Wild Boar Medicine

High on the most slender ledge of the northern mountain, the snow leopard stirred. She opened her eyes and scanned the valley below, without moving a hair, invisible. The valley slept in darkness. Her ears swivelled as she listened, no sound apart from the wind and dripping water. She raised her head to smell the air and then she saw it. The gash of unbearable darkness between the stars was gone – the sky had healed. She stood up and a ripple of excitement flowed from her whiskers down her spine, to the pads of her feet and she stretched her luxurious body, turned around, curled up and went back to sleep.

In the valley below, in a small cave warmed by a thermal spring the snake woke suddenly. There was no point in opening her eyes in the total darkness of the cave, anyway, she recognized the tickle of her underbelly. She would wait until the Sun had warmed the Earth before making her way to the meeting place.

It was the noise that woke Grand Master Boar out of his long meditation. The incessant hum and whirring of a cloud of locusts that never showed up. He was accustomed to his own company – Great Mother Boar had not trusted him since that one time he snacked on a juicy squeaker and he couldn’t relax around her. He would seek her out when he was required to perform his duties, but he liked to make his own bed. Lying down on the damp ground and feeling his body merge with the Earth, the warmth reaching deep into the marrow of his old bones was deeply comforting. If he found a good spot, cool earth under a pile of morning dew-laced honeysuckle, he could sleep the whole day through, but there was no peace in his dreams.

He played and replayed the same scenario. It started just as it always did, with the baying of hunting dogs. He would wait until they were close enough to hear and jump out of his safe place, making enough noise for them to hear him. He would lead them on a chase away from the sounder, but there was something out of place that he couldn’t grasp. The dogs were different, smaller, half-hearted, not up for a fight. Occasionally, one would get too close and he would have to spear it with a tusk and toss it aside, they seemed almost relieved. Knowing he could out run the dogs and hunters to get to the river and ditch them he would make a break for it across the field, but he never made it. There was another sound, a huge crack like an old oak shedding a limb and then a sudden pain exploded in his body and he smelled blood, his own. There never was the blood of an honest fight to the death, blade and tooth and tusk on flesh and bone, releasing the elixir of immortality onto the land. Total awareness. Then back to being a tiny squeaker sucking on Mama’s tit. He ground his teeth in his sleep.

Later that afternoon, Grand Master Boar was almost startled by the snake resting in the gnarly roots of the ancient apple tree in the middle of the woods. But he hadn’t forgotten either. They acknowledged each other with the silent ritual nod that starts the dance and he grunted, flexed his massive scarred shoulders and began to shuffle the fallen apples into a neat pile on the edge of the clearing. Wild boar are immune to snake venom.

On the far side of the woods the Great Mother Boar, had her snout yanked sharply to the right by the sudden smell of fresh apples, lots of them, a feast. She turned abruptly began crashing through the woods towards the smell, her Maids of Honour and their tribe of squeakers and youngsters in her wake. When she reached the clearing and saw the neat pile, still fresh with the dressing of Grand Master Boar, who had by then retreated to a respectful distance. She bristled in anticipation with the memory of what was to come, but ate the apples first.

After they’d eaten their fill and grubbed around for any other tasty morsels in the soft soil, Great Mother Boar marshaled her troupe; maids of honour to the left and right, juvenile males on the wings and to the rear and little ones in the middle. Great Mother Boar raised her snout, sniffed the air, stomped the Earth and they began to run.

They ran through the day and into the night down the mountain into the old forest and across the graveyard of charred stumps, into the hills and young oak woods, where the acorns were rich on the ground. The woods remembered them and gave them welcome shelter through the day. As the Sun set, they forded the rivers and ran into the low-lands, they ploughed through the fields and into the gardens, into the cities. They ran through the streets, into alleyways and shopping malls, subways and offices, a pulsing tidal-boar of solid Life Force, bristling with survival instinct and forgotten wisdom of the primal order.

Izzy was the first of our pack to encounter a wild boar, when she was about six months old. We only saw his calling card, a gash to the bone across her chest to the shoulder. We know it was a male as the females don’t have tusks and if he had intended harm, well….but when you are hunted and hated, a quick strike before disappearing into the bush is the best chance of survival. I packed it with dried yarrow flowers and it healed within a week or so. Izzy has some respect for the boars, but she too is a player. She likes to sniff them out for a chase. Often, if it’s a single male, he’ll stay put, unthreatened by her. Our concern is if she flushes a female with babies, as the protective instincts of the mother boar are legendary.

A few months later we disturbed another boar up on the ridge. We didn’t see him, but we heard him grunting and rustling around, the dogs wanted to flush him out, but we called them back. The memory of Izzy’s wound, still fresh enough. In my attempt to restore the balance, I announced that the boar was welcome to eat here whenever he wanted. A gold embossed invitation could not have been clearer; the next day, the boar family came and ate all our corn and potatoes. Over the following three years, just before we were going to harvest, the boars came and ate all our corn and potatoes, until we decided not to grow them anymore. This was the start of our conversation, and our initiation into boar wisdom, but I was too ‘busy’ with other matters to real-eyes it at the time.

Boar medicine is very old, as old as the mountains, as old as the wisdom of the serpent. The Spanish name for wild boar is ‘jabali’ and it means ‘of the mountain’. The wild boar embodies all the attributes of the mountain, endurance, strength, fearlessness and independence, along with the intelligence and acute senses that enable them to adapt and thrive in almost every environment, except for the frozen north. These qualities were highly regarded in the ancient world and the boar was respected as an adversary and honoured in art and mythology.

We would sometimes hear the boar grunting behind the orchard and on our morning walks we saw their night-time digs allover the fields. We had several run-ins with the hunters, telling them not to shoot on our land. We don’t object to hunting for food and boar is an exceptionally lean and tender meat, when properly prepared. Our farmer neighbour shoots the boar that dig up his fields and he sometimes gives them to us, as his wife doesn’t like boar meat. We don’t want hunting on our land as it’s not locals that hunt around here anymore, it’s hunting parties from Madrid and Barcelona and they have no respect. It’s dangerous when they shoot too close to the house and there are many hunting accidents. I would like our property to be a sanctuary for the boar from the outsiders.

Freya had the next intimate encounter. We don’t know what exactly happened, but one evening just after dusk the dogs went running and barking into the woods and Freya returned, with a deep gash and the flesh of her haunch hanging loose and flapping. We staunched the blood with yarrow, but the next morning we took her to the vet to be stitched up. Freya being Freya, she managed to remove her protective ‘lampshade’ during the night and rip out all the stitches that held the flap in place. We knew there was no point taking her back to the vet, as she now had a fairly large open wound with nothing to cover it. Open wounds need to be kept moist, so I mixed ground yarrow with coconut oil and we applied this mixture several times a day until the wound healed, which took about three months. She was undaunted by the experience and quickly discovered how to use her ‘lampshade’ as a weapon with the other dogs, but she has learned to respect the wild boar and now maintains a safe distance.

Tulku was up next. His initiation took place on another level, as appropriate for the venerable being that he is. He was in a state of high stress on the day it happened, as we had given the dogs worming tablets the day before. Never give border collies or border collie mixes worming tablets as they have highly sensitive immune systems and the tablets can cause a horrible over-reaction and distress. Tulku was up all night, with upset stomach, panting and terrible itching. However, a highly evolved being uses stress or pain as a stepping stone to a greater embodiment of themselves, whatever their form.

Even though Tulku is a multi-dimensional being, in this life he is enjoying the experience of living in a dog’s body and for a dog, the distinction between inner and outer awareness is seamless; when he is happy the world is happy. When he feels under attack, there must be an attacker out there that he can see. I mentioned this to Dean, as we dragged ourselves out for a walk, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. We crossed the field and barely made it to the track when we heard a squeaker screaming for its life in the woods to our left and movement in the bushes to our right. Something was terribly wrong and the dogs ran off barking in all directions. We called them and the girls came back, but not Tulku. Dean had to hold Izzy and Freya, so I could go and find him. I was cautious, not knowing what had happened and whether there were still any boar around, but I went into the woods calling for Tulku. It wasn’t long before he came back to me, covered in blood.

We continued our walk because the dogs were too excited to go home and the woods seemed eerily silent. When we got to the stream, we washed Tulku down and there wasn’t a mark on him. It wasn’t his blood. Was there a wounded boar out there? We decided to head home, but Tulku wouldn’t settle. We let him stay outside and he ran off to the woods in the other direction and came back with a dead squeaker, still warm, but completely unmarked. To this day, we don’t know what happened. How did that baby die? Whose blood covered Tulku? We never found any other remains or signs of a fight in the woods.

Tulku stopped scratching, as his adrenaline stopped the histamine response and his mind was satisfied that he had identified the attacker. We were a bit uneasy; did he think his attacker was the squeaker? Would that cause him to be over-confident around the boar? With this on our minds, we went out the next morning and on a different track a massive male boar suddenly jumped out of the bushes right into the middle of the three dogs and just as quickly spun around, back into the bushes and off. None of the dogs even attempted to chase him. Lesson learned. Phew.

Since then, my respect and affection for this animal has grown enormously and a doorway into another level of reality has opened. As I’ve grown more into myself, I’ve begun to wonder about the magical nature of this being, who has the ability to show up physically, in dreams or even on the computer screen, at just the right moment. Grand Master Boar wandered into our orchard just after our rainbow auras fired up. He spent a peaceful half hour there, rooting around and wagging his little tail happily, whenever he found something tasty.

In August 2020, this mama boar found something interesting too. She became a well-known character in Teufelssee nature reserve (Devil’s Lake) in Berlin, when she stole a laptop from a German nudist. She was named Elsa and there was a protest to prevent her from being culled. Around 600,000 to 800,000 wild boar are shot every year in Germany, roughly 2,000 of which are in the wild boar are in the Teufelssee. I have to wonder what was on that laptop.

 

Spain’s Hunting Resources Research Institute estimates that the wild boar population is now in excess of two million. They are considered to be a destructive pest by farmers and conservationists alike, digging up fields and threatening the biodiversity that is somehow not threatened by deforestation. They rampage through towns and cities, terrorizing residents and rooting through trash, especially in Barcelona, apparently. Hunters kill around 70,000 per year, which barely dents the population.

A few weeks ago, in mid-October, we planted some hazel and aronia between the house and the orchard and during the night, the wild boar came and dug them all up. They didn’t just dig them up – they flung them about as if they were having a wild party. We have planted hundreds of trees, including hazelnut, and they’ve never dug them up before, so this was something new. We replanted them and they dug them up again. What was going on? After the second digging, Grand Master Boar came to me in a dream and I asked him what he wanted. He said: tell our story. I agreed.

I began a three-fold process, research, a meditative/telepathic outreach into the mind of the wild boar and action to protect the trees. Initially, I put Plasma Man tags on the trees. I used Plasma Man, as it is a solar symbol and, from what I’d been reading, the wild boar were considered to be affiliated with the Sun in many ancient cultures. Trees form an energy line with the Sun as they grow upwards and I thought this might create an energetic line that the boars would recognize and leave the trees alone. They didn’t. I began to real-eyes that this story is the living experience of wild boar medicine, moving through me and activating dormant faculties.

The human-boar relationship reaches way back in time. The world’s oldest known cave painting from 45,000 years ago is of a wild boar. It was discovered on the island of Sulawasi, in indonesia in 2017.

 

The wild boar artwork in the Altamira Caves of Cantabria, Northern Spain is probably around 36,000 years old.

 

Ancient art and stories endure because they imprint existence with the timeless Truth of real events. These events appear to be ‘unbelievable’ because they occurred and were depicted in an expanded state of awareness that is imperceptible to our ordinary conditioned consciousness. When we engage with these images and stories in a corresponding state of awareness, we resonate with the original experience and a similar event will begin to play out, as appropriate to the new setting.

Throughout old Europe the wild boar was recognized for its aggression and fearlessness, especially the mothers in protecting their young, as well as its abundance and the generosity of its succulent flesh. The norse goddess Freya rode into battle on a giant boar named Hildesvini, the ‘battle swine’, who was her lover Ottar. Her brother, Freyr had a golden-maned boar named, Gullinbursti, whose bristles glowed in the dark. Greek mythology is rammed with boars (!): Artemis and the Calydonian boar, Hercules and the Erymanthian boar (his fourth trial). Adonis killed by the god Ares in the form of a boar. When Perseus decapitated Medusa, he ended her exile and the rush of her life force released the two forms she had conceived with Poseidon; everyone knows of Pegasus, but fewer know of his brother, Chrysaor, an enormous boar with golden tusks. This sounds more like a warthog, as they have longer tusks than boar; they are related, the warthog being an African cousin to the boar. In some versions of the story, Chrysaor is depicted as a giant with a golden sword and was said to have become the King of Iberia.

The wild boar emblem was widely used in heraldry throughout India and Europe, until the mid-fifteenth century, and still appears in some coats of arms today. The form of the wild boar was moulded into anglo-saxon, baltic, celtic, gaulish, germanic, roman and nordic battle helmets, in order to invoke the Warrior Mother Goddess in battle.

“They worship the mother of the gods, and wear as a religious symbol the device of a wild boar. This serves as armour, and as a universal defence, rendering the votary of the goddess safe even amidst enemies.”

Tacitus, Germany and its Tribes, 98AD

The last English King to die in battle was Richard III, in 1485 in the Battle of Bosworth against Henry Tudor. Richard III had a white boar as his emblem, although why he chose it is unknown. Etymologically, Bos-worth means, boar enclosure and he was killed as he led the charge into enemy lines, by a man who had pretended to be an ally. Richard III was the last of the Plantagenet kings, a chosen name rather than a surname, thought to come from the plant genista or broom. That is the tall shrub in the legume family with bright yellow pea-blossom like flowers that bloom in spring – traditionally used in witches brooms in many countries. The Plantagenet kings had brought sweeping reforms to England, including the Magna Carta.

Boar mythology extends across much of the world, except for the Americas. The official story is that wild boar are not native to the Americas and were introduced in the 1890s for sport hunting. I don’t find this credible, given the native presence of wild boars in all continents, apart from Antarctica, and the ongoing falsification of the historical record. Wild boar were supposedly hunted to extinction in England in the 1300s, by men with dogs, swords, spears and bows and arrows. By 1300 the human population of England was between 3-4 million and England is roughly one fifth the size of Texas, which has a current population of around 30 million. Wild boar in Texas are hunted with helicopters and machine guns, but they have not been eradicated. Curious, isn’t it? The British Isles have been fenced in for a long time in so many ways, but now there are wild boar in England and Scotland, apparently escaped from zoos and private owners!

In my research, I was particularly attracted to the story of Vishnu, who took the form of a wild boar to plunge into the ocean depths to rescue the Earth from a power-hungry demon who was holding the Earth hostage. He chose the wild boar as he knew that the demon had been granted a guarantee that he could not be harmed by any of the animals he named, but he forgot to name the wild boar. The wild boar avatar of Vishnu is known as Varaha and his female consort is the boar-headed warrior goddess, Varahi, aka Bhairavi.

This is the story that is playing out now, in which the wild boar are performing their traditional role. Varaha and Varahi are personifications of timeless Nature Powers that always work together as male and female, their faces are said to be the colour of stormy skies. They bring massive storms and flooding, destruction of the corrupt, to protect the sacred:

“When it comes to Varahi, we find a Goddess-form Who is hailed not only as a formidable Warrior in Her Own Rite – but also as a Commander, a General of the Divine War-Hosts. And, yes, most definitely invoked for the specific purpose of countering malefic magic and its practitioners and their demonic allies, instruments, associates, and masters.”

https://aryaakasha.com/2022/01/12/varahi-freyja-saraswati-the-boar-of-battle-and-the-goddess/

Back to the trees; I put Medusa tags on them and a few days later, they dug up the trees for the forth time.

By this time, I real-eyesed that we were participating in a non-ordinary event. The boar were specific and deliberate in their digging, not damaging anything else in the garden or orchard. Varahi is said to “to ‘dig up’ and destroy the ‘concealed’, ‘buried’ spells of the malefic sorcerer.” This corresponds with what I have been working on over the past few months, the identification, clearing and sealing of black magic spells that have smothered the Earth and trapped us into distorted ways of living. The Boar Goddess also unearths treasures, truths and “glinting precious wonderments.”

Like Grand Master Boar, we needed to see who was the perpetrator – who was digging up the trees. So we put up a wildlife camera and just after dusk, we saw that it was a mother boar, a young adult and four squeakers. Very cleverly, the young adult came and checked the area first and then the mother and babies showed up, rooting up the trees and digging around, looking straight at the camera.

She knew there was no food there, as she had been so many times before. What was she trying to tell us? If she was hungry and wanted food, how would she communicate that to us? It felt like a test. Whatever else was going on here, she was a mother with young ones to feed. So we broke the rules that say we should not feed the wild animals and certainly not the boar – you will be overrun with them etc. I could well imagine what our neighbours would say if they knew, but so what? It felt to us like the right thing to do.

They did not show up for the food. They haven’t been back at all and it’s been a week.

Finally, I’m getting it. The wild boar are not just animals. They are Nature Powers, what were once called gods, in animal form. To see the nobility and beauty in the fearlessness of these great beasts, is to real-eyes these qualities in ourselves – they remind us of what we’ve forgotten. Wild boar medicine flows through their stories and the art created by those who know them, you don’t have to have a physical encounter (or eat them) for it to work in you. This elixir of immortality awakens our dormant ability to face any threat fearlessly, including the threat of death, so that we can be fully alive. Then, when we eventually leave our bodies, we can make this transition into spirit and back into form, seamlessly, consciously and without fear, as all the animals do.

Update: on 16th April 2024, the Grand Old Boar broke free.