Yolanda Misty

“Witches the Church simply burned at the stake, but something more interesting happened to the witches’ magic plants. The plants were too precious to banish from human society, so in the decades after Pope Innocent’s fiat against witchcraft, cannabis, opium, belladonna, and the rest were simply transferred from the realm of sorcery to medicine, thanks largely to the work of a sixteenth-century Swiss alchemist and physician named Paracelsus. Sometimes called the “Father of Medicine,” Paracelsus established a legitimate pharmacology largely on the basis of the ingredients found in flying ointments. (Among his many accomplishments was the invention of laudanum, the tincture of opium that was perhaps the most important drug in the pharmacopoeia until the twentieth century.) Paracelsus often said that he had learned everything he knew about medicine from the sorceresses. Working under the rational sign of Apollo, he domesticated their forbidden Dionysian knowledge, turning the pagan potions into healing tinctures, bottling the magic plants and calling them medicines.”
― Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

“When I wrote the previous letter, I had made up my mind I would show you how I could be very composed and cool and not need to ask you to listen to me nor to explain anything to me nor need any help. By telling you that all this about the multiple personalities was not really true but just put on, I could show, or so I thought, that I did not need you. Well, it would have been easier if it were put on.”
― Flora Rheta Schreiber, Sybil: The Classic True Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Personalities

“Tis so beautiful—flowers every day of the year. You can always smell them in the air, even out to sea.”
― Elizabeth George Speare, The Witch of Blackbird Pond

“It was as if we played chess after denying me both bishops and knights.”
― Gabriel F.W. Koch, Death Leaves a Shadow