John Gallagher:
Hi, Tara.
Tara Ruth:
Hi John.
John Gallagher:
We're getting close to the end of October here, and I think of the ancestors and many traditions, right? Celebrate ancestors this time of year. And I was thinking about my great-grandfather because the only ancestor that I know of that had any sort of herbal tradition was my great-grandfather, Giovani Luigi DiCristoforo. Changed his name to Louis Christopher when he came to Philadelphia. All I know is he got their dandelions in the park. I met him when I was very little. He passed on when I was a little kid. I can remember being at his house, but I don't know much about him though. Kimberly and I do make his chicken recipe, a traditional Italian recipe, and it made me wish that I knew more about Italian herbalism.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, connecting with those ancestral traditions is so important, and sometimes it can be hard to find information on them.
John Gallagher:
And I wonder how I could learn more about Italian herbalism.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, well, we have just the thing for you today, John.
John Gallagher:
We do?
Tara Ruth:
We do. We're going to be chatting with Lisa Fazio all about Italian and Italian American folk herbalism. So you're in luck.
John Gallagher:
Oh, this is going to be great. And she wrote a great new book. We're going to talk all about it, and I just highly recommend this because it's a way for everyone to connect with their ancestral roots to herbalism this time of year, especially when we're thinking about these things.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, and we're going to be talking about a lot of herbs that so many folks will be familiar with, like St. John's wort, garlic. We even talk about belladonna, which is a poisonous plant. We'll give you all the cautions with that one in a little bit too.
John Gallagher:
Let's get to it.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, let's do it.
John Gallagher:
You are listening to Herb Mentor Radio by LearningHerbs. I'm John Gallagher.
Tara Ruth:
And I'm Tara Ruth. Today we're chatting with Lisa Fazio. Lisa is a clinical herbalist, author, and folkloric witch trained in traditional Western herbalism, Western astrology, and the ancestral healing ways of her Italian immigrant family. She's an academic background in psychology and ethnobotany, but her primary learning has been through direct experience with plants, place and the ancestors. She's the founder of The Root Circle, a mystery school focused on promoting and regenerating traditional healing practices. And she's the author of the book, Della Medicina: The Tradition of Italian-American Folk Healing.
John Gallagher:
Welcome, Lisa.
Lisa Fazio:
Hello. Thank you for having me.
Tara Ruth:
Thank you for being here.
John Gallagher:
I was so excited to hear about your new book. My great-grandparents came from Italy.
Lisa Fazio:
Oh, really?
John Gallagher:
And all I ever heard about him is that he picked dandelions in the park.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, all the Italians picked dandelions in the park.
John Gallagher:
That was the thing in Philadelphia back in the '30s, I guess.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah. Do you know where?
John Gallagher:
South Philly somewhere.
Lisa Fazio:
No, do you know where in Italy?
John Gallagher:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:03:07] or something like that. Yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
Okay. Yeah.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, that's where he came from. But I've never been there, but I really want to go.
Lisa Fazio:
I hope you do. You won't regret it.
John Gallagher:
Well, this interview is going to inspire me.
Lisa Fazio:
Good.
Tara Ruth:
Lisa, I'm curious, did you grow up with these folk, herbalism practices that you teach and write about, or did you become more interested in that later in life?
Lisa Fazio:
A little bit of both. I grew up in an Italian American enclave in the city of Utica, New York, which is in the Adirondack Foothills. Had a very large, believe it or not, Italian immigrant population in the early 1900s, which is when my family came. Both my grandparents were Italian immigrants. I'm second generation. I grew up with Italian American culture, and their folk medicine was just part of their culture, but it wasn't something that stood out from daily life. In fact, it was part of a lot of the things that Italians were discriminated against. For instance, wearing garlic around your neck. I grew up with it in that sense that it was just part of our culture, but it wasn't anything that you could say, "Oh, this is folk medicine." Or anything like that.
Then I studied herbal medicine. In my early 20s I started studying herbs and working with plants. A lot of the plants that grow here in New York State where I live and in the Northeast in general, are European plants. And I was sitting with a plant one day at my teacher's house, Pam Montgomery. I was studying with her, yeah. I was sitting with a plant I didn't know, and I just spent a lot of time with it, and I smelled it, tasted it, and I just was like, "I know this plant." I just had this very strong sense of familiarity, even though I know I hadn't seen this plant before. I just knew it. I went to Pam and I said, "I don't know why, but I know this plant. I don't know its name. I don't know anything about it." And she said, "Oh, it's probably an ancestral plant." And that... Yeah, that was like, I would say, the first spark that turned on that connection for me between plants, herbal medicine and folk medicine. Yeah, it's a little bit of both. It came in cycles.
John Gallagher:
We're talking about traditional folk medicine and practices, and I'm wondering what makes these traditions relevant in our current times?
Lisa Fazio:
Well, that's a really important question. That's a really good question, and it's a question that I keep asking and that I've been asking over and over again is I've done this work because I'm asking myself, "Why am I doing this?" Other than for my own personal growth or my own personal connection, how is this important to the current generations? The future as well as the past, really? And how does it place us on that timeline? I think there's many answers to that. One for me is especially that it is something that helps us to become more sustainable and self-sufficient.
It also connects us in community with each other. And it connects us to the ways that people throughout history, not just Italian people, people in almost every traditional culture on Earth. Probably every traditional culture on Earth found to do a couple of things. One, to live and survive in communities all over in place in connection with the land, the ecology. But also as a way to... Particularly with Italian folk medicine and I'm sure with many others in Southern Italy, their folk medicine was very important during the Risorgimento, which is the unification of Italy that started happening in 1860.
It's the reason why most of us are here. Most of the people that left Italy were Southern Italians who left after the Risorgimento because it was a very bad thing for the south. Basically, the north invaded, and it took the lands away from the monarchs, which sounds good, but that also meant that it disenfranchised the peasants, which most of us were peasants, because the land was sold to land barons or the church where it was once common. It was common land. The peasants had nothing. They had nothing at all. Their folk medicine was a means of survival. Then when we came here, we brought it with us. And it was also a means of survival in a strange place where you didn't speak the language.
How is that relevant today? Well, for one, it connects us to our self-sufficiency, our resilience. I think it also regenerates our cultures, so it creates diversity. Also, it helps us to remember that we have these skills, that we can do things for ourselves. That's part of why I went into herbal medicine as well. And I think why many of us do is, "Oh, I don't need to go to urgent care because I've got a little cold. I can make a tea and I'll probably be fine." I think that's another important point, is that it's just something that we can do and we can avoid having to take more extreme measures.
John Gallagher:
In your book, you also talk about how you learned traditions from other cultures or people of other cultures to help you find your way in your own culture. I read about connecting with the Haudenosaunee and folks like that.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, my connection with the Haudenosaunee, and particularly the Mohawk Nation. I had teachers that were Mohawk, Tom Porter, just to share his name is an amazing teacher, and friends. I collaborated with people there a little bit. One of the things that was told to me was that it was very important for those of us of European descent to learn about our traditions for a few reasons. One is so that we are oriented in who we are because we are displaced people. It helps us to orient. It helps us to ground understand ourselves. Also, helps us to understand how we are in relationship to being here in the United States.
Probably, I would say this applies in Canada and Australia. Although those are, of course, different somewhat. I don't know really, because I've never been to Australia. I've been to Canada. But here in the US anyway, this is mainly what I'm referring to is that I think it's just really important. And it was told to me that it was important, that we understand ourselves. There's a bunch of other tangents we can go off there. In terms of cultural appropriation, I just think we're less likely to want to take on something that is part of somebody else's culture and claim it when we can find that connection in ourselves. Then we can go back and have true cultural exchange with people.
John Gallagher:
Yeah.
Tara Ruth:
This is making me think about... In my studies of Jewish folk herbalism, I learned so much about cultural exchange of different medicines, especially in Eastern Europe, between folks who... This was an area where there was some of the most exchange in herbal traditions. And hearing you talk about the folks wearing garlic around their neck, it's like, "Oh, yeah, that's also..." Wearing garlic is a part of Jewish folk traditions.
Lisa Fazio:
It is. There's actually a lot of commonalities between Jewish folk medicine and Italian folk medicine.
John Gallagher:
Well, let's talk about that. Why garlic around the neck? That's what I'm wondering.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, I wondering why too.
Lisa Fazio:
Okay, well, there's a few reasons. We can talk about what might be called the spiritual energetic reasons, which is that garlic is an apotropaic plant. In other words, apotropaic means it fends off evil. It's under the what we might call the rule or the association of San Michele, which is Saint Michael. Saint Michael is a protector. The garlic around the neck is an apotropaic charm, basically. That's part of Italian folk magic. It's also a part of Italian folk Catholicism. The Catholicism in the magic, or witchcraft, whatever we want to call it, are very intertwined. And, of course, we know that garlic is also a very strong antibiotic. There's the other reason. We would wear it when the flu is going around. I was trying to get my children to wear garlic around their necks during COVID.
John Gallagher:
Did it work?
Lisa Fazio:
They wouldn't do it.
John Gallagher:
Were you doing that at home or were you sending them out?
Lisa Fazio:
I was trying to send them out. I have a daughter who's a bartender, so I was trying to get her to do it, and she wouldn't. I was wearing garlic. I was wearing a clove of garlic for each of my children around my neck because they were refusing, so I was wearing it for them.
John Gallagher:
Well, maybe this could be fashionable.
Lisa Fazio:
It could.
John Gallagher:
It's just you have to find the way to get to Gen Z here with the... Open an Etsy shop. You can get some influencers.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah. Oh no.
Tara Ruth:
I relate to the wearable garlic. I didn't put it around my neck during COVID, but I would have garlic cloves in my pocket. And I, on more than one occasion, accidentally ran it through the washer and dryer.
Lisa Fazio:
Oh, no.
Tara Ruth:
And all my clothing smelled like garlic bread.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, that's a nice smell, right?
Tara Ruth:
Yes, like, "Oh, I'm so protected now." I just infused all my clothing.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, you can wear it. All right. Owe it to garlic, yeah.
Tara Ruth:
Yes.
Lisa Fazio:
You can put it in your pocket. The old women would wrap it in something like a cloth and put it in their bra. That's another way you can wear it.
John Gallagher:
Tara, I am really enjoying this interview, learning so much.
Lisa Fazio:
Me too.
John Gallagher:
And I think, for me, personally, my connection to herbalism always interested me the most was food as medicine and how that connects to traditions around the world.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, so many folk medicine, folk herbalism traditions are centered around the hearth, the kitchen, and using our hands and using our senses to really connect with the herbs and connect with our ancestors.
John Gallagher:
Really is the spirit behind learning herbs that over the years we've created... And on Herb Mentor, which is our membership community, we have some great resources like Rosemary Gladstar, shares so many of her remedies and recipes and many that are from her own traditions in Armenia.
Tara Ruth:
So many beautiful recipes. We have all these videos of her, just in her kitchen, showing you step-by-step how to make some of her favorite herbal recipes like fire cider, or honey onion syrup, or sleep tincture. These little herbal sore throat balls too. So many things.
John Gallagher:
And you produced folk medicine, of course, with Shereel Washington. Can you talk a little about that? I did,
Tara Ruth:
Yeah, in that course Shereel really dives into what is folk medicine on this high-level overarching term. Then just goes into depth based on her traditions of Black North American herbalism folk traditions.
John Gallagher:
Also Todd Caldecott and KP Khalsa talk about our Vedic traditions. KP was mentored by Yogi Bhajan on the Sikh tradition back in the '70s. He shares a lot what he learned. Again, more traditional kitchen medicine that food is medicine that connects people to different traditions around the world.
Tara Ruth:
And all of these courses, again, they're really centered around working with your hands, touching the plants, tasting the plants. It's such a beautiful way to delight your senses and get to know the plants better and know yourself and your ancestors.
John Gallagher:
And you could go to herbmentorradio.com. That's the podcast you're listening to, and not just subscribe to this podcast but also find a Herb Mentor Radio listener discount to Herb Mentor. You definitely want to go there and if you're interested, then you can check out Herb Mentor and also get the special coupon thing that we have.
Tara Ruth:
I love a special coupon thing.
John Gallagher:
Exactly.
Tara Ruth:
They're the best.
John Gallagher:
Who doesn't love a coupon thing.
Tara Ruth:
Yes. Especially when they're special.
John Gallagher:
They're special. Exactly. Well, I am really enjoying the interview with Lisa Fazio, and let's get back to it. In the book, how far back do you go with Italian folk medicine, like in the roots and all? Do you go up to ancient times or...?
Lisa Fazio:
I do. I went all the way-
John Gallagher:
Tell us about that.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, I did go back... I'm trying to remember how far. I definitely touched on the first people on the Italic Peninsula. Then some of the first colonization, which the whole Mediterranean was, I don't know, 6,000 BC. Don't quote me on that date. Colonized by the Phoenicians, and then there were primitive people in Southern Italy. There's a lot of archaeology there. I also went... Going forward, it's the area of Europe that Marija Gimbutas, who is an archaeologist. She called it Old Europe. She did a bunch of excavations and studies in Old Europe, which includes actually a lot of the Balkans, and it goes a little bit north of the Balkans, Greece. A lot of her research she did on pottery shards and different symbols where she found that there was no symbolic representation of war.
Then it changed. The archaeological record changes during the Indo-European invasions. I did go back pretty far. Then into Ancient Greece and then Rome. And how some of those, what we now call our philosophers, were what was called in Greek iatromantis. Iatro which is doctor. Mantis, which is seer. They were physician-seers. They were using various forms of divination, as well as herbs and other things in their healing sanctuaries. We went into that. Then just how the Mediterranean... Italy has only been a nation state since 1860. The idea of Italian folk medicine in and of itself-
John Gallagher:
In of it, right.
Lisa Fazio:
... is really based on the idea of Italy being a state which is very new. That really influences there. Sicily was an Arab emirate for 300 years around the Middle Ages. The influences in Southern Italy are really part of the greater Mediterranean.
John Gallagher:
Mediterranean, right. Because then, of course, Roman influence went north all the way to England and beyond. They brought probably a lot of ways of looking at things in traditions of north.
Lisa Fazio:
Right. When we talk about traditional Western herbalism, there was a huge influence because of the Romans. Also, the Salerno Medical School was in Salerno, in Southern Italy, was the largest medical school in Europe during the Middle Ages.
Tara Ruth:
Wow.
John Gallagher:
Wow.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, a lot of our traditional Western herbalism, like the humors, the elements, the humors came out of the Greek and Roman medicine. Then, yeah, a lot of that went north, and then went into some of our later herbalists, Nicholas Culpeper, those kinds of people. Then, of course, into North and South America.
John Gallagher:
Yeah, it was really as a nexus of worldwide herbal medicine.
Lisa Fazio:
At one time.
John Gallagher:
One time must have been an amazing place.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah.
Tara Ruth:
Wow.
Lisa Fazio:
It still is.
John Gallagher:
Yes, I know. But you think about being back in those days and what those...
Tara Ruth:
All of this is making me curious. Your book focuses on Italian American folk herbalism. I'm curious if you can talk a little bit more about differences nowadays and historically too, between, say, Italian folk medicine and then Italian American folk medicine?
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, there's a difference between being Italian Italian, being an Italian national, being born and raised in Italian culture, or being an American and born and raised in an Italian American enclave or Italian American culture, because we have an American... We're inculturated in the United States.
John Gallagher:
Yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
We have other influences. Also, we had to make adaptations here because we didn't have either ingredients that we were used to. We were dealing with a different culture. We were dealing with different types of conditions. And in the Italian enclaves, people came from all over Southern Italy and all moved into the same neighborhood. And like we said, Italy wasn't a nation state until 1860, so most of our Italian immigrants didn't even identify as Italian. They identified with the region that they were from.
John Gallagher:
Interesting. Yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
My nonno, my grandfather was from Calabria, and so he would identify as Calabrese. He spoke the language of his region. He didn't speak Italian. Standard Italian is the dialect or the regional language of Florence that was imposed upon the entire nation of Italy. Now everybody there speaks Italian. They came from disparate, almost different countries, and we're all living in the same neighborhoods. There was many different traditions. Just like there's many different sauce recipes, and everybody had their way of doing things. A lot of what those of us here that live in the Italian diaspora learned is going to be different than if we had grown up in our ancestral regions in Italy. Also, our cultures diverged. Italian culture today is not the same as Italian culture was when my grandparents immigrated.
John Gallagher:
Right.
Lisa Fazio:
Right?
John Gallagher:
Right, because my great-grandfather, they were in neighborhoods of all other folks from their area and things like that. Sure.
Lisa Fazio:
A lot of the difference is just... Again, what we talked about in the very beginning in terms of understanding ourselves and orienting ourselves in place and in the network of relationships that we're in, and then all of the things that we've been conditioned by.
Tara Ruth:
I'm also thinking about... Delighted to hear more about garlic, and I'm curious about some of the other herbs you wrote about in your book, like belladonna, for example. That one really caught John and my eye.
John Gallagher:
Looking at the materia medica in your book and in Della Medicina, I'm just like, "Oh, these very..." Yeah, we have basil and belladonna and elder, even cannabis, mallow, St. John's wort. I'm like, "Okay, I want to hear your perspective." We have belladonna that she was asking.
Lisa Fazio:
Well, there's so many plants, it was very hard to choose. But I tried to choose plants that were familiar to Italian Americans. There's a lot of plants in Italy that I love that we don't have here. I tried to choose plants that people have access to, belladonna. Then belladonna got in there just because I love belladonna. And my first interaction with belladonna was in an Italian forest in a place called Mount Taburno in Campania near the city of Benevento in the Apennine Mountains. The first time I ever saw belladonna as a living plant was there, growing wild in this woods. Now I grow it here and it is poisonous.
John Gallagher:
We should mention that.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, it's poisonous. I mainly work with the flower essence, and I work with it as a plant spirit, as a plant ally. But it does have a history of use in Italian folk medicine and Italian witchcraft in particular. We know it's one of the ingredients, what are called flying ointments or witches ointments. In Italian it's [inaudible 00:26:48] and it's part of the folklore of Italian witchcraft. But it also does have medicinal use. It is a great painkiller. We still use belladonna in modern medicine. It usually goes under the name of scopolamine. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. They give you patches for pain. People put them right on their skin and that's one of the main chemical constituents of belladonna.
Tara Ruth:
Wow.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, I just happen to really love belladonna, and it's just such a big part of the folklore.
John Gallagher:
Since we're talking about... I do want to get back to some plants, but we're talking about witchcraft and I'm interested in the role of spirituality and magic, Italian American folk practices, or Italian practices. How you got to identify with doing work with magic, spiritual work with the plants in that world, those traditions? Italy became a very Catholic country.
Lisa Fazio:
Yes.
John Gallagher:
So you have those, and then you have traditions. I'm just like, "Yeah." Just curious about this whole part.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, everybody is.
John Gallagher:
Right.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, there's different views on this. A lot of what is called witchcraft or Italian witchcraft is practices that in Italy... It's really folk Catholicism. In other words, what you might say a witch or say... For example, my nonna was called a witch. What she was practicing was Italian folk Catholic. It was folk Catholicism. One of the best examples is the cure for the malocchio. Malocchio is, mal bad, occhio eye. That's the evil eye. This is one of the most well-known cures, what we would call a cure. It's the thing that people say, "Oh, that's witchcraft." Or, "She's a witch." If she does this. They're a witch. Could be he. He is a witch, because they do this practice. It's a folk Catholic practice.
The people, the village healers in Italy who do this, they identify as Catholics, not as witches. The word strega, which means witch, literally, in Italian. It has been largely considered a derogatory word. Whereas here in the Italian diaspora, you'll see on witch talk, "Strega this, strega that." Everybody's a strega. I think that's fine. We're Italian American. The word has a different meaning here. There's people who would disagree with me on that, but you wouldn't want to go to your local village healer in Southern Italy and call them a strega, because they would say that they're not.
John Gallagher:
Interesting.
Lisa Fazio:
There are some practitioners who believe that there was this witchcraft tradition, this pre-Christian witchcraft tradition that went underground and stayed intact underground for the last 2,000 years. I don't know about that. All of the quote, unquote, "Witchcraft." That I'm aware of are things that are also based in Catholicism. Other than there is now in the newer generations, people who are identifying with the word strega or witchcraft. And a lot of that is associated with Wicca and the neo-pagan movement, as well as part of cultural reclamation. It's not an easy thing to say this is witchcraft, and this is Catholicism in Italian folk medicine. There's just not a neat line.
John Gallagher:
Never is.
Lisa Fazio:
I know.
Tara Ruth:
I was looking at your course as well on Della Medicina on folkloric medicine, magic, and plants. It looks like an amazing course. I want to take it. But you also talk about this concept of social reciprocity and energetic sharing, which, yeah, I'm really curious about, and I'm wondering if it's connected to this spiritual aspect or if you view it as something different? What exactly is this concept of energetic sharing in folk medicine?
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, it's very connected and it's actually a really important component of understanding the way this folk medicine works. Because in Italy, as well as in the Italian enclaves, the culture is very collectivist. Anyone who was raised in an Italian American family is aware of this, that you're not so much an individual, you're part of a family, and the family operates as one unit. And it's the same in a village. Again, not as much anymore, but definitely in the past. It's still there though in Southern Italy, that you're part of a whole community, right? You're accountable to the whole community. You don't act as an individual in the same way we think of it here in the United States. The condition of the family as well as the greater village... Really it's parochial. It would be the parish, the community would be part of a parish.
The health, the condition, and the well-being, as well as the not the dis-ease, in the community would be shared. And everything is energetically shared. In terms of, for example, the malocchio or the evil eye, it's actually considered an energetic theft. This actually goes into the humors because the evil eye as well as some other curses and conditions, which can manifest in physical things, like the malocchio ends up usually becoming like a headache, and there's other, rashes. There's different things that you could get a medical diagnosis for as well, but they would say it was attributed to this specific type of curse or energetic attachment.
The malocchio, for example, is a condition of dryness. Pregnant women, babies are particularly susceptible. And the idea is that somebody can take your juiciness. Somebody who doesn't have as much would take it. This goes into the idea of the vital force that we have in traditional Western herbalism. In Italian folk medicine we call it vitalità. It's the vital energy that circulates among the community and how it's distributed. Sharing is the idea that in order for there to be health, that the vital energy of the village, the community, has to be well distributed and in good circulation among the community.
John Gallagher:
Right, and it seems like food and medicine would be very connected to...
Lisa Fazio:
Food and medicine are very connected.
John Gallagher:
To all of this.
Lisa Fazio:
Yes. Right.
John Gallagher:
Interesting. Maybe all the feasts of the different saints and a lot of these are all rooted, right?
Lisa Fazio:
They're all rooted. Feasting with the saints is attached to a lot of different things, including death practices and the idea that not only does the vital energy circulate amongst the people, it circulates in the greater, what I like to call the social field. Which includes the ancestors and the dead and the spirits and everything in the ecological community, the waters, the plants, the animals, and the saints, and the spirits, and the gods.
John Gallagher:
We look at this as a religious superstition, but in reality it's very practical way of everyone to stay healthy and benefit and eat and drink.
Lisa Fazio:
Yes. And that's what I was saying, what's the relevance nowadays? Because it's a way of communally... Within the United States, nobody wants to live in a collectivist culture. Even if they think they do, they wouldn't like it. Not if you're used to you do you, I do me, that kind of thing. Nobody wants to be told who to marry or who not to marry or any of those things anymore.
John Gallagher:
Right.
Lisa Fazio:
We're not going back to that, but that doesn't mean that these traditions can't change. A healthy tradition is open to modification, right? It's adaptive. It's naturally adaptive. That's part of the question that I don't have the answer to. I'm just one person, and this is-
John Gallagher:
Oh, I was hoping you'd have the answer.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, sorry.
John Gallagher:
All right, Tara, that's that. No, I'm just kidding. No, just kidding. Is this connected to when you talk about, is it beneditaria? I'm using [inaudible 00:37:00].
Lisa Fazio:
Benedicaria.
John Gallagher:
Benedicaria.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, benedicaria, actually, it's a word that came out of the Italian diaspora in the United States. You don't find it in Italy. It basically means the blessing way. Some people call it the things we do. [inaudible 00:37:20] it's another phrase for [inaudible 00:37:24] to do a little holy thing. That's from the area where my nonna's from in Benevento. There's other things that it's called, but it really is just the things we do, and it's really referring to our folk Catholicism and what you could call Italian folk medicine in the Italian diaspora. It's just a very everyday practice that includes Catholicism. It includes Saint veneration. It includes making herbal teas. It includes curing the malocchio. All of those things.
Tara Ruth:
When you talk about these everyday common practices, what are some of the herbs that are common in the everyday... We talked about belladonna, which is a little more extreme.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, we should probably...
Tara Ruth:
I'm thinking more about... I know in your book you talk about fennel and mallow and olive and rosemary. Yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, a lot of herbs in Italian folk medicine are used in cooking. They're just part of everyday cooking. Mallow though is one of those panacea herbs in Italian folk medicine. Going back to what we were saying about dryness. Dryness in a dry climate, it's relevant that in Southern Italy and Sicily, Sardinia in Greece, that whole area, that's an arid climate. A plant like mallow that's very mucilaginous is really important and used for everything. Just like digestive, coughs, sore throat, anything that's a dry condition. Mallow would be used for. Other things about the herbs... I'm trying to think of different herbs we could talk about here. I'm trying to remember what's in my book. You mentioned a couple of them.
Tara Ruth:
Olive, rose, rosemary.
Lisa Fazio:
Well, olive. Right.
Tara Ruth:
[inaudible 00:39:30]. The main way that we use olive is olive oil, and we drink it. You know what I mean? Copious amounts of olive. Olive oil is in everything, but also it can be used externally. Also, it's a medium or menstruum for other infused oils like St. John's wort oil. St. John's wort is a sacred plant. It is the plant of San Giovanni, Saint John.
John Gallagher:
Oh, really? Oh, that makes sense, duh.
Lisa Fazio:
Right.
Tara Ruth:
John.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, there's a whole day devoted to San Giovanni in Southern Italy, June 24th, right around the solstice. It's a big festa. On that day, you make... On the eve of St. John's Day, you make L'Acqua di San Giovanni, which is the water of St. John, that is considered a holy water that's-
John Gallagher:
Really?
Lisa Fazio:
... used. Yeah. Then there's a bunch of rites, including the St. John's wort plant. People make plant bundles. It's hung on doors. It's burned in bonfires. Any herb that's gathered on that day or the eve of that day is considered to have the healing power of San Giovanni.
John Gallagher:
I think when herbalists first discovered St. John's wort Hypericum and make the oil, it is a magical experience, not just finding St. John's wort. That first time you come across it and crush those flowers and they transform into this purple hue. Can you talk a little bit about that? I feel like it is a transformational plant for people and magical.
Lisa Fazio:
In southern Italy that color, when it turns red, when the oil turns red, they consider that the blood of St. John.
John Gallagher:
And are they intentionally using medicinally?
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah.
John Gallagher:
Okay.
Do you know for what particularly? Because I feel like here sometimes people are like, "Well, we use it to help with sunburn." Or, "To protect from the sun." Or, "For nerve pain." Any of those kinds of things?
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, well, all of the things that we use it for. And, of course, it has its spiritual aspects. Anointing oils or blessed oils are really important in our folk magic, right? A blessed oil or a sacred oil contains the healing power of the saint or deity or whatever it is imbibed with. St. John's oil made on St. John's Eve or St. John's day will have the power of St. John. Each saint has their own healing affinity. For instance, Sancta Lucia is for the eyes. I'm trying to think of some other ones. Like we said, San Michele, St. Michael is protection. He's an archangel. They all have their thing that they heal. Some of them are just going to heal anything like La Madonna, the blessed mother, the Virgin Mary. You can really petition her for anything.
But the saints are believed to... They give us grazia, which is grace. A saint can just intervene and just heal you. Oh, Padre Pio, a lot of people know Padre Pio. He's just a healer and you can petition him for any of these things. A sacred oil, an oil that's imbibed with the energetic imprint of a saint will give you... It's just like a flower essence, I guess. Not that I'm saying this.
John Gallagher:
Sure.
Lisa Fazio:
It's like you're getting that imprint. If have St. John's wort oil, for instance, you're going to have all of the medicinal properties that we all know of St. John's wort oil, as well as the medicinal benefits of it being a plant of St. John.
John Gallagher:
Then, of course, saints replaced pre-Christian gods and goddesses.
Lisa Fazio:
Right.
John Gallagher:
And you wonder how far that goes back.
Lisa Fazio:
Well, it goes way back, right? Actually, I'm writing about this for my newsletter because we know that the saints were people, and they were canonized. But we also know that they were also associated often. Like for instance, St. John is associated with the Green Man and Sol Invictus, who was the Roman sun god. And his feast day is the same day that the Romans had their festival to the sun god. It was a blessing of the water festival. We make L'acqua di San Giovanni, the water of St. John. Yeah, there's a lot of associations between the saints and pre-Christian, gods, deities, beings, forces.
Tara Ruth:
I'm also curious about practices with herbs for honoring ancestors and ancestral remembrance. I think about rosemary with that. Yeah, I'm curious if there are any everyday rituals that incorporate herbs in that way, or maybe not everyday rituals too.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, any plant that's an ancestral plant is a link or a bridge to our ancestors. Each of them have their own different qualities, but there's a couple of different ways we can work with them. If we know that it's a plant that our ancestors or our grandparents or great-grandparents used in their daily life or in their cooking or in their herbal medicine, then we can work with that plant. In that way, finding what their recipes were. Then, of course, we can work with them as flower essences. That's going to tap into the long knowledge of the plant from wherever it originated. We do that with using our senses, so taste, touch, smell. We know that taste and smell go right to our limbic brain, which is the memory center of our brain. A lot of times if we're working with an ancestral plant, like I talked about my first encounter with this plant that I didn't know. I had never identified before. It was a species of Veronica that... Actually, I'm half Irish that, and this species of Veronica grows in Ireland. I just knew I knew the plant.
It makes you curious about the epigenetic memories that could be or potentially are being elicited when we taste, smell, touch, look at, work with in some way, an ancestral plant. I can't prove any of that. And I think there's people who have been doing work with that, but that is one way.
John Gallagher:
As a fellow Irish Italian, I'd have to say that I think the Italian memories taste better.
Lisa Fazio:
I know. They're also more demanding. They're just like...
John Gallagher:
What do you see as the future of Italian folk medicine? This book is amazing.
Lisa Fazio:
Thank you.
John Gallagher:
What was the foundation all the way to where you want to go in your sharing?
Lisa Fazio:
That's a really good question. It's a tricky one because what are we doing right now? What are we doing with our cultural lineages? What are we doing with our ancestral lineages? Especially in a place like the United States and why? What is the importance of remembering this? I think that is one of the reasons is that we're remembering that there is a way to transmit knowledge that is outside of the dominant paradigm. And I think that that's one of the important parts of it in terms of Italian folk medicine as becoming some type of standardized system.
That's not something that I see happening, nor do I necessarily think that's in the best interest of anybody, because it originated as... It's not a standardized system. It never was, and it is not now a standardized system. I don't know. I think the thing that I'm doing is remembering it and practicing it and sharing my experience with it as an American that's part of the Italian diaspora, that has strong values of sustainability, cultural resilience, and people being able to be self-sufficient, care for themselves and others. I don't know, it's not really an answer because I don't only have one...
John Gallagher:
I think herbal medicine can be at risk of losing its soul through-
Lisa Fazio:
Exactly.
John Gallagher:
... not just over-scientific stuff and constituents and getting lost in that, but also all of the packaging and marketing. "Take this adaptogen blend in these little pills and it's going to help you..." Whatever. When we're earth-based and tradition-based, we have stories. And herbal medicine is story medicine, in my opinion.
Lisa Fazio:
I agree. Folkloric traditions are orally transmitted. This is why this is such a big question. They were not codified. Just in writing this book, I had to really ask myself like, "Why are you doing this? Why are you writing this down? And should it be written down?" Because as I've said, I don't know everything about this. Every region in Italy, every village in Italy, every neighborhood in North Italian neighborhood in the US, you're going to find a different way of doing it. That's one of the basic premises of any folk medicine. The reason I decided to do it is because it is being lost. And the one way that we do still have in our world is to write things down.
I was actually inspired by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and her work where she said... And really this is what keyed it in for me was, "Writing things down is the way we have of bringing this forward into the future." That's what made me decide that I could write the book, that it was okay, because I was saying, "If I don't do it..."
John Gallagher:
Right. You will. Yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
Then what they're going to do with it, I don't know.
John Gallagher:
You can't know. You just put your heart out there and see where it goes.
Tara Ruth:
Yeah. And in addition to your book, you also have a course coming up, I think. Yeah, this month, October. Yeah, can you talk a little bit about the course?
John Gallagher:
Let's talk about this, yeah.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, the course is also called Della Medicina, and it's a nine-month course, that we go in depth with. It's based on obviously an Italian American folk medicine. It's not just for people who are of Italian descent, it's really about folkloric medicine and all the different aspects of it from working with plants, working with the different rites and rituals. Yeah, we're just going to go in depth month through month. It's like a training and a practice circle.
Tara Ruth:
And folks can learn more about that on therootcircle.com, and then they can find your book Inner Traditions.
John Gallagher:
Where would you like people to get the books?
Lisa Fazio:
Well, right now you can actually order the book... Well, October. As of October, the book will be available everywhere that you buy books.
John Gallagher:
Right. Wonderful.
Lisa Fazio:
Yes.
Tara Ruth:
Lisa Fazio, thank you so much for joining us on Herb Mentor Radio.
John Gallagher:
Thank you.
Lisa Fazio:
Yeah, thanks for having me and for being interested in Italian folk medicine.
John Gallagher:
Ciao.
Lisa Fazio:
Ciao.
Tara Ruth:
Oh, and let's stick around for an herb note. Welcome to Herb Notes. I'm Tara Ruth. With its familiar sweet and pungent taste, cinnamon is a common spice that makes an exceptionally tasty addition to every meal it graces. Cinnamon's gifts go far beyond its flavor, however. In fact, herbalists know that cinnamon offers many healing gifts. Let's dive into three benefits of cinnamon. One, cinnamon for digestive health. Cinnamon is a warming spice that can help support healthy digestion. It's particularly helpful for easing stagnant digestion with gas, cramping, and bloating. My favorite way to enjoy the digestive benefits of cinnamon include cooking with the spice, and also enjoying a cinnamon spiced milk with my meals. Two, cinnamon for immune support. Cinnamon's warming and antimicrobial properties also make it a great herbal ally during colds and the flu. When I feel sick with a cold or flu, I brew up a cup of plant-based cinnamon milk to sip on, and it often immediately improves my congestion and aches.
Three, cinnamon for oral health. Cinnamon's antimicrobial properties and anti-inflammatory properties also make it a wonderful herbal ally for oral health. Brushing your teeth with cinnamon powder can help support teeth and gum health. The antimicrobial effects of cinnamon can support the oral microbiome and even help improve halitosis. And just a few notes of caution when working with cinnamon. Medicinal doses of cinnamon are contraindicated during pregnancy, and since medicinal doses of cinnamon can significantly lower blood glucose levels, folks with diabetes should consult with their doctor and closely monitor their insulin if they wish to regularly take cinnamon.
Medicinal doses of cinnamon can also thin the blood, so it should be avoided while taking blood-thinning medications. And cassia cinnamon can also have negative impacts on the liver in medicinal doses. It's advised to opt for Ceylon cinnamon instead. Want to learn more about the benefits of other common herbs? Visit herbnotes.cards to grab a deck of our top 12 herb notes. You'll learn all about herbs like chamomile, elderberry, yarrow, and more. This has been Herb Notes with me, Tara Ruth. Catch you next time.
John Gallagher:
Herb Mentor Radio and Herb Notes are 100% sustainably well-crafted podcast. Written, performed, and produced by Tara Ruth and me, John Gallagher. Can you do us a quick favor? Look up Herb Mentor Radio on your favorite podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and rate and review us. We'd really appreciate it. Also, visit herbmentorradio.com to find out how you can be part of Herb Mentor, which is a site you must see to believe. Herb Mentor Radio is a production of LearningHerbs.com LLC. All rights reserved. Thank you very, very, very much for listening.
