The cure is in the venom
Star Catherine Feliz
The Three Fates in Hercules, 1997, released by Walt Disney Pictures
Fateful Daze on Faithful Days
The world is kept alive only by heretics […] tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust...―Yevgeny Zamyatin
We seek out ecstatic experiences because they are a direct line to our soul while in this human form. Traveling down the spiral of this earthbound mortal coil is a special opportunity unlike anything available in other dimensions, even when our suffering leads us to curse this very existence. But we are never alone on this journey. After long being discarded as weeds or mislabeled as dangerous drugs, we are now being called to remember poisonous plants as our ancient and wise teachers guiding us to dream our liberated future into being.
The visionary leadership of priestesses, shamans, medicine people, mystic healers, and other roles with more culturally specific terms, is to maintain a clear and constant channel with the creator and the realm of helping spirits. Devastatingly, within the last millennium collective leadership has shifted considerably from the hearts of those accountable to the laws of the universe to the tiny hearts of those in the western colonial world with no regard for the web of life. To maintain power, the ruling class and the systems that recreate it weaken our inherent connection to liberation—our capacity to dream.
On one such fateful daze, a spider spirit visited my dream to teach me about flying ointments. The spider slowed down my heart rate to a melodic drone and showed me floating above and flying as if I was swimming through air. With an ability to shapeshift into various frequencies and forms, we can travel across the hedges, return safely, and report back oracular wisdom with the wider community. This is what the ancient ones deeply knew and has fallen out of practice since the church marked our ancestral technologies as evil. It took me many years to begin trusting in my own oracular knowledge. I watched my schizophrenic brother and father live through inhumane treatments and social rejection and what I feared most was that I would suffer the same fate. This shame and fear continues to be weaponized by structures of oppression until the brave ones break the spell that’s been crystalizing in our DNA for generations.
This visioning requires a daring courage that doesn’t flinch at the hum of death. Our survival and evolution has always relied upon our ability to vision alongside plants and fungi held in sacred ritual. High in potent alkaloid and atropic solubles, datura, opium poppy, henbane, and many more have the effect of narrowing blood vessels, slowing down the heart rate and activating extra-ordinary states of consciousness. Tobacco is the most sacred plant within our Arawak-Taino cosmology. The first plant to offer to come to earth to aid in the spiritual evolution of humanity, its smoke carries prayers to the realm of the gods.
Have faith in your dreams, in waking and in sleep, trust that it is the creator making known how they want to take action in the world. Like a spider sees and weaves throughout all of time with the ease of a grandmother sitting in a rocking chair, have faith in the cast lines across generations made visible. Now imagine four spider legs stretching out to offer the Moirae Sisters and all sides of Hekate a glass of iced yew tea while they weave our collective paths within collapsed time. See in the dark.
A relief sculpture of the goddess Mami Wata on the wall of a voodoo temple in Benin. Image: Godong_Stockbyte, via Getty Images
The Poison Arrow Pierces Mutant Ass
Enslaved peoples reshaped the cross of suffering into a crossroads of healing.―Robbie Shilliam
Chances are if you are reading this then you too are living in a dead and dying world. The colonized or so-called first world is the underworld. Losing your spirit and drowning your heart is the token we subconsciously pay to be a part of this world. In order to be alive, radically alive, we have to die many symbolic deaths. Poison offers us the ultimate chance for transformation: wither away in stagnation or surrender to evolution. When Chiron was wounded by a poison arrow, all of their knowledge about healing herbs could not cure them of the venom. He died and was lifted up into the sky as the Sagittarius constellation. Similarly, Osanyin who was born from under the soil was left deeply scarred by the hands of another orisha, but they survived and deepened their communication with the natural world to become the most powerful healer and keeper of plant wisdom in Yorubaland.
Venom brings us beyond the egoic individualist paradigms of healing under capitalism by activating a felt sense of the ways in which we are our surroundings and our surroundings are us. Serpent medicine, if it does not destroy us, can guide us in transmuting pain, grief, and our attachment to belief systems that are based on false illusions into a sacrament for the continuation of life in alignment with love. Connection is the cure in a world spellbound with disconnection. When George Washington Carver divined a way to regenerate southern soils in the wake of slavery’s ecological destruction they taught us about alchemy. Carver was able to channel the teachings of the elemental universe for us to heal and choose life in a dead and dying world. And as Paracelsus had scribbled centuries ago, the line dividing poison from medicine is simply dosage.
Working with poisonous plants to heal and transform is an ancient art and a high empirical science. Even far away from the magical herbalist’s lab we can see these principles governing the poetry of our lives within the eye of every storm. Through living with PTSD and chronic depression I’ve learned that healing can only begin with safety. Working with and alongside these beings has allowed me to see my trauma conditioning and work to move my perspective beyond those patterns. But of course the expectation of being fully healed is naive at best when you’re a mutant living in the poisonous reality known as America. The darkness that’s now bound to this soil and our monuments’ stones is what keeps us sick. We can only find moments of respite that armor us with enough courage to brave the dark and create a new world from within the belly of the beast.
There wasn’t always such a moral judgment separating light and dark. In fact, one of the many epithets of Hekate, a guardian of baneful plants, is Phōsphoros Φωσφόρος: the one who brings the light. Can you hear her whispers daring you to swim into the sea of consciousness just long enough for Clotho to stop spinning and gather the strings of pearls that spirit set aside to illuminate our paths? They lie deep in the chthonic waters where the darker aspects of central goddexx figures like Athena were split and became the scorned dark goddexxes so that we wouldn’t brave the underworlds with clear vision to find the gift of our shadows: the cleansing wrath of our fires, the truth-telling sage of our fears, the saving wisdom of the oppressed ones. To truly live we have to destroy what binds us.
Star Catherine Feliz holds the bloom of a Datura Inoxia at Mobile Moon Coop Farm
Heresy For All
Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggesting the very power of suggestion. No one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces...―Genesis P-Orridge
True knowledge comes straight from the source. It cannot be taught, it is only transmitted. Within this dead and dying world we are miseducated, so now we have to break away from what our minds are woven to think and to imagine. We can start by remembering the wisdom that already lies within our bones. As our teachers, psychoactive plants and fungi are not interested in being masters or held above others. They break hierarchies and revel in the damned profane and in holy servitude. They desecrate myths and inspire us to defile illegitimate rule. To the uninitiated this knowing is received as deviancy and waywardness. The prophets of new religions and spiritual movements are ruled by this divine spark, as too are the leaders of social movements.
One of the teachings of Black Liberation Theology is that the god of the people packed in the bowels of the slave ship is not the same god of the people who walk freely on the deck. While one god oppresses, another liberates. When the visionary poet Pauli Murray left a secular career in law and academia, they trailed new paths for racialized and gender-oppressed clergy in the Christian Episcopal Church. What possibilities open up for us when our hearts and minds are connected? We don’t settle for a home within the imagination of a system built on annihilation. This torch was also famously taken up by the 1960s counterculture whose movement was one in higher consciousness ignited by LSD and the politics of racial and gender equality. Have faith in the compass aligning you with a truth that can withstand the fall of empires.
We can all tap into this spark, with or without our poisonous plant allies. It’s a power we must sharpen if we truly want to decentralize and disarm the poison of violence from the root. Let’s ask ourselves, how do the mistakes of humanity present themselves in our everyday lives? Personally experiencing and supporting comrades who are experiencing violence of all forms within movement-organizing spaces is disheartening enough to call it quits. We can unknowingly harm others because the systems are alive and well within us, silently rooting and waiting to seed themselves on new fertile soil. And it’s not a problem that we can think our way out of. The real work is relational. The real work is to also slow down with glacial time enough to distance ourselves from the noise and feel the patterns that govern our reality.
Our liberation is deeply bound to our shackles, just as venom points us towards a cure. When in doubt, dive into the well of emotions and infinite senses that lie beyond numbness. Bring it back to the human body, the earth body. The revolution is earth connection. The revolution is a heart-mind connection. The revolution is a spiritual connection. The revolution is bringing the sacred back into everyday life and every moment offers us another chance to remember how to be alive.
Préfète Duffault, Le Reine d'Araignée (Spider Queen), 1958
✸
Thank you to all the students who’ve sat in classrooms and workshops with me where I’ve worked through some of these threads with words. You’ve allowed me the space to begin trusting in my wyrd ways, and remind me that the work of recovering the sacred happens when we gather and live with this intention. And a special thanxxx to spiders, serpents, tobacco, datura, morning glory, blue lotus, bittersweet nightshade, arabica bean, henbane, amanita muscaria, and persephone for the teachings you’ve shared with me.—Star
✸
Star Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person born and raised in Lenapehoking, aka New York City, with roots in Ayiti, aka Dominican Republic. Entangled across the mediums of sculptural installation, time-based media, and book forms, their work explores earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles in the department of Interdisciplinary Studio. After almost ten years of studying and practicing community-based herbalism, Star is currently sharing their medicine under the self-started project of Botánica Cimarrón. Their formulas are unique stories that weave together the past, present, and future of Caribbean folk healing to bring living systems back into alignment.
BACK TO TOP
The cure is in the venom
Star Catherine Feliz
The Three Fates in Hercules, 1997, released by Walt Disney Pictures
Fateful Daze on Faithful Days
The world is kept alive only by heretics […] tomorrow is an inevitable heresy of today, which has turned into a pillar of salt, and to yesterday, which has scattered to dust...―Yevgeny Zamyatin
We seek out ecstatic experiences because they are a direct line to our soul while in this human form. Traveling down the spiral of this earthbound mortal coil is a special opportunity unlike anything available in other dimensions, even when our suffering leads us to curse this very existence. But we are never alone on this journey. After long being discarded as weeds or mislabeled as dangerous drugs, we are now being called to remember poisonous plants as our ancient and wise teachers guiding us to dream our liberated future into being.
The visionary leadership of priestesses, shamans, medicine people, mystic healers, and other roles with more culturally specific terms, is to maintain a clear and constant channel with the creator and the realm of helping spirits. Devastatingly, within the last millennium collective leadership has shifted considerably from the hearts of those accountable to the laws of the universe to the tiny hearts of those in the western colonial world with no regard for the web of life. To maintain power, the ruling class and the systems that recreate it weaken our inherent connection to liberation—our capacity to dream.
On one such fateful daze, a spider spirit visited my dream to teach me about flying ointments. The spider slowed down my heart rate to a melodic drone and showed me floating above and flying as if I was swimming through air. With an ability to shapeshift into various frequencies and forms, we can travel across the hedges, return safely, and report back oracular wisdom with the wider community. This is what the ancient ones deeply knew and has fallen out of practice since the church marked our ancestral technologies as evil. It took me many years to begin trusting in my own oracular knowledge. I watched my schizophrenic brother and father live through inhumane treatments and social rejection and what I feared most was that I would suffer the same fate. This shame and fear continues to be weaponized by structures of oppression until the brave ones break the spell that’s been crystalizing in our DNA for generations.
This visioning requires a daring courage that doesn’t flinch at the hum of death. Our survival and evolution has always relied upon our ability to vision alongside plants and fungi held in sacred ritual. High in potent alkaloid and atropic solubles, datura, opium poppy, henbane, and many more have the effect of narrowing blood vessels, slowing down the heart rate and activating extra-ordinary states of consciousness. Tobacco is the most sacred plant within our Arawak-Taino cosmology. The first plant to offer to come to earth to aid in the spiritual evolution of humanity, its smoke carries prayers to the realm of the gods.
Have faith in your dreams, in waking and in sleep, trust that it is the creator making known how they want to take action in the world. Like a spider sees and weaves throughout all of time with the ease of a grandmother sitting in a rocking chair, have faith in the cast lines across generations made visible. Now imagine four spider legs stretching out to offer the Moirae Sisters and all sides of Hekate a glass of iced yew tea while they weave our collective paths within collapsed time. See in the dark.
A relief sculpture of the goddess Mami Wata on the wall of a voodoo temple in Benin. Image: Godong_Stockbyte, via Getty Images
The Poison Arrow Pierces Mutant Ass
Enslaved peoples reshaped the cross of suffering into a crossroads of healing.―Robbie Shilliam
Chances are if you are reading this then you too are living in a dead and dying world. The colonized or so-called first world is the underworld. Losing your spirit and drowning your heart is the token we subconsciously pay to be a part of this world. In order to be alive, radically alive, we have to die many symbolic deaths. Poison offers us the ultimate chance for transformation: wither away in stagnation or surrender to evolution. When Chiron was wounded by a poison arrow, all of their knowledge about healing herbs could not cure them of the venom. He died and was lifted up into the sky as the Sagittarius constellation. Similarly, Osanyin who was born from under the soil was left deeply scarred by the hands of another orisha, but they survived and deepened their communication with the natural world to become the most powerful healer and keeper of plant wisdom in Yorubaland.
Venom brings us beyond the egoic individualist paradigms of healing under capitalism by activating a felt sense of the ways in which we are our surroundings and our surroundings are us. Serpent medicine, if it does not destroy us, can guide us in transmuting pain, grief, and our attachment to belief systems that are based on false illusions into a sacrament for the continuation of life in alignment with love. Connection is the cure in a world spellbound with disconnection. When George Washington Carver divined a way to regenerate southern soils in the wake of slavery’s ecological destruction they taught us about alchemy. Carver was able to channel the teachings of the elemental universe for us to heal and choose life in a dead and dying world. And as Paracelsus had scribbled centuries ago, the line dividing poison from medicine is simply dosage.
Working with poisonous plants to heal and transform is an ancient art and a high empirical science. Even far away from the magical herbalist’s lab we can see these principles governing the poetry of our lives within the eye of every storm. Through living with PTSD and chronic depression I’ve learned that healing can only begin with safety. Working with and alongside these beings has allowed me to see my trauma conditioning and work to move my perspective beyond those patterns. But of course the expectation of being fully healed is naive at best when you’re a mutant living in the poisonous reality known as America. The darkness that’s now bound to this soil and our monuments’ stones is what keeps us sick. We can only find moments of respite that armor us with enough courage to brave the dark and create a new world from within the belly of the beast.
There wasn’t always such a moral judgment separating light and dark. In fact, one of the many epithets of Hekate, a guardian of baneful plants, is Phōsphoros Φωσφόρος: the one who brings the light. Can you hear her whispers daring you to swim into the sea of consciousness just long enough for Clotho to stop spinning and gather the strings of pearls that spirit set aside to illuminate our paths? They lie deep in the chthonic waters where the darker aspects of central goddexx figures like Athena were split and became the scorned dark goddexxes so that we wouldn’t brave the underworlds with clear vision to find the gift of our shadows: the cleansing wrath of our fires, the truth-telling sage of our fears, the saving wisdom of the oppressed ones. To truly live we have to destroy what binds us.
Star Catherine Feliz holds the bloom of a Datura Inoxia at Mobile Moon Coop Farm
Heresy For All
Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling itself into intuition and suggesting the very power of suggestion. No one noted down from a book this process, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces...―Genesis P-Orridge
True knowledge comes straight from the source. It cannot be taught, it is only transmitted. Within this dead and dying world we are miseducated, so now we have to break away from what our minds are woven to think and to imagine. We can start by remembering the wisdom that already lies within our bones. As our teachers, psychoactive plants and fungi are not interested in being masters or held above others. They break hierarchies and revel in the damned profane and in holy servitude. They desecrate myths and inspire us to defile illegitimate rule. To the uninitiated this knowing is received as deviancy and waywardness. The prophets of new religions and spiritual movements are ruled by this divine spark, as too are the leaders of social movements.
One of the teachings of Black Liberation Theology is that the god of the people packed in the bowels of the slave ship is not the same god of the people who walk freely on the deck. While one god oppresses, another liberates. When the visionary poet Pauli Murray left a secular career in law and academia, they trailed new paths for racialized and gender-oppressed clergy in the Christian Episcopal Church. What possibilities open up for us when our hearts and minds are connected? We don’t settle for a home within the imagination of a system built on annihilation. This torch was also famously taken up by the 1960s counterculture whose movement was one in higher consciousness ignited by LSD and the politics of racial and gender equality. Have faith in the compass aligning you with a truth that can withstand the fall of empires.
We can all tap into this spark, with or without our poisonous plant allies. It’s a power we must sharpen if we truly want to decentralize and disarm the poison of violence from the root. Let’s ask ourselves, how do the mistakes of humanity present themselves in our everyday lives? Personally experiencing and supporting comrades who are experiencing violence of all forms within movement-organizing spaces is disheartening enough to call it quits. We can unknowingly harm others because the systems are alive and well within us, silently rooting and waiting to seed themselves on new fertile soil. And it’s not a problem that we can think our way out of. The real work is relational. The real work is to also slow down with glacial time enough to distance ourselves from the noise and feel the patterns that govern our reality.
Our liberation is deeply bound to our shackles, just as venom points us towards a cure. When in doubt, dive into the well of emotions and infinite senses that lie beyond numbness. Bring it back to the human body, the earth body. The revolution is earth connection. The revolution is a heart-mind connection. The revolution is a spiritual connection. The revolution is bringing the sacred back into everyday life and every moment offers us another chance to remember how to be alive.
✸
Préfète Duffault, Le Reine d'Araignée (Spider Queen), 1958
Thank you to all the students who’ve sat in classrooms and workshops with me where I’ve worked through some of these threads with words. You’ve allowed me the space to begin trusting in my wyrd ways, and remind me that the work of recovering the sacred happens when we gather and live with this intention. And a special thanxxx to spiders, serpents, tobacco, datura, morning glory, blue lotus, bittersweet nightshade, arabica bean, henbane, amanita muscaria, and persephone for the teachings you’ve shared with me.—Star
✸
Star Catherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist and medicine person born and raised in Lenapehoking, aka New York City, with roots in Ayiti, aka Dominican Republic. Entangled across the mediums of sculptural installation, time-based media, and book forms, their work explores earth-based pathways for disarming apparatuses of violence and their cycles of trauma. They are currently an MFA candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles in the department of Interdisciplinary Studio. After almost ten years of studying and practicing community-based herbalism, Star is currently sharing their medicine under the self-started project of Botánica Cimarrón. Their formulas are unique stories that weave together the past, present, and future of Caribbean folk healing to bring living systems back into alignment.
BACK TO TOP