VIII Appendix: Modern Reflections

It is worth remembering, when translating ancient data dealing with technical sub-
jects such as astral medicine, that what is being described are universal problems
which have always been with us and persist until our own day. Although astrologi-
cal influence today is hardly reckoned to have any scientific basis or relevance to
drug therapy, there are nevertheless modern adherents to both astrology and herb-
al remedies who would adopt a different point of view. A good case in point is a
company known as Bach Remedies, whose literature is widely distributed, offering
herbal treatments for the following kinds of mental and physical states:

You are shy or feel anxious about something

You are anxious but can’t say why
You feel an extreme terror about something
You fear you might lose control
You find yourself making the same mistakes
You feel down in the dumps and don’t know why
Your talkativeness leads to loneliness
You feel impatient with the slow place of people or things
You give up when things go wrong
You can’t make your mind up
You feel overwhelmed by your many responsibilities
You feel guilty or blame yourself
You expect to fail and lack confidence in your skills
You feel unclean or dislike something about yourself
Sometimes you are a tyrant when you want to lead
You feel critical of or intolerant towards others
You feel wounded, spiteful, jealous, or want revenge

This selection from the Bach Remedies brochure features common types of anxie-
ties and insecureties, the kinds of conditions for which today one might seek
psychological counseling or psychiatric help. The Bach Remedies brochure groups
the ‘symptoms’ into various categories: ‘face your fears’, ‘live the day’, ‘reach out
to others’, ‘know your own mind’, ‘find joy and hope’, ‘live and let live’, and ‘stand
your ground’.
The recommended treatment for each of the modern Bach Remedy conditions
is some form of herbal remedy, many of which are easily recognisable from the
garden, such as cherry plum, honeysuckle, clematis, wild rose, mustard, olive,
heather, impatients, wild oat, willow, elm, pine, crabble apple, pine, vervain, and
Star of Bethlehem. Although not exactly like the various magical spells listed in
BRM 4 and similar texts above, nevertheless the underlying human feelings of self-
doubt and angst are common to both ancient and modern lists. In the ancient
world, however, no recourse to psychotherapy was possible, and the only treat-
ments available to a Babylonian patient were either incantations or therapeutic
recipes, consisting mostly of plants and drugs to be administered in various forms

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96 Appendix: Modern Reflections

or attached to the person within an amulet. Although we cannot associate Akka-

dian plant names with most of the above modern garden herbs, nevertheless the
common feature is that quite ordinary plants and herbs, also used for standard
culinary purposes, could form the basis of a pharmacopeia to be used to treat
psychological distress of different sorts.
The only thing missing from the Bach Remedy list, from an ancient perspective,
is when such herbal remedies are best applied, and modern herbal medicine has
no real answer to this question. Ancient physicians, however, working in the latter
half of the first millennium BC, could find a ready answer in the form of astrology
and astral medicine, which attempted to determine when incantations and recipes
had an optimal effect on the condition to be treated, whether physical disease or
mental problems. Because of the fragmentary nature of our ancient source materi-
al, we cannot always know how astrology was applied to medical recipes or even
incantations, since this knowledge may have been orally transmitted and taught
without necessarily being committed to writing. In a similar way, one could easily
imagine a Bach Remedies brochure in the hands of a modern astrologer, intent to
find the most propitious times when such herbal remedies could be used to cure
the kind of psychological problems to which astrology is often addressed. There
would be no record of such calculations, apart from those in the know.

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