A few weeks back I had an amazing experience, a vision, given to me by Ghost Pipe (Monotropa uniflora).
Ghost Pipe has been called Indian pipe or Indian Ghost Pipe, but now has more appropriately come to be called Ghost Pipe, at least in herbal circles.
If you didn’t know, you could be forgiven for thinking this mysterious being is fungal and not of the plant kingdom because of it’s pure white colour with zero green chlorophyll, and how it erupts out of the ground in groups with waxy white flowers that could be mushroom caps. And, in fact this herb is mysteriously connected to the fungal kingdom.
In the last couple of years there has been strangely copious amount of this plant growing, bulging out in bunches everywhere under the trees like mushrooms after the rain. In forty years or so of my knowing this plant and watching I’ve never seen anything like this growth. There has also been a peak in interest among herbalists. Not sure which came first, I’ve seen it happen both ways. Sometimes our collective interest and acknowledgement of a plant brings more of it into the physical realm. I remember that happened with Saint John’s Wort when his popularity boomed in the late 1980’s as the ‘herbal prozac’. Generally though, on a personal and collective level, plants ‘present’ in a big way when our human consciousness is ready for them, or we need them. Thinking about it this way it’s clear we humans are needing more help than ever with our ‘skeletons in the closet’; with that which we thought was dead and buried, but which is sprouting back up for us to look at again.
One of the medicine’s signatures is Ghost Pipe’s bowed head, which we do when we are burdened with the corpses of the past. Line up this plant’s medicine with what’s happening on a planetary level, with lockdowns and fear and it makes perfect sense this plant is presenting in a huge way these days.
Because of both the rise in information about this herb and the actual numbers of plants, I made a good amount of tincture a couple of years ago. It bruises blue but like magic when immersed in spirits and turns an incredible deep royal purple. This colour holds another aspect of this plant’s medicine signature. Purples and the ultra-violets stand at the edge of our experience of physical existence. Beyond them does exist but we cannot see it physically. In nature the colour purple is very rare. We see it in the twilight, in the hue of distant mountains and in a few plants. Purple in our body often represents the resolution of entropy and physical decay. The point at which flesh (red) transforms into water and either (blue) is violet. Also consider the chakra system in which the purple relates to the spiritual body.
Now I’ll tell you about my vision. You’re not really supposed to share everything about a vision because then you give away its medicine, but I feel sharing the main image will be very useful. It was a day of ceremony for me and after many hours I left the lodge needing a stretch and break from ritual. As I slowly and adoringly walked a trail through a stretch of pine forest I looked down and saw what looked exactly like a group of embryonic skeletons rising up in a ring, being born from the Earth. I knelt down and sunk into their world. They showed me they come to digest grief on the land, and could be used by the people to help work with their ‘ghosts’. They rise white, from the underworld, their skulls first, like a birthing. As they grow the skulls hollow out into plates, which are white flower petals, and the spine and neck twist the head down for flowering. Then after the Ghost Pipe has set seed they stand strait again and the head turns to face up. If you pick them when the heads are down (which is the time to pick them for medicine), and turn it sideways, it looks just like a porcelain white pipe. The pipe helps us transform our prayers from the etherial to physical. The pipe enables us to make offerings like smoke of your grief to the Earth and Spirits. This plant helps transform and resolve rotting issues psychically, just as the plants feed through the underworld fungal kingdom and not through the sunlight and photosynthesis.
I knew from what I’d heard in recent years this herb had analgesic properties and was particularly good for back (bone and nerve related issues), as well as being used for anxiety and trauma. But what I saw was that this special all-white plant’s purpose is to help us work with the deepest core issues, that have gone to our ‘bones’ and the nerves and ligaments that make them move. Like the colour purple, our bones also lie at the edge of physical reality for us, at the edge of form, before we are dust. Bones are the last physical part still holding something of who we are long after our mortal time and all memory of us has passed. The conflict you carry in your bones can make you sick this life and you can carry it into the next. Ghost Pipe can help relieve you of that burden.
I’m sure Ghost Pipe has many physical and chemical characteristics that are useful in healing the body, the flesh and blood, but what the plant’s spirit spoke of to me was of being able to help people resolve spiritual issues, raise our heads and stand up straight again, free of the past’s weight. Ghost Pipe is here to help resolve conflict with the living and the dead. Because I consider this plant ‘spiritual medicine’ I think super small amounts, like a drop dose, would work on its own or added into other herbal concoctions, where it would homoeopathically help resolve the spiritual aspects of illness, while the other portion of the herbal combination might be aimed at shifting the physical conditions.
I don’t have much experience with higher doses of this plant or using it topically, both of which may be fruitful for healing, but Ghost pipe has now become a way I can connect and help others connect with the underworld and a part of my herbal healing pantheon.