Page 120 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Arbor Vitae Cortex

received decreasing publicity the farther one got from the source.
Americans, accustomed to disappointing fads, moved on to the next
great salvation. Elsewhere, the internet was quick to pass Betzaroff’s
hype around the world, and slow to communicate the denunciations.
In Asia the principle behind Tree of Life Tonic struck an ancient but
vibrant chord. Sympathetic magic, as the doctrine of signatures is
more generically known to anthropologists, is alive and well in China.
Vast quantities of faunal as well as floral limbs and vital constituents
are consumed as medicine, purely on the superstitious basis of
resemblance of form. Science was slow to keep up or compete with
this time-honored habit; for many, the revelation that a part of the
human brain resembled a specific species of tree was not just
reasonable but inspirational. What else might Western anatomists
have to tell the demented and dull-witted about hidden cures? And it
couldn’t be a coincidence if further structures discovered inside the
skull had an obvious signature, a correspondence with some other
component of nature.
Soon it was pointed out that one of the key structures in the brain
is called the hippocampus, based on its uncanny resemblance to a
seahorse. From there it was but a small imaginative leap to finding
the seahorse with the biggest head: it had to be a miraculous brain
food! That unfortunate creature was located in the Gulf of
Carpintaria in Northern Australia, an easy target for legal and illegal
fishing. It wasn’t long before dried carcasses of H. grandiceps became
featured items in traditional Chinese medicine shops and ubiquitous
in the inventories of itinerant vendors throughout East and Southeast
Asia, touted by one and all as the cure for every known neurological
ailment.
Prior to that event seahorses were already a staple of folk
medicine, putting them at risk. But the utterly senseless harvest of
this one species was unprecedented. Its population, limited to one
marine niche, was collapsing. Without Oliver Betzaroff’s example,
this might not have happened. I hoped I could forget about it. And I
wondered about Al Magnus: he must have understood the possibility
of opening Pandora’s box when he decided to loosen the controls
imposed in the social world to keep obsessive geniuses in check. Was
he as crazy as they were?
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