Rev. Paul’s specialty was the usage of herbes for religious ceremony, for folk magick, the use of herbs to change the very image of reality. This is not to imply a disregard for modern science. Rev. Paul spent hours at a time in the website for the National Center for Biotechnology Information. The NCBI is a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

      For 45 years, Rev. Paul listened to his peers lamenting the fact that no one studies herbs for their properties. “All of the studies are for the pharmaceutical industry” they moan and we all know the pharmaceutical industry is problematic. The NCBI has “more than 30 million citations” from all over the world.

      We study herbs in so many ways. Scientists globally are looking at the constituents, identifying facets of the herb which slow the growth of cancer, which are useful in the fight against the new potent and frightening bacteria and fungi and pathogens which are stronger and resistant to the arsenal of antibiotics once useful until we used them so prolifically that we merely helped render them helpless.

      In Rev. Paul’s words – “I have not the skills with which to sit with Crassula orbicularis  in order to determine how and why it shares the same relationship with lightning as does Sempervivum tectorum… And just how closely are those two related?

      What I do have are the stories collected by skilled ethnobotanists, stories based upon their experience. Based upon the source materials I’ve seen authors use, and some of the books which I have dowsed, it is a reasonable claim I make.  There are more than 2,200 species for which I have magickal information, all from documented sources.

      The classification system I initiated for the Compendium remained in use as a means of identifying some generalized information about the type of energy or qualities of the species and then, my favorites, one document, now 24 pages long, lists deities Abellia through Zoroaster and the species which share history with them, and a different document now 39 pages long which lists the usages by specific topic.”