen from our heart.
The heart has within it neural structures not unlike that of the brain, and it has a direct connection to the brain in order to process what the heart perceives of the world, feelings and emotions that our sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch miss perceiving. Again to bring what the heart perceives we need to move our attention downwards to listening with our heart and it helps to close our eyes and shut down our other senses as when we are in an altered state of trance. This trance, whether ecstatic or hypnotic, opens a whole new world to us. Attending to our breath helps move this listening to our chest, but then by listening to the beat of our heart, listen to the beat of the drum or rattle, our listening is moved to our heart. This is why the Cuyamungue Method is so effective. Relearning listening from the heart opens the world to us, to what the animal spirits and the plant spirits have to say and what they provide for us. This is how the ancients learned what the plants have of offer. I have been using ecstatic trance to listen to the plants as my spirit guides. The plant world has so much to offer us for our health and for healing if we open ourselves to them, our plant ancestors.

The Ecstatic Trance Experience
Ecstatic Trance Experiences come from beyond our five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch. During the 2500 years of what we would consider the rational era, what we experience from beyond our five senses has been considered unreal and superstitious. Much has been lost in life by ignoring these experiences whether they come from our nighttime dreams, from hypnotic trance, from Ecstatic Trance or other trance experiences, or from the use of our imagination. Yet the imaginative writing of many writers has been highly valued, writing that comes from an alternate state of consciousness. The next sentence or where the story goes next magically arises from beyond the five senses. The writer is often surprised with what ends up on paper, especially when it is re-read at some later time. I have often had this experience of surprise when reading what I wrote some time ago. “Writer’s block” can be easily overcome by recognizing that the writer’s creativity comes from an altered state of consciousness, by learning and practicing how to intentionally go into such a state of trance, whether by sleeping on it in a dream state, by going into an hypnotic state of trance, or for me the state of Ecstatic Trance.
These experiences from beyond our five senses are often in the language of metaphor as are the many loved stories of mythology and the stories written for children with their many animal characters. There is much to learn from these stories that come from beyond. Our hunting and gathering ancestors were very open to appreciating what came from beyond the five senses, from the ancestors and from the spirits of the Earth. What they experienced in listening to that which comes from beyond, from the world of the spirits, would tell them how to live, where to hunt, what flora was edible, and give direction to their day to day activities. It would tell them how to live in a healthy way, of how to live in oneness with the Earth and all that is of the Earth. Ignoring this direction in how to live, direction that we have ignored over the last 2500 years, has led us in our greed to take indiscriminately from the Earth, and has brought us to the brink of extinction as evident in the Global Climate Crisis and now the Coronavirus. Now is the time we must begin to live differently in order to survive. Again, bringing alive the ancient stores from our hunting and gathering ancestors and to again experience that which is from beyond our five senses can show us how to live in oneness with the Earth and how to survive.

Book Review – The Sacred Herbs of Spring: Magical, Healing and Edible Plants to Celebrate Spring by Ellen Evert Hopman, Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2020.
I was given the opportunity to review a prepublication manuscript of The Sacred Herbs of Spring and jumped at the opportunity with my love for her previous book The Sacred Herbs of Samhain. The time of Samhain is when the sap of trees stops flowing and the trees become dormant for the winter. Beltaine, six months later, is when the sap again flows and the trees wake up with the increase in daylight and warmth, a time when seeds germinate and plants begin to sprout. At Samhain the veil is thinned between the two worlds, the waking world of our five senses and the world of the spirits, a time to celebrate visitation from our ancestors of the underworld. Six months later the Beltaine spirits that come to us are playful, the fairies and elves of longer days and warmth, a time for celebration of love, fertility, and dancing around the maypole, a time when cows are led between two sacred fires, a ritual to protect them against disease before they are taken to their summer pasture. Trees live in three worlds, the Underworld, the Land and the Sky, especially the sacred Oak and Ash that reach toward the sky with roots deep in the underworld. Under these sacred trees people swore oaths and were married, trees that were simultaneously the church, the court house and meeting place of the elders, Druids and tribal leaders. Stones that also live in the three worlds are venerated in the Beltaine rituals. The Sky World Gods and Goddesses are honored with the sacred altar fires, fires that reach into the sky.
The four ancient, sacred treasures brought by the tribe of Danu, i.e. the Sword of Nuada, the Cauldron of the Daghda, the Spear of Lugh and the Stone of Destiny, as well as the five directions: north, the direction of battle and fire; east, the direction of abundance; south, the direction of the creative arts; west, the direction of history keeping and storytelling; and the center, the place of mastery were celebrated. The many kinds of fairies known by many different names throughout the world are central to the Beltaine rituals. To keep on their good side special food was/is left at their many recognized dwelling places, e.g. under hills, on mountain tops, within the roots of trees, in deep caves, and under lakes. Hopman’s description of these many fairies is especially enchanting, fairies as magicians and healers, fairies with which to bond, fairies that are pranksters and jesters, fairies that help with chores, protect the house and wine cellar, and fairies that help in the garden. Special charms were/are made from the sacred herbs to be worn for calling upon them or for protection from the malevolent ones.
The next nine chapters describe the herbs along with their medicinal preparations and recipes for their consumption to aid in the different Beltaine journeys: Herbs for the Beltaine fires, for calling the fairies and elves, for magic and mysteries, for protection, for purification, for connecting to other realms, for courage and clarity, and for love, fertility and abundance.
The wood from nine sacred trees is used in the sacred ritual fires: Willow, Hazel, Alder, Birch, Ash, Yew, Elm, Oak and either Apple or Pine. I have planted several of these trees in my Celtic Wheel of Light Garden and have described Hopman’s use of the sacred oak in my earlier review of the Sacred Herbs of Samhain. I have planted three Hazel sacred to the goddess because of the milk of the green hazelnut. A good year for Hazelnuts is a good year for babies and cows. A rod of Hazel prevents horses from being ridden by fairies and branched stems are used for water dowsing. Powered nuts in mead relieve coughs and sinus problems and the inner bark tea relieves boils and warts.
Of the herbs for calling upon the fairies and elves I have a special affinity for the wood sorrel. As a child when visiting my grandmother there was a patch of sorrel growing in her back yard that I enjoyed eating because of its pleasant sour taste. My cousins and I called it sour grass. The four leafed Sorrel may be the original lucky shamrock, and the three leaves represent the three Druidic worlds of Land, Sea and Sky and the triple high gods and goddesses. Large clusters of Sorrel are recognized as favorite haunts of fairies and elves, so a gift needs to be left for them. The leaves and flowers are good in salads, pestos and decorations for desserts. Its tea is used to lower temperatures, as a heart and blood tonic and used to treat diarrhea, stomach cancer, and liver and digestive issues.
The herbs for magic and mysteries include the turkey tail mushroom that I discovered growing on a dead ash tree in our yard. This mushroom is used in treating lung, gastric, colon and breast cancers. It is also antibiotic, antifungal, antioxidant and antiviral.
The herbs for protection include plantain which I have planted in my garden of the nine sacred herbs of Woden. When hung in the home or car or brewed in bath water it provides protective energy. Medicinally crushed leaves stop the bleeding of wounds and the pain of the nettle sting. Its juice can help lung, gastrointestinal, bladder stomach and eye problems. Chewed leaves and salves relieve gum infections, insect bites, and hemorrhoids, and its tea is used for bronchitis, and bladder and stomach problems.
Of the herbs for purification Burdock was the first herb I ever used. It is very effective for relieving the nettle sting when rubbed on the skin. This herb of the fairies is used as a wash to purify rooms and ritual areas. The “Burry Man” covered with Burdock burrs is a scapegoat figure who goes from door to door, and with a shout the inhabitants give him money. A poultice of leaves is used for convulsions, epilepsy, hysteria and other nervous conditions. Its root tea is used for jaundice and bladder problems, and for cleansing the body systems.
The protein and fiber of the Pinto Bean, an herb for connecting with other realms, can lower risk of heart disease in people with mild resistance to insulin. Originally from California I learned early to make tortillas and would fill them with frijoles or pinto beans. Many of the herbs that were previously discussed in the book are also used for love, fertility and abundance.
Of special interest to me are the last chapters that describe the ritual traditions of Beltaine in other countries, England with the witches, fairies and the Maypole, Ireland with the decorated Maybush and gifts left under a fairy tree, Scotland with its processions and songs, Germany and Sweden with their veneration of Saint Walpurga, and the Finish festival of Vappu. Thomas Morton was famous for resisting the early Puritan Christians by hanging onto his Pagan sensibilities. The concluding chapter provides a wealth of herbal recipes used in the feasts for Beltaine, many of which I am eager to try.
The Sacred Herbs of Spring takes us on a very enchanted journey into the world of fairies and elves, spirits that lead us along an avenue into the otherworld, the world of the spirits with the many herbs used for their protective, divining, purification and healing powers.

Felicitas Goodman’s big contribution to the world is her discovery of the power of the shamanic body postures of the hunter-gatherers, ancient and contemporary. Incorporating these postures in her designed ritual for the induction of ecstatic trance has shown the power of these postures, but the importance of the postures goes well beyond the part they play in inducing trance ecstatically. The sacred postures bring healing to a much higher level when also used with guided imagery and hypnosis, and they have opened a whole new door as to where ecstatic trance can take us. Before her death she was following this new direction as seen in her interest in Rupert Sheldrake.
Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of the morphic field, a field of information or knowledge that comes from beyond the individual’s physical brain or consciousness we call the world of the spirits, spirits that can come from the Earth and from our ancestors. The morphic field or world of the spirits is not just a field that encapsules a specific being but encapsules the entire species and then all species. These ancestors are not just our human ancestors, but earlier ancestors, the spirits of the animals and other life, and before that, spirits of the substances and all features of the Earth. These spirits have so much to show us and teach us. This knowledge from the world of the spirits is accessed when in ecstatic trance, but it can be accessed from well beyond ecstatic trance, again from the use of guided imagery, hypnosis and from our nighttime dreams.
I believe that Felilcitas Goodman was on the edge of opening us to this whole new world of the spirits accessed through ecstatic trance. We know that ecstatic trance can heal us of our physical and emotional problems, and it can carry us to higher levels of spirituality, which is especially meaningful with the coronavirus pandemic. Those of us who practice ecstatic trance have experienced this healing and spiritual growth, growth that led me to write “The Power of Ecstatic Trance,” but it does much more. From my research of the thousands of ecstatic trance experiences I have collected, I realized that when using the Hallstatt Warrior Posture from the 5th century B.C. I was commune with my own German ancestors, but these ancestral journeys continued and led me to Scandinavia and to write “Baldr’s Magic.” While traveling in Scandinavia the spirits of the Earth came to me, spirits that opened me to the stories of antiquity and led me to write “Beowulf’s Ecstatic Trance Magic.” But doors kept opening. Next I found the spirits showing me and our ecstatic trance groups the need and how to heal the Earth, leading me to write “Trance Journeys of the Hunter-Gatherers.”
But the psychologist inside of me was calling, and I wanted to show how Ecstatic Trance can improve the process of psychotherapy, calling me to write “Ecstatic Soul Retrieval: Shamanism and Psychotherapy.” Then most recently in bringing Ecstatic Trance and the power of the Ecstatic Postures more into the academic domain of psychology for expanding the use of Dreamwork, Guided Imagery, and Clinical Hypnosis I wrote “Applying the Constructivist Approach to Cognitive Therapy: Resolving the Unconscious Past.” With the dedicated use of Ecstatic Trance whole new worlds of the spirits open to us.

Book Review – A Druid’s Herbal of Sacred Tree Medicine by Ellen Evert Hopman, Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 2008.
I came to read A Druid’s Herbal of Sacred Tree Medicine after having read and reviewed three of Hopman’s other impressive books: A Druid’s Herbal for the Sacred Earth Year; The Sacred Herbs of Samhain and her soon to be released book The Sacred Herbs of Spring. In Sacred Tree Medicine Hopman has revealed her knowledge of the ancient Ogham Tree Alphabet, and the Ogham words used to describe these twenty trees along with her knowledge of Gaelic. She is an amazing linguist in her ability to call upon three ancient Ogham documents to describe these trees: The Word Ogham of Morainn mic Moin; The Word Ogham of Mic ind Oic, and the Briatharogam Con Culainn. These three sources converge on meaningful descriptions of the trees and the losa fedo or brush in the woods.
Hopman’s Ogham description of each tree or bush provides a description of some central and important Celtic belief or way of life, e.g. the Hazelnut describes the nature of the classes of people from peasant to king, the Heather the importance of the bee and honey to the Druids, and the Aspen the rituals surrounding death and burial. The Ivy describes the ways of farming, and the Blackthorn the use of dyes and dying agents. The descriptions of these twenty trees have opened me to a new and deeper understanding of the life of the ancient Celts of Ireland and the importance of these trees in their lives. In each tree chapter the description of the tree is followed by the tree’s herbal uses and its many diverse uses found among indigenous American people. This again shows the incredible depth of Hopman’s knowledge of these sacred herbal trees.
The third section of each chapter examines the spiritual aspects of the tree. This spiritual section is of special interest and importance to me in my practice of ecstatic trance for calling upon the tree or herb as a spirit guide. Through ecstatic trance I have met and communed with many animal spirit guides, but more recently plants have become my guides as they were for our hunting-gathering ancestors. The shamanic body postures as researched by Felicitas Goodman are used while in an ecstatic trance for healing, divination, metamorphosis or shape shifting, for journeying into each of the three worlds, the underworld, the middle world and the upper world, and for providing initiatory or death-rebirth experience. To commune with the plant world I like to begin with a divination posture to become acquainted with the plant, then with a healing posture, specifically the Chiltan Spirits Posture with my right hand over my heart, to fall in love with the plant. My third meeting with the plant uses a metamorphosis or shape-shifting posture to become one with the plant as in marriage, and fourth, an initiation or death-rebirth posture for letting my relationship with the plant change my life. Hopman’s description of the spiritual aspects of the trees has provided me with deeper and more beautiful connections in my relationship with each tree.
Our acre garden has been void of Oaks, so I am planting an Oak grove that is providing me with a special sacred space to commune with the Oak, though they are still small, and I will never see them in their maturity. The Oak, one of the twenty trees, is the “noble of the wood.” As the tallest of trees it lives in the three worlds with its deep roots in the world of the ancestors, the trunk in our middle world and branches in the sky world of the deities. It offers much to life with its healing properties, its uses for living by providing heat from its fire, wood for the structures in which we live, and for many other items necessary for living such as bows, boats and their oars. Its acorns provide flour for baking and food for animals.
The ancient laws defined the punishments for harming an Oak, e.g. the fine for stripping the bark for tanning a pair of woman’s sandals was one cow hide and an oxhide for a pair of men’s sandals. With such laws and fines, harvesting Oak for its many purposes must have been quite restricted and involve Oak grove rituals that validate its sacredness. These trees were sacred to a lengthy list of deities including Indra, Jupiter, Yahweh, Thor, Baldr, Artemis, and Brigid. One word for oak, dorw, became our word “door,” i.e. the tree that is inhabited by a spirit who opens the door to the otherworld.
Sacred Tree Medicine ends by offering divination exercises using the tree Oghams that tell us how to open ourselves to and learn from the trees that come to us in these exercises, a beautiful section of the book that I find most meaningful and exciting for my spiritual growth. The divinatory message from each tree offers us new and meaningful insights that affirm its sacredness and brings it alive within us. The Oak reminds us to stay centered and balanced with our roots grounded and our head in the spiritual sky. The Oak opens us to regain that balance which we might have forgotten or from which we have become distracted.
Of the twenty trees I will review one more, the Heather, since I have been a bee keeper. Opening a hive with thousands of bees flying around me and not stinging is a very spiritual experience. Heather is one of the losa fedo, or bush of the wood that grows on scrub land or in waste places, land that is a wonderful habitat for bees, bees that bring sweetness to our lives through their hard work. Archeological discoveries from two to five thousand years ago provide evidence of brewing. I have frequently brewed mead, a wine made with honey.
Heather was used for thatching, baskets, ropes and brooms. Medicinally it is an astringent and antiseptic. Its tea cleans the liver and blood of toxins, and it is used for coughs, colds, cystitis and other bladder and kidney conditions. Spiritually, bees were sacred to the Forest Druids. The Welsh saying is so true: “The day the bees stop humming the world will end.” They symbolize the work of the Druid as teacher, healer, philosopher, and naturalist, i.e. work guided by the sun for bringing nectar back to the tribe and the wisdom shared for the benefit of all. Heather brings good fortune.
The Divinatory lesson that Heather brings us reminds us that our Great Earth Mother brings us sweetness, the sweetness and joy of the spirits that we have likely forgotten and need to again embrace. Each of the twenty trees has a beautiful message that we need to embrace and keep alive within us.
In Part 2 of the book the nature of the druid magic and the tools used by the druids to bring alive this magic are described. This magic is used during the four Celtic fire festivals, Beltaine, Lughnasad, Samhain, and Imbolc. The rituals call upon the deities and spirits of these celebrations, whether for the beginning of new life at the end of winter, growth in the middle of summer, the completion of our work that ends with the fall harvest, or the middle of winter for the rest we need to prepare us for the work of the following spring. The rituals of these celebrations are described in a delightful way. Central to these celebrations and festivity are the twenty sacred trees and what each has to offer us, celebration that involves feasting with many foods and special recipes that I look forward to preparing.
Also central to these celebrations is the involvement of children who learn the importance of these turning points in the yearly cycle of life as taught to us by the Yew Tree if we would again practice the rituals of our Celtic past, rituals that would be as much fun and more meaningful than their current secularization with Halloween and Mayday. Listening to our ancestors and the spirits of the Earth is taught to us by the Aspen. Returning to these ways of our past is needed to again selflessly value our Great Earth Mother, selflessness taught to us by the Elder in order to save her from the destruction caused by our greed. Though to do this we need the strength to face this spiritual battle by embracing the Holly and again appreciate what our Earth has to offer us by listening to the teachings of the Ivy.
Each book I have read by Ellen Evert Hopman opens new doors, and even though I have read and loved many of the ancient myths, the Tain, the Mabinogion, Cuchulain of Muirthemne, among others, she brings these stories alive in an interconnected and meaningful way that I find most beautiful. They are not just myths but are about a way of life. Because of her writing I am eager to delve more deeply into the ways of the Celts and Druids.

The Healing Postures: Felicitas Goodman’s research of trance postures used by hunting-gathering shaman found that the postures gave direction to the ecstatic trance experience, direction that can be described in seven or eight groupings or intents: healing, divination, metamorphosis or shape-shifting, journeying into the three worlds - the underworld, the middle world and the upper world, and initiation or death-rebirth. The eighth intent was found in only a few postures, that of celebration or calling the spirits. From the fifty-plus postures that she initially examined, the experiences within each group of postures for a specific intended direction were relatively uniform except for the healing postures. The different postures that she identified as healing postures offered a number of different healing experience. The first most frequently found posture was the Bear Spirit Posture that provided a sense or feeling of increased healing energy and strength. The Chiltan Spirits Posture offered a sense of energy coming from 41 spirits or women knights who assist in their work of healing as the story or myth that surrounds the Uzbekistan figurine tells.
Then there are the two 7000-year-old figures of the couple of Cernavoda from Romania that when experienced the male figure sends healing energy to the receiving female figure. A fourth figure, the Tlazeolteotl figure is for cleansing. The story surrounding this Aztec Goddess is that people come to her with their “filth,” stories of their wrong doings or sins, which she eats and gives them rebirth in innocence. The fifth figure, the Mayan Empowerment Posture, is just what the name says, its intent to bring a sense of a growing strength of empowerment to the person sitting in the posture. Thus each of these postures provides a specific healing direction. Recognizing these distinctions in healing can be quite beneficial.