Over the past few months we’ve had raging fires, howling storms, floods, famine, war and the most dire of climate predictions, yet we have carried on with business as usual, allowing nothing to get in the way of a sense of entitlement that tells us it’s fine to lead our lives exactly as we please, taking no responsibility for our choices, even denying there could even be one. We’ve also had other viruses this decade, other pandemics, other respiratory related SARS viruses, of which Covid-19 is actually the seventh and not the deadliest, in most cases causing either no symptoms or just a runny nose. Yet nobody can deny that it is the coronavirus that has ground the world to a standstill, literally brought us to our knees. The medical profession and governments warn this could just be the beginning, others say that it will disappear as quickly as it came. Either way this tiny spiky ball, this microscopic virus has our full attention now, so what is it that we need to hear? Is there an opportunity for growth amidst all the chaos, fear, panic and death?
The answer is a resounding yes, and many people have already begun thinking about this and expressing their views online. As we stay at home, ecosystems driven to the brink by us start to come into balance again, the air that we are now so fearful of breathing becomes instantly cleaner. People are starting to reflect on what really is important, on all that they have taken for granted before confinement. We have started to communicate in new ways, exercise in online communities, take up new creative hobbies that we previously had no time for. We are starting to think not only about the vulnerability of own health, but also about the fragility of the ecosystems of the Earth. Finally, we are realising how interconnected we all are. How literally someone coughing in China has the ability to infect the whole world, with disease, but with other things too, including hope.
And then we start to ask, what is the Earth trying to tell us? What have we not heard because we were too busy to listen? As we fear for our own lungs, we remember that the lungs of the Earth, one of the most precious and priceless resources we have, is being cut down by the rate of one football pitch every minute. That during 2019 – 2020, more deforestation took place in the Amazon than ever before, despite pledges a decade before to stop mindless tree burning by 2020. As we fear our own lungs might be drowned in water, we feel how the lungs of the planet are going up in fire.
If we take responsibility for our part in the cause of this virus, which is the only way forward given that everything is interconnected, we can start to unpick the behaviours that got us to this place in the first place. And we can do this by trying to understand the symbolic message of the coronavirus, the crown virus, a messenger arising from the mycelium of the Otherworld, the voice of the Earth itself.
Firstly, there is our relationship to other life forms. The outbreak started, as did SARS and MERS the other respiratory viruses of this century in so-called wet markets in China where live and dead animals are slaughtered, eaten, bought and sold with no regard to animal welfare or basic hygiene. After the SARS outbreak in 2002-3, instead of closing down the markets and instigating measures to stop cruelty to animals, thousands of pangolin were mindlessly ‘culled’ for their role in the virus transmission, as though they alone were the cause of the outbreak. This disregard for animal welfare is symptomatic of our Grand Disconnect, our lack of connection to the interconnected web of which we are an integral part.
Covid-19 literally went viral because it jumped the species barrier from bats (now there’s a transformation symbol if ever there was one) to humans and emerged fully equipped with all the right mechanisms to lock onto the epithelial cells in the lungs and rapidly multiply. Only Mother Nature is capable of such precision and execution, this is far beyond the capacity of mere Man, and as the virus has an endless capacity to mutate, it will not help us if we go down the simple root of ‘getting a vaccine to destroy it so we can go about business as usual.’ But everything has changed, there is no getting back to normal, so we need to develop a more holistic way of dealing with this virus. There are many ways to do this, but homeopathy can offer us a potent tool.
According to Samuel Hahnemann who formulate the principles of homeopathy during the early nineteenth century, a miasm is regarded as a sort of blueprint of dis-ease, an underlying matrix from which all symptoms, no matter how unrelated, emerge. Allopathic medicine traditionally aims to treat the symptoms not the cause of dis-ease, whereas an enlarged view of miasm is to view them, when they present, as an opportunity for growth (incidentally not shared by Hahnemann himself who sought somewhat allopathically to eradicate the miasm, considering it to be a malevolent force). Given that any form of disease is the best attempt of that organism to heal itself, rather than seeking to just eradicate it, we could also ask what is it trying to communicate to us about our lifestyles, the choices we make, the habits we have formed and our emotional behaviour. Using this approach, we see patterns and meaning, we start to listen to the voice of the Earth itself, to become empowered and work with dis-ease rather than simply fight against it and hope it goes away in a fingers-crossed-bury-our-heads-in-the-sand-sort-of approach.
There are only a handful of miasms in homeopathy, three described by Hahnemann and another three of four since his death. All miasms are present within us, waiting to be activated in response to particular circumstances, but to Hahnemann, the primary miasm, responsible for around 80% of all disease, is Psora, linked to our most basic needs, how we survive on Planet Earth. When all is said and done, food, water, our environment and how we transition and adapt are the most fundamental aspects of our lives. This pandemic is clearly pushing us back into our most primal of fears, throwing us all back into survival mode, causing us to rush to supermarkets and stockpile goods (toilet paper hoarding is very indicative of Psora!) Our fear of death has been awakened, our cellular memories carry the imprint of The Black Death and the Blue Death, amongst others, and we feel helpless, despondent and disconnected from source. Our challenge is to overcome these deeply ingrained traumas and reconnect to the life force at the heart of everything.
The other two primary miasms are Syphilis and Sycosis, one concerned with the survival of our species as a whole and therefore preoccupied with sexual reproduction, the other with the necessary chthonic forces of decay and breakdown that allow life to flourish through death and die back. We are witnessing the interplay of the two on a global scale and individually we can try to maintain our own health by achieving balance between the forces of fire (Syphilis) and water (Sycosis). Global warming is also a good example of these two primary forces at play[1]: as our human population expands, heating results from the burning of fossil fuels, which pushes carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This in turn traps more heat due to the greenhouse effect, resulting in more overheating, melting the water held in ice that protects us from overheating due to its albedo effect. So more heating occurs, and so on. Our challenge here is to turn our passion (fire) to compassion (water), and keep fluids moving in a healthy way to counteract the excess of fire energy. In Covid-19 it is the filling of the lungs with fluid that is the cause of death.
Most importantly of all, there is Tuberculinum, the miasm that has been called the Divine Wake up Call [2]. This is one of the few miasms whose challenges are specific to humanity (though it should still be noted that we contracted TB in the first instance from cattle) and could be the main miasm of this extraordinary time. In essence, it allows us the possibility to break free of all that is purely material and instinctive, to soar and become the highest and grandest versions of ourselves. But as it originated in cattle that were displaced from their home environment with the spread of agriculture[3], in its shadow aspect it, it is linked with displacement and with being forcibly trapped and imprisoned. Refugees and prisoners therefore have always been particularly susceptible to this disease as over-crowding aids the spread of airborn viruses. As we find our own freedoms severely restricted, we are thrown back into the memory of imprisonment and loss of home, another deep-rooted trauma in us all. Our challenge is to use the restrictions on movement to communicate and act in more creative ways, and of course to remember now more than ever the terrible plight of refugees, and those from Syria in particular. Solving this problem is surely still one of the greatest challenges of our times.
Like Coronavirus, the Tuberculinum miasm affects the airways. Aspiration means both to draw a substance in through the nasal passage and the desire to improve oneself, to dream big. It is quite literally life energy carried through the breath that leads to inspiration.[4] This is the call to reignite our connection to the entire cosmos, and most of all to the Earth. It is about integrating the creative, the spiritual and the mundane, seeing the sacredness in everything and in every action. This is what Coronavirus, the crown virus, could be offering us. We all have a choice on how we move forward, but collectively we must move forward in a new and different way. The survival of our species could depend on it.
[1] ‘The Homeopathic Miasms: A Modern View,’ by Ian Watson, 2009
[2] Ibid
[3] Diana Eder, personal conversation 28.3.20
[4] Ibid Ian Watson
Earth Wisdom Earth Science 
A wonderful, insightful and thought-provoking article. Thank you!
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