Health (Vedic tradition).

    Healing with herbs is available nowadays more that ever. Piles of books and magazines contain the information on the use of one or another herb. However, even taking into account all these sources, a great stratum of the said knowledge has been lost unfortunately. The fact is that one of known causes of such loss is the incursion of alien religion from the beginning of the year 988 since most of herbalists were spiritual personalities of «parental» faith (in the first place – soothsayers, healers, curers, bards, bonesetters and witch doctors). With the advent of Christianity all activities of ancient healers were branded as «diabolical deeds». Soothsayers and healers were persecuted and annihilated.
 
    There remained one thing to do for ancient sages – to lock up their knowledge for some time.
 
    Nowadays it is hardly possible to find real effective details of the correct gathering and usage of herbs. Everybody knows that every kin have their own «egregore» - an information field accumulated by our forefathers for thousands of years. The only thing we are unable to get to know – WHO used to imbue the same and for what purpose.
 
    A great deal of knowledge on healing methods is concealed in stories, myths and legends or it has been passed on from a father to a son or from a mother to a daughter. Also, there are ancient Soothsayer families that possess all the best practices of our ancestors but unfortunately just very few of them exist nowadays.
It seems nothing special can be concealed in a fairy tale. But say hardly anybody remembers who Baba-Yaga was. Was she a witch? No, she was a healer, who lived at the edge of the village or in the forest. Fellow villagers built a house for her on a cut tree so that wild animals would not eat her up. Thus and so we have looked into the meaning of «a hut on chicken legs» phrase. Baba-Yaga used to carry along a wooden snag with wisps of healing herbs attached (so it looked like a broom). Yaga always came fast to the aid of people curing them, hence the expression «flied in by broom» appeared.

    Also, there is a tale that Baba-Yaga shoveled children into a stove.
 
    Actually, at those times stoves named «dry fonts» were used after bred making for curing diseases caused by evil whirlwinds such as rheumatic pains in bones and muscles, general weakness, deafness and dumbness.
So, the stove (hot after the bread making) was laid over from inside with oat or barley straw and poured with beet-root or cabbage soup. Then a sick person was placed inside and kept there during his ability to stand that. And such procedure was repeated during the course of about 3 days.
 
   Small children were also seated on a shovel and then placed into the stove (with its temperature reduced). A mother and a father pronounced three times such a dialog:
- «May the child be seated into the stove? »
- «May tabes torture the child? »
After the third time the child was released and the time of his stay in the stove was marked off by that way.

    Also some cases of the inhalations application by our ancestors have come to our notice.
Burning hot stones were put into the hot herbal decoction and then a person sat down on the top of such structure with his head covered. The purpose of that method was to cure catarrhal diseases.

    And what about a fern flower blossoming on St. John the Baptist day?

    And what do you think of «witches' Sabbath» legend? Actually, it was a festival called «zileynik» (meaning «herbal»). It was celebrated between the «mermaid week» and St. John the Baptist festival.
 
   On that day witch doctors used to go to gather herbs. As traditions of that time demanded, the same had to be done being without a stitch of clothes since «in case you gathered herbs having your clothes on, herbs would be of no help». Initiation ceremonies were held during that festival for newly-minted witch doctors to become healers.