THE GREAT CHAIN OF BEING
The essential life force is not only an intuitive concept found in every child. It is also a belief that has survived thousands of years in different models of the human body, both religious and medical. The ancient Greeks described the essential life force in their humoral theory of how the body works. They believed that a healthy body depends on maintaining the balance of the four vital juices of blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. However, as these bodily fluids are ultimately perishable, a fifth element, or ‘quintessence’, is necessary to animate the body with spirit.35 Today a similar idea is still the core component of traditional Eastern medicine and philosophy, whose treatments and rituals involve manipulating and channelling energy. The Greeks also recognized a holistic concept of life – the doctrine that unseen energies and forces connect everything in the universe. These connections are permanent, so that action on one thing in the universe has consequences further down the chain. The more closely things are connected, the stronger the consequence of action.
Such an idea underpinned the later dominant Western medieval theory of the universe known as God’s ‘Great Chain of Being’. This was the belief that all things, including animals, vegetables, and minerals, are related.36 All things originated from the same source, are organized into a hierarchy of association, and are held together by divine correspondences – invisible forces that connect the various elements. These forces could be sympathetic in that they shared common correspondences that could be combined. Or the forces could be antipathetic where the elements opposed each other and could be used to cancel each other out.
FIG. 14: Robert Fludd’s ‘Great Chain of Being’. PHOTOGRAPH BILL HEIDRICH © UC BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA
For example, in an illustration of God’s natural plan published in 1617, Robert Fludd’s diagram shows how man was sympathetically linked to the sun, which was linked to the grape vine, which was linked to the lion, which was linked to gold. Hence, men were noblemen. Gold was considered a noble metal, as was the name of the gold coin of this period. The vine was noble, and the mould that forms on overripe fruit and produces a characteristic rich flavour was known as the ‘noble rot’. The lion was a noble beast. Likewise, woman was sympathetically linked to the moon. Her menstrual cycle was clearly related to lunar activity, which was linked to wheat, which was linked to the eagle, which was linked to silver, and so on. Man was opposite to woman, and the sun was opposite to the moon. Everywhere in nature you could find evidence for sympathies and antipathies by looking for signatures of God’s hidden order. The evidence was overwhelming. You just had to look around you and see all the connections. This was trivially easy for a human mind designed to detect patterns and infer connections in the natural world.
Everywhere nature’s patterns were interpreted as reflecting a deeper causal model based on God’s hidden correspondences. Sometimes God left clues in that animals, vegetables, or minerals that shared sympathetic correspondences looked similar. This reasoning became known as the ‘Doctrine of Signatures’ and was the basis for much alchemy and folk medicine.37 For example, because walnuts looked like the brain, they were used for headaches. The weeping willow tree was thought to be a cure for melancholy because of the clear signature of the drooping weariness of its branches. The foxglove plant (digitalis), with its spotted fingers, was originally thought to be a remedy for respiratory conditions because it was reminiscent of diseased lungs. Turmeric, the root commonly used to colour Indian food yellow, was used to treat jaundice, a condition that produces a yellow skin pallor. Mandrake roots, which resembled shrivelled humans, were considered to be particularly potent and, owing to their alkaloid toxins, could be used to induce altered states of consciousness for all manner of purposes. Nipplewort (lapsana communis), a tall weed with small yellow heads, was once esteemed for treating sore nipples. Pilewort (lesser celandine), with its knobbly tubers, speaks for itself.
Even today many societies value magical foods that are believed to contain essential healing or enhancing properties by virtue of their resemblance to body parts. Figs and pomegranates have properties that resemble female genitalia. The Coco de Mer coconut resembles a woman’s genitals and is highly prized for fertility.38
FIG. 15: A Coco de Mer nut. What does it look like to you? AUTHOR’S COLLECTION.
Phallic-shaped foods like bananas and asparagus are also deemed to be potent by virtue of their resemblance to the penis. It’s not too surprising then that actual penises feature regularly as foods that can enhance male performance. The Guolizhuang in Beijing is China’s first restaurant that specializes in animal penises. Businessmen can pay up to £3,000 to eat tiger penis in the belief that it will improve their virility and life energy.39
Much of traditional Chinese medicine is based on essentialist and vitalist notions of sympathies. Pregnant women are advised to eat dragon-tiger-phoenix soup, which combines the energies of snake, chicken, and our old friend the civet cat. Yes, that’s right. If it’s not enough that we drink its droppings in our coffee and smear its buttock juice on our necks, it’s also a popular ingredient in a common Chinese medicinal soup. Civets may have the last laugh against their human tormentors. The severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak that threatened a world-wide pandemic in 2003 was transferred to humans by civet cats stacked in crates in the infamous wet markets of the Far East before being shipped out to restaurants. SARS is a coronavirus. It replicates by hijacking the DNA contents of a cell and replacing it with its own genetic material. You could say that a coronavirus substitutes one essence for another. How ironic that the cherished supernatural essence of infected cats was in fact a real and deadly virile essence with a one-in-ten fatality rate.
HOMEOPATHY IS ESSENTIAL
Modern homeopathy is equally a direct descendant of sympathetic magical reasoning and logic. Much of its practice is based on the publication of the German physician Samuel Hahnemann’s (1755–1833) law of similars: similia, similibus curantur, or ‘like cures like’. If your baby has a diaper rash, homeopathy recommends treating it with poison ivy, a toxin that produces severe rashes. For children’s diarrhoea, try a dose of rat poison. But don’t worry, the first law of similars was supplemented by the second law of infinitesimals, which states that the more dilute the dose the more effective the treatment.
Homeopathic remedies are diluted to such an extreme that it is unlikely that the liquid contains anything but pure water. This is because the practitioner adds the ingredient to a beaker of water and then takes one-hundredth of the solution and adds this to a new beaker. He or she then takes one-hundredth of that solution and repeats the process over and over again. A typical homeopathic remedy will be so dilute that it contains one particle of the original target ingredient in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 particles of a liquid. You get the picture. You would have to drink twenty-five metric tons of water for there to be a remote chance that you had swallowed just one molecule of the original substance. Apparently this is not a problem. According to homeopathy, shaking the solution ten times with each dilution releases the vital energy of the active ingredient, which imprints a memory trace in the water.