[EBOOK] PLANT POWERS, POISONS AND HERB CRAFT, BY DALE PENDELL, Foreword by Gary Snyder

This is a hook about plants. Green, sweet, peaceful plants: the harmless beings who give us flowers, nuts, fruits, roots, sap, bark, fiber, and shade. But some aren't so great to cat - sour, bitter, or worse. Plants arc all chemists, tirelessly assembling the molecules of the world, and in their transactions with insects, birds, animals, and fungi, they find elaborate ways to defend themselves, to seduce pollinators, to confuse. So it's a book about the interplay of plants, insects, animals, and humans. and suggests a bit how toxins shaped ecological systems. How much we assume about plants, and how little we know them! Pendell playfully says, "Only plants had consciousness. Animals got it from them."

It's a book about people, the plant-women and -men who for millennia investigated the properties of plants and learned to use them for healing, for their effects on the mind, for poisons. These ancient experts and traditional professionals knew and kept plant secrets close for generations. It's a book about knowledge, and secrets.

In recent centuries those who knew plants and their powers have often been stigmatized, as though danger and unpredictability were of themselves evil. This is a book about human cultures, and'how those which demonize death or pain or sickness are thus less able to deal with the bitter side of nature, with intoxications; and make themselves doubly sick.

The Buddha taught that all life is suffering. We might also say that life, being both attractive and constantly dangerous, is intoxicating and ultimately toxic. Cupid shoots an arrow which strikes and changes you forever; love is toxic. "Toxic" comes from toxicon, Pcndcll tells US, with a root meaning of "a poisoned arrow." All organic life is struck by the arrows of real and psychic poisons. This is understood by any true, that is to say, not self-deluding, spiritual path.

So Pendell speaks of the "way of poisons." This way (modem and ancient shamanism and herberaft, verging into ethnobotany and elhnopharmacology) has developed a remarkable body of empirical and scientific knowledge to place against current official ignorance and resistance to the possibility of clear and courageous thinking about the many realms of drugs.

This is a book about danger: dangerous knowledge, even more dangerous ignorance. and dangerous temptations by the seductions of addictions both psychic and cellular. It is a book which requires that one not be titillated by romantic ideas of self-destruction. I hope and believe it will benefit human beings and the plant world too. It is not for everyone — but neither is mountaineering.

Pendell quotes William Blake, "poets are of the devil’s party." Poets needless to say are not satanists, so what does Blake mean? I think he is saying that for those who are willing to explore the fullness of their imagination, their mind and senses, there are great risks — at the very least, of massive silliness. Farther out is madness. No joke. But forget about the devil; poets and such travelers also bring a certain sanity back home. Here is a look at half-understood truths and serious territories of remaining mystery. This is a book of imagination and poetry.

Industrial toxins and wastes are in the aừ and oceans, and buried and heaped up on the land. Our very food now' seems suspect. "Better living through chemistry" was brought US by our own entrepreneurial and selectively regulatory societies. The developed world now has to work all these questions out, with vast environmental destruction as the stakes. Who indeed are the crazies of the twentieth century? We desperately need to understand the basics, of plants, of consciousness. of poisons. This book is a tentative map with scribbled reports by scouts from the territory beyond the ranges, and it aims for sanity.

[EBOOK] PLANT POWERS, POISONS AND HERB CRAFT, BY DALE PENDELL, Foreword by Gary Snyder

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