0.4 Introduction
The mosses have been a mostly unknown territory in homeopathy. In the old literature one finds only Polytrichum juniperinum and there is little information in the modern literature.
A few years ago Britta Dähnrich started the research on mosses by doing proving of Polytrichum formosum and Brachythecium rutabulum. One wonders about the the names of these mosses, coming from another world. An it turns out that the mosses live in a strange world. She also had a few very good cases helped by mosses. Gradually an image started to form about them, but the amount of mosses and information about them was very lacking. One has to imagine that there are about 1500 genera and 15000 species. And there were about 5 of them in homeopathy.
In the spring of 2017 Britta Dähnrich a few others went to the botanical of Tubingen. A moss specialist there, Michael Sauer was very open en helping to get samples of mosses and to identify them. This helped increasing the amount of mosses to about 40. The problem then was how to use them. Without any proving or botanical classification it was hard to know what would be their specifics.
Thus the plan arose to do a proving weekend. Britta Dähnrich organised this in Rottenburg, a village in the neighborhood of Tubingen. Again Michael Sauer helped with the gatherings and identification of the mosses. Without this help the project would have been impossible. With a group of 8 people we did about 30 sense provings in a few days. This book is in a way a report of the result of these provings. We choose for sense provings because they give relatively reliable result with relatively little effort. Most sense provings were done each by one person. Syntrichia ruralis was done by 2 persons. But we started a meditation proving about mosses in general. Then we did a sense proving of Polytrichum affine by all 8 of us. This was kind of test about the reliability of sense provings, as we did the proving on our own and exchanging the impression after we had written them down. This will be further discussed in the chapter on provings.
The next step was to put all the information together: the information of the proving, the botany of the mosses and the classification. This was a problematic process as will be described in the chapter on classification.
This book is the result of the above process. The development of the knowledge on mosses is far from perfect, far from finished. At the moment about 50 mosses are available, which is a huge extension of what was present. But probably a few hundred mosses will be needed to cover the field form the homeopathic point of view. Much of the information in this book is unsure, it is just a tentative approach. But it is better to have a start then to have nothing. And we have the impression that mosses are very much need for our patients. They cover very deep problems from early childhood trauma’s, mental handicap, schizophrenia and the like. They are needed for people who are unable to cope with life, to find a job and an income, to live on their own.
One can see Fairylike Mosses as the start of opening a new filed in homeopathy. It is in Stage 4, so to speak. The goal is to get feedback from many directions, so that the information can be expanded, corrected and added.
I dedicate this book to humanity