Wondrous Order - Michal Yakir
Dr Yakir’s labour of love, first conceived two decades ago, is a synthesis drawn from the passions and experience of a lifetime as botanist, gardener, homeopath, researcher and educator.
It is one of the most beautifully designed books ever in homeopathic literature – 848 pages with full colour plant photos in solid hard cover. Michal Yakir, in this pioneering work, has developed a revolutionary system with which to organise the plant kingdom, in the form of a simple tabular set of coordinates: each row and column can be assigned to different types of patients with varying psychological traits and physical pathologies, thus enabling the prediction of common characteristics for plant families and their members.
The Table of Plants tells the story of parallel journeys: the evolution of plant groups (based on Cronquist’s system), matching the features of plants as remedies, alongside the development of the individual, humankind and the cosmos itself, including interplay between feminine and masculine archetypes. With insights from psychology, philosophy and Kabbala, all these evolutionary processes link seamlessly with the Materia Medica. Comprehensive and easy to use, it offers vivid, recognisable portraits of both familiar and relatively unused plant remedies.
Richly illustrated throughout, this volume begins with a summary of relevant botanical and homeopathic perspectives, followed by an in-depth exploration of the table’s six (potentially seven) columns and nine rows, with traits for orders and families. Finally there are condensed essences and cases for over six hundred and fifty of two groups of the flowering plants (Dicots and Monocots), many newly-proved, always highlighting links to the themes of the Table – a wondrous order indeed.
Full of flair and packed with invaluable pointers and fascinating snippets, this is a book for all homeopaths to treasure.
"I have had an opportunity to learn from Michal Yakir her novel approach to plants from a development point of view. It makes a lot of sense to me and has changed my outlook towards plants. She has made the plant kingdom very understandable by her simple yet deep insights based on the concept of plant evolution. I am using her ideas in my practice with excellent results.
This is indeed a fascinating and very practical work. It gives an additional dimension to our understanding of known plants and also helps us prescribe as yet unknown remedies with confidence, complementing all that we know about plants from other teachers like Sankaran and Scholten. I would recommend every serious homeopath to study it, as it will prove to be a really useful tool enabling us to help our patients.” - Dr Mahesh Gandhi, psychiatrist and homeopath
“A truly marvellous treasure trove of information on more than 650 plant remedies, classified according to the Cronquist system, with 848 pages featuring superb colour photos of virtually every plant, carefully illustrated too … The more often you use the book, the more clearly you realise the decades of research that has gone into it. This book will be a major reference work in homeopathy for at least the next decade, firstly due to the rich content but also because the book does justice to the rich quality of the plants themselves. It’s simply beautiful – the photos, the research, the depth of the descriptions. Thank you, Michal Yakir!” - Sigrid Lindemann, August 2017
- Author: Michal Yakir
- ISBN: 9783955821098
- 848 pages
- Edition: Third
- Hardback
- Published in 2018
- Printed in Germany
Reprinted with the permission of The Society of Homeopaths, (from 'The New Homeopath' Journal, Spring 2018 edition). Reviewed by Ian Hamilton.
Michal Yakir's work on the table of plants seems as important as Scholten's work on the periodic table. Like Scholten, there is a system, this one based on the Cronquist botanical system. Yakir has added to this her own system which comprises six columns representing an evolutionary view of mankind's development.
Yakir likens the evolution of plants to human development, arguing that plants evolve quickly and that many have died out over time. She quotes the fossil record as proof of earlier species. All the plants in the book are in the Class Angiospermae, which bear flowers and fruit.
Yakir's idea is that we start out as unformed, pre-separation and pre-ego, expressing the feminine principle. This state is represented by plants in column one, the subclass Magnoliidae which contains the family Ranunculaceae, which includes Pulsatilla. Through the columns we move from the feminine to the masculine principle. Column four is when the two principles are balanced. This is the column of maturity and nurturing. By column five, the masculine is dominant, but the female and male principles unite in column six. This is the Subclass Asteridae, the most complex plants. Column six is also a bit like Scholten's Uranium series, where there is a sense of destruction from which arises a new beginning. Plants located here include those in the Solanaceae family, with all that they represent for us in homeopathy.
Like Scholten, there is a pattern intersecting the columns through nine rows and these represent the stages of life from pre-birth to old age and death. These are derived from classifications of stages of development used by psychologist Erik Erikson.
How does the book work? Each column has its own chapter, and is colour coded for easier reference. Yakir discusses and illustrates the themes using cases in which that plant remedy was prescribed. Readers need to understand the philosophy of the columns as the development of the ego and how this is reflected in the descriptions of the plants. Without doubt there is an underlying theme of the Kabbalah, as part explanation, but this is not necessary to understand how the botanical structure links to human development.
However, for a full understanding of the system, we need to see the work as a description of global consciousness, the connection to which, I believe is the great strength of homeopathy. We are utterly connected to the species and substances around us.
Let's take two remedies to illustrate the way the system works. Pulsatilla is in column one, which has as its theme: pre-separation, feminine, primal, boundless. It intersects row four, which has as keywords: early childhood, penetration, confused, imitative, no confidence. I used the system here with a case which I thought was Pulsatilla and it helped me confirm my choice.
Now let's take Stramonium. It's in column six, Asteridae, which contains many of the advanced plant species. It has as its theme the idea of "me versus the world", ie the ego's struggle for its place. But it is in row one, which has as its keywords: before birth, the unconscious, antagonist, war, flee or protect, pursued, fears, instinct, the shadow. These are like the themes of the Solanaceae family. If I was in doubt between Pulsatilla and Stramonium, then knowing the table of plants would help confirm. The overall picture would guide you to the remedy.
You can find your way around the book by using a guide at the foot of each page, and the columns and rows are explained in outline at the start and expanded on in each chapter, along with cases. This is more than a tool to help identify which family a remedy might belong to, although it does do that, it may just change the way you practise homeopathy.
