Myths and Memories

REMEDIES

AMMONIUM CARBONICUM – sal volatile

Ammonia is also called volatile alkali. Ammonia is a transparent, colour-less and consequently invisible gas. This gas has an exceedingly pungent smell well known by the old name of 'spirits of hartshorn.' An animal

It extinguishes combustion but being itself somewhat combustible, the flame of a taper immersed in it will enlarge before going out. By exposing this gas to very low temperatures it can be liquified. It has a very acrid taste. Water condenses it rapidly. Ammonia expands during condensation with water. Water is capable of dissolving easily about one third of its weight of ammoniacal gas, hence, when placed in contact with a tube filled with this gas water rushes into it with explosive velocity. When mixed with oxygen it also explodes with electric spark. The alkaline na-ture of ammonia is demonstrated by its neutralising of acid and changing vegetable reds to purple or green. Sal ammoniac was originally fabricated in Egypt, the dung of camels and other animals constituted the chief fuel used from which the original soot is formed.

From this we can extract the

following:-There is a volatile nature but it is transparent and virtually invisible. It is pungent and attacking, can kill. It both extinguishes combustion but also aids it. Its state can easily be altered. It is very acrid. It has an intimate re-lationship with water and other liquids. It is expansive and also dissolv-ing, it is explosive and yet neutralising. It has an affinity to the digestive system!

And from this we

have:-An angry temperament that tries to be suppressed but if let loose can really attack. They are closed and held in but they try hard to dissolve or escape the disappointments in life but generally fail. Mood changes. Acrid and acid risings. Has an affinity to water or liquids in a variety of symp-toms and modalities.

There are many swellings and other states of 'being large' that include obesity.

The sense of chaos comes from this remedy in the form of ‘clouds of gas’

that babble on, oscillating between suppression and liberty.

In Ammonium carbonicum the clouds here are of fear, anxiety, excitement and abuse. They awake in the morning burdened with guilt and this anxi-ety rises to fear later in the morning, as if some misfortune will take place, then back to more anxiety in the late afternoon. By evening they are dwelling on all the things that others have done to displease them until finally they become abusive and angry at someone. Scholten says it is the father. Sometimes the father has died and they can do nothing about an unresolved problem with the relationship and this is why they harbour the past and have delusions of dead people. A lack of love can certainly be the aetiology.

Whether it is the father or not, there is grief, guilt and blame all combust-ing inside until it comes out as hate.

Sometimes this hate is sublimated into various other outlets - sadness, ex-travagance, a refusal to speak, chaos, confusion (this remedy also makes a lot of calculating errors), insanity, laziness, heedless daring, they reveal their secrets during sleep, they take to a religion for solace. On the physi-cal plane an outlet is provided by haemorrhage.

Quite a heavy cloud then. In fact, cloudy days make them so much worse, but neither can they tolerate the shaking up of a storm. They are under oxygenated, they need a breath of fresh air, they are trapped inside the test tube of ammonia in distilled water. They refuse to wash and become un-clean - cannot bear to be near the water or mixed with it. They are lazy (you might mistake then for Sulphur), the most they can manage is

stretching the limbs as a way of extending themselves out of the test tube.

Constricted in this way it is understandable that heart symptoms prevail and oppressed breathing, the nose gets blocked and they snore.

Because of the lack of oxygen they are always sleepy and chilly. When cold and damp there is collapse and when hot and fiery they are expan-sive.

One can recognise a typical teenager - heedless and disobedient, morose and ill humoured, rebellious, disorganised, blames others, hates washing, wants to escape the family, resentful, discontented, desires junk food, envy (feel they have had a raw deal).

A curious symptom - there is a SAI the teeth are loose when walking – even the teeth have no solace in the turmoil.

MEZEREUM – spurge olive

Mezereum sits between a rock and a hard place – the hard place brings a fear of loss (delusion he is poor) and the rock brings a fear of gaining something unpleasant (delusion he has warts), so this rigid halfway house is a house of indifference where they just want to sit and look through the window for hours. But don’t be fooled by appearances because there is a lot of chaos going on inside the ‘house’.

It is probably needless to say that ‘spurge’ means to ‘purge’, i.e. evict from the house – not in ‘big brother’ style but in the Hahnemannian method of removal of the symptoms of the suppressed psora that Mez-ereum represents.

The plant itself exudes an acrid milky substance that is mimicked in the symptom picture regarding the skin – eruptions that form thick crusts or scabs with gluey, chalky white moisture oozing from underneath the crusts. There is intolerable itching, extreme pain and a sensation as if hundreds of insects are crawling over the skin – although Mezereum is a remedy to choose for Lice (literally insects crawling on the skin) this pain is in fact a nerve sensation and Mezereum is one of the top ranked reme-dies for Herpes Zoster – one of the most painful conditions to endure, and it is this pain that causes one who needs Mezereum to just sit and try to find a way of enduring such unimaginable pain – as if the head would split, as if the top of the head were gone, as if head were an ant’s nest, as if everything in the head were torn asunder, as if violent and burning fire were darting through muscles.

This is the chaos of Mezereum – something wanting to be purged but to-tally lacking in power or ability to do so. Instead of purging they bury themselves even deeper into the mire and they literally become buried in thought. A total abstraction of mind to the point of feeling as light as air.

Buried but levitating and this brings us right back to the neutral base of apparent indifference.

But it is easy to get lost if one buries the self too deep. The delusion can be so deep as to signify death – everything is dead and this suggests a ne-crotic state that is paralleled in the physical pathology. Organs become prolapsed, orifices fill with acrid pus, ulcers and abscesses form, finally bones and teeth begin to decay as a syphilitic taint marries a psoric one.

This is the ultimate in suppression, can it get any worse than this? A physical suppression of an early skin condition, one that attempts to re-emerge but is buried deeper. Or an immune system damaged by vaccina-tion and so becomes lost in its direcvaccina-tion of maintaining health – all con-tribute to an unrelenting torment with which to endure.

RUBRIC – DISGUST