Magical Brews, Part One
The strange places research can take you.
One of the earliest characters I imagined for my story was a solitary druid, a shrine keeper who was the apprentice of a Master Healer. But what was a “master healer” in 52 B.C.?
My research path eventually led me to herbalism. As the father of western medicine, Hippocrates, famously wrote: “Let food be thy medicine, thy medicine shall be thy food.”
Herbs and medicine were one in the same, and written history attests to this.
The Egyptian Ebers Papyrus written in 1500 B.C. records over 700 herbal combinations.
The Hippocratic Canon describes over 400 different herbs and their uses.
The Greek scholar Theophrastus (371 B.C. – 287 B.C.), considered the father of botany, wrote the treatise Historia Plantarum describing where plants grew, what they looked like, and their uses as both food and medicine.
Pliny the Elder’s (A.D. 23-79) Naturalis Historia extensively describes the medical use of herbs.
Penanius Dioscorides (A.D. 40-90) wrote the famous De Materia Medica, an extensive recod of the preparation properties, pharmacological properties, and testing of medicinal compounds in plants. His five books became central to pharmacology for the next 16 centuries.
And of course Galen (A.D. 129-200), the Greek scholar famous for treating Roman gladiators as well as the personal physician of emperor Marcus Aurelius, wrote extensively about plants and their place in medicine.
That is not the only record, though. We also have plenty of archaeological records of pollen fossils which can fairly accurately tell us which plants were being cultivated by ancient cultures. Common herbs have been growing wild for thousands of years, and humans have been using them for just as long.
But how did they use them? Topical applications as poultices were standard, and consumption of the raw herb would be another obvious method. The most effective, however, was the herbal tea.
Theophrastus, mentioned above, gave specific instructions on the preparation of herbal teas in his Historia Plantarum.
In Colchester, England, a grave was found containing a variety of medical instruments, including a metal straining bowl very much resembling a tea pot.
Apparently, these straining bowls were common in northern Europe, and have been assumed to be used to strain beer and mead. But I don’t think it’s a logical leap that they may have been functioning tea pots.
Herbal teas as medicine are most effective because of the ability to regulate dosage. Consuming large amounts of raw plants can be hard on the stomach, but when steeped in water the medicinal properties can be easily absorbed.
Based on my research, I decided that my druid would own a bronze teapot like the one above, his most treasured possession. But what would he brew in it?
I began to compile a list of herbs and their properties from the variety of resources, which I will present in my next post. But perhaps the most useful document for me was a book my wife gave to me for Christmas, Victoria Zak’s 20,000 Secrets of Tea. She provides an A-Z guide of ailments and the corresponding herbal remedies, as well as a profile of each herb and its properties. While her descriptions of medicinal properties span the range from scientific to mystical, the text is a great starting place for additional research and verification.
Of course, I couldn’t just include these teas in my story with actually trying them, could I?
And this is, perhaps, the most enjoyable part of research: the real application. What does a tea of parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme taste like? How does it make me feel?
I discovered the online store Mountain Rose Herbs and started what has become a large collection of loose leaf herbs. I already had a cool teapot purchased at one of those cheesy commercial booths at the Orange County fair, as well as a single cup infuser.
“Living the History,” as many of the community members of the Iron Age site kelticos.org do, changes the way you write about it. I now can describe the exact tastes, brewing methods, textures and scents, and effects of the various herbal teas my character uses.
And there is something magical to these brews, a connection back to the natural world that is so lacking in Western medicine. I go into my backyard on a sunny California winter day, harvest fresh rosemary, sage, parsley, and thyme, and brew a tea that leaves me feeling refreshed, energized, and mentally clear. Then I write about my characters doing it.
In my next post, I will describe in detail the herbs I’ve chosen for my story.
