This paper explores how herbs function as ritual agents and healing resources within Polish Native Faith, shaping and mediating relationships between practitioners and nature.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores narratives and practices of members of Native Faith in Poland that concern nature, with particular attention to herbs. Drawing on ethnographic research, it examines how knowledge about it is produced, shared, and transformed, and how this knowledge shapes practices that attribute both magical and healing properties to herbs. The paper is based on participant observation during collective herb gathering for Kupala Night celebrations. In addition, popular narratives—such as lectures delivered at Native Faith festivals and Slavic culture events—will be examined as materials through which these practices and meanings are further articulated.
The analysis addresses how engagement with herbs establishes members’ relationships with nature, emerging through negotiations between practice, intuition, and scientific knowledge. Herbs play an active role in shaping both the individual and collective daily lives of members of Native Faith. They serve simultaneously as vehicles of mythic storytelling, agents of purification, mediators in offerings to Slavic spirits, and practical remedies. Considering these multiple forms of herbal agency offers new insight into the reciprocal ways humans and their immediate environment influence one another.