Decked head scarf to sandals in black, Byron Ballard leans back against the podium and begins instructing the standing-room-only crowd on the varied uses of elderberry, vervain, and mugwort.
“Put it in some booze,” she says, and you’ve got yourself an elderberry tincture that can help fend off any number of nasty coughs and colds.
It’s not native to the area, says Ballard, but vervain can act like “rocket fuel” for any magic or healing work you’re trying to do. And mugwort? Put the leaf inside your pillowcase, she says, to help promote lucid dreaming.All manner of Southern magic practitioner has gathered at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Atlanta for a breakout session of the 2017 Mystic South Conference. In this room, Ballard, an author and the self-proclaimed village witch of Asheville, North Carolina, is giving her rapt audience a crash-course in Southern Appalachian folk magic.
Equal parts paganism, down-home Protestantism, and stubborn Southern practicality, Ballard’s is a specific manifestation of a long-standing Appalachian folk healing tradition that combines an intimate knowledge of the land beneath her feet, a few recited prayers and charms, and a couple of everyday items that she likely picked up at her local corner store: salt, twine, marshmallows, and mason jars.
Ballard’s pagan practices may have actualized later in life, but the roots of it are deep and familial, a passed-down gift from generations of Appalachian mountain women—her great-grandmother was a local healer, and her grandmother was a self- and community-identified witch that possessed a gift for precognitive dreams. Out of necessity and pragmatism, women, like those in Ballard’s family, used what they had on hand to cure ills, tend to the dying, and deliver babies in their communities.
By Ballard’s own definition, it’s medicine and midwifery, omen-reading and weather-working. It’s using “keen observation, common sense… and folkways to affect change.”
Appalachian folk healing goes by many names, depending on where it’s practiced in the region and who’s doing the practicing: root work, folk medicine, folk magic, kitchen witchery. Ballard dubs her own practice hillfolks’ hoodoo, and some Southern Appalachian natives would never think to call it anything but the work of the Lord.
Regardless of naming conventions, Southern Appalachian folk healing modalities—using plants, prayers, herbs, and dirt to heal illnesses, ward off evil, and protect the home—reflect the vibrant cross-section of people who initially inhabited the area from West Virginia down into Mississippi.
The first people to employ the use of natural Appalachian resources, coupling them with spiritual prayer and ritual, were the Cherokee and Choctaw. In “A Modern Appalachian Folk Healer,” Edward Green discusses how influential this indigenous knowledge was to the education of Clarence “Catfish” Gray, one of West Virginia’s most well-known folk healers.
“Catfish relates that his ancestors learned much of their herbal medicine from local Indians,” Green says. “And it was an Indian from North Carolina that gave Catfish real faith in the curative value of herbs…”
The Scots-Irish, Ulster Scots, and English—rural people who carried with them a reverence for nature and understanding of medicinal plants from the Old World far predating modern medicine—came later. Upon their arrival, they fused these Native American methods with their own.
This early European arrival to the New World South also coincided with Europe’s religious transition to Protestantism, a conflict that led to the violent persecution of people who did not adhere to prescribed, Christian religious practices.
Religious xenophobia saw many non-Protestants classified derogatorily as witches and persecuted, though many were simply lay healers, practitioners of herbal medicine whose philosophies were rooted in a spirituality that venerated nature instead of a single monotheistic deity. A few historians have speculated that these potentially pagan practitioners—a word with Latin roots simply meaning “country dweller,” which later evolved into the word “paganus,” and eventually became “heathen” in Christian Latin—went underground or fled to the New World, where their methodologies could have been suppressed or absorbed by Christianity.
Indeed, one of the unique characteristics of Southern Appalachian folk magic or healing is the way it combines all of these elements. “Like everything else in the South, there’s a combination of European, African, and Native American influences,” says Sara Amis, Southern writer, instructor at the University of Georgia, and practicing pagan.
According to T.J. Smith, Ph.D., folklorist, and executive director of the Foxfire Museum and Heritage Center in Mountain City, Georgia, however, many mountain…
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