We mourn and celebrate our colleague Christian Rätsch, who died September 17, 2022, from complications with a chronic stomach ulcer. Christian was a pioneer scholar of psychoactive ethnobotany and the reclamation of Euro-pagan traditions and plant preparations. His research, joyous curiosity and beautiful books have inspired us for the last three decades. https://www.christian-raetsch.de/
Christian was a monument to himself — an utterly unique man that greatly enriched the lives of many folks through sharing his love and fascination with the remote and forgotten facets of our world. Only some of his 40+ books were ever translated from his native German into English, (The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, The Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs, Shamanism and Tantra in the Himalayas, Witchcraft Medicine, Pagan Christmas, etc.), many of these are still in print in the US through Inner Traditions. He visited me in 1996 and photographed my plant collection shortly before I began Sacred Succulents. My early claim to “fame” was that plants I grew were immortalized in photographs that illustrate several of his most popular books. May we all strive to leave the world a richer, better place as Christian has.
Memories of Christian
I first met anthropologist Christian Rätsch in 1996 when I was 21, I have very warm and humorous memories of his visit to California late summer of that eventful year. I had dog-eared my copy of A Dictionary of Sacred & Magical Plants and was excited to meet the enigmatic German author whom I’d been told was something of a celebrity anthropologist and rockstar in his native land. Ethnobotanist Rob Montgomery brought Christian by the small house in the woods where we were living at the time in Occidental. I had envisioned a stereotypical blond haired, blue-eyed, clean-cut Aryan professor, but with his spectacles, dark eyes, long raven hair and impressive beard, he looked more Chinese sage than Volkisch ideal. His black leather pants, knee-high moccasin-like boots, and half buttoned black, red & orange paisley silk shirt announced his rocker proclivities. Christian was soft spoken, his English excellent, with an accent that infused his words with both warmth and drollery. I was surprised when he found my own speech, inflected with SoCal slang, hard to keep up with. It was a revelation for me to realize that I had an accent! Christian regaled us with stories of his experiments recreating the original Pilsner beer from henbane and spoke affectionately of his time living with the Lacandón Maya and the wonders of balché–their mysterious magical mead. He was very excited to photograph my burgeoning plant collection; marveling over my discovery that a single Psychotria leaf could be cut into many small sections and each one would grow new plants from the leaf-veins; delighted to see his first Sceletium plant; oohing and aahing over the geometric allure of Ariocarpus, Epithelantha, Pelecyphora, and other globular cacti (though he was visibly a little disappointed I had not tried eating any of them!) Later I was honored when a fair number of my plants ended up gracing the pages of The Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants, The Encyclopedia of Aphrodisiacs, and most especially his updated version of Richard Schultes and Albert Hofmann’s classic Plants of the Gods. Christian’s visit was before Sacred Succulents existed and he was one of the people who encouraged me to begin distributing plants to further conservation and inspire research. At some point during his photo shoot Christian rather spectacularly slipped on our redwood deck and flew directly into a large potted San Pedro cactus, knocking it down on top of himself! His leather pants saved his legs but his silk shirt did little to protect his right arm from being scratched up by spines. Afterwards he joked about his “amorous tumble” with the cactus and proudly showed off his “San Pedro love scratches” to others. Later that month we attended the Entheobotany conference at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, a scholarly renaissance gathering of noted ethnobotanists, anthropologists, pharmacologists, archaeologists, etc., organized by my friends Rob Montgomery, Jonathan Ott and Ken Symington. Christian sat with Melissa, Jamaica and I at the back of the theater during elderly pharmacologist Bo Holmstedt’s presentation. We were all opulently inebriated on some elixir and we found Bo’s talk on ergot poisoning wildly funny: The wrinkled and wispy-white-haired Bo looked very old shuffling out on stage hunched over in his oversize tuxedo and Christian stated genuine concern Bo might not live long enough to finish his speech. Bo’s talk was delivered at an exceptionally slow pace and he would regularly take long pauses right in the middle of a sentence–which was absolutely hilarious to Christian, and Christian trying desperately to control his laughter, and utterly failing, was hilarious to Melissa–who is subject to extreme laughing fits, which got Jamaica going–and, well, I’ll just say that the entire scene was fabulously funny to me. I’ve never laughed so hard for so long while trying to remain respectfully quiet and still listen to a talk!
Several years later we visited again at the Entheobotany conference in Whistler, B.C and Christian was still chuckling about Bo’s presentation. We corresponded off and on over the years, Christian was always wonderfully encouraging of what I was doing with Sacred Succulents and Botanical Preservation Corps.
Jonathan Ott shared that he heard from friend, who was with Christian the day before his unexpected death, that he appeared in good form and said that with the recent completion of the second volume of his Enzyklopädie he felt his life’s work was complete.
Christian will be missed, I’m sure he’s now reveling under the hallowed branches of some divine grove, joyously feasting and fornicating with the gods.