Beyerl’s feet were firmly placed upon his Path in the 1970s, from his earliest herbal mentor, Yetive, in the 1950s to his passionate study of the same texts which changed Aldous Huxley’s life: The Bardo Thödol, the Gita, and books which moved him awkwardly on an Eastern path.

 

When he began studying with his Wiccan teachers in 1975, he began with equal passion humanistic astrology and medical herbalism. Upon discovering Occult Science in Medicine by Franz Hartman also published in 1975, he recognized that his childhood dream of an elaborate chemistry set was not about chemistry but about alchemy. He was that member of a large agrarian family who was known for precognitive dreams and the ability to dowse water, and his views of reality were not quite like those of the mainstream. 

 

In ca. 1950 his Christian education taught him that the answer to the question “Where is God?” is that “God is everywhere,” which he thought to be a universal truth. Believing that god was in the trees and in the plants of the gardens and woodlands, that god was in the animals and even in his erectile tissue put him at serious odds with that religion.

 

The religion of Wicca enabled him to find unity in all of his disparate experiences and beliefs and his approach to herbal work was soon influenced as well by what he read of Findhorn in 1976. How wonderful to learn that there were others who understood the special radiance and energy of the Green World.

 

In 1980 the first edition of Beyerl’s seminal book The Holy Books of the Devas was written, a little book written as if the sacred and holy books of the plant world, which the herbalist had been privileged to translate and bring back from the Underworld. This book is now in its fourth edition, greatly expanded.

The main work in this book is The Deva Ritual. This is a work of ritual theatre in which we are taught the primary creation myth of the transformation of simple plants into medicinal wonders, into the healers of the planet.

 

Beyerl has been guiding students into becoming at one with the herbs, of learning how to understand them as whole beings from their chemical components to their botanical structure, from the history of the medicinal values to the stories found in folklore and the ways in which people globally have used them in ceremony, all of which contributes to learning the secret name - the elusive goal of shamanic students - of every plant we work with.

 

Paul Beyerl is an accomplished author and his books as resources relevant to these two workshops are:

 

• The Holy Books Of The Devas: The Secret Mythologies of the Herbal World. Fourth Edition. (1998). The Hermit’s Grove Publ.

• Painless Astrology: A Simple and Fun Guide to Natal Chart Interpretation (1993). The Hermit's Grove Publ.

• The Master Book of Herbalism (1984). Phoenix Publ. (US) Distributed by Robert Hale Ltd UK.

• A Compendium of Herbal Magick (1998). Phoenix Publ. (US) Distributed by Robert Hale Ltd UK.