S ea R emedies

Evolution of the Senses

Jo Evans

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 CONTENTS
CORRESPONDENCES
Evolution and the Unity of the Senses
Myth, Mirror and Healing
Alienation and Inner Space
Illustrated timeline of animal evolution

THE CHEMICAL SENSES: TASTE AND SMELL

The Nose Knows
Fantastic Voyage
Smell: A Sense Base or Sublime?
GASTROPODS & SHELLS

Alchemy of the Sperm Whale

Smelling and Tasting in the Oceans
Sensations and Symptoms: Smell, Taste, Chemical Messaging

THE SENSE OF VISION

In Darkness
Inner Space: As Above, So Below
Feeling Light
Watercolours and Tricks of the Light
The Colour Purple
Ocean Eyes
Cnidarian Vision, Cnidarian Senses
Overwhelmed by the Senses: Tropisms
The Brilliance of Brainless Coral
Third Eye: Cnidarians and the Pineal Gland
Powers beyond Seeing
Self-Consciousness in Sea Animal Remedies
Additional sea remedies: sense of self consciousness
An Eye for an Eye
2 Relevance to the Cnidarian remedy provings (jellyfish, coral, anemones)
Spies of Light
Sensations and Symptoms: Vision

THE SENSE OF TOUCH

The Paradox of Touch
Of Life and Limb
The Language of the Skin
Sensitivity and Numbness
On Having a Shell
On Being Armoured or Disrobed
Sensations and Symptoms: Touch

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 Contents

THE SENSE OF HEARING

The Dance of the Sea
Dance, Society and Invertebrate Mood Modulators
Notes on the Evolutionary Origins of Music and Language
Singing the World: Homeopathic Poetry
Sensations and Symptoms: Hearing, Singing, Dancing, Movement
Evolutionary Echoes: birds, insects, spiders

Materia Medica
PORIFERA: marine sponges
Tree of Life
Natural History
Spongia tosta (roasted sea sponge)

CNIDARIANS: coral, sea anemones and jellyfish

Tree of Life
Cnidarian Remedies
Natural History
The sea anemone remedies
Corallium rubrum (red gorgonian coral) Anthozoa
Anthopleura xanthogrammica (giant green sea anemone) Anthozoa
Stichodactyla haddoni (Haddon’s sea anemone) Anthozoa
Physalia pelagica (Portuguese man of war) Hydrozoa
Medusa or Aurelia Aurita (moon jellyfish) Scyphozoa
Chironex fleckeri (box jellyfish) Cubozoa

ECHINODERMS: starfish and sea urchins

Tree of Life
Echinoderm Remedies
Natural History
Acanthaster planci (crown of thorns starfish) Asteroidea
3
Asterias rubens (red starfish) Asteroidea
Toxopneustes pileolus (flower urchin) Echinoidea

MARINE ARTHROPODS: lobster and horseshoe crab

Tree of Life
Natural History
Limulus cyclops (horseshoe crab) Cheliceramorpha
Homarus gammarus (European lobster) Crustacea

MARINE MOLLUSCS, GASTROPODS AND BIVALVES: sea shells

Tree of Life
Natural History

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 Introduction

Marine Mollusc Remedies: the shells

Gastropods Natural History
Cypraea eglantina (dog rose cowrie ) Gastropod
Murex (Tyrian purple dye) Gastropod
Bivalves Natural History
Pecten jacobaeus (scallop) Bivalve
Venus mercenaria (clam) Bivalve
Calcarea carbonica (oyster shell) Bivalve
Conchiolinum (mother of pearl)
Pearl Remedies
Mytilus edulis pearl (pearl of blue mussel) Bivalve
Pearl (pearl of oyster) Bivalve
Pearl in Medicine
Pearl in Nature
GASTROPODS & SHELLS

Pearl Signature and Symbol

MARINE MOLLUSCS, CEPHALOPODS: nautilus, octopus, squid, cuttlefish

Tree of Life
Cephalopod Remedies
Natural History
Nautilus (nautilus) Nautilida
Sepia officinalis (sepia/cuttlefish ink) Sepiida
Eledone cirrhosa (lesser octopus) Octopoda
Onychoteuthis banksii (clubhook squid) Teuthida

SPIRAL JOURNEY: Part I: The Homeopathic Process

Spiral as Symbol
Non-Dual Duality
Spirit and Sensibility
A Remembered Present

SPIRAL JOURNEY: Part II: Spirals and Shell remedies

The Spiral and the Goddess
4 Left and Right Handed Shells
Which Way to Turn?
Sexuality and the Shell Remedies
Anima and Animus: Reciprocal Spirals
Uroboros: Cycles and Spirals
Three in One
I Rise Again
Polarity and Duality
Darkness and Light
Into the Labyrinth
Shadow and Sex
Shells and Moon

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 Contents

The Sinistral Way: The Copper Breathers

Life Breath: From Gills to Lungs
Air and Soul
The Shell in the Desert: Assigning Value
Summary of Shell Symbolism
Material to Spiritual: The Journey
Spiral Chambers
Conclusion

R EMEDY I NDEX
R EMEDY NAME COMMON NAME A BBRE. PAGE

Acanthaster planci Crown of Thorns Starfish Acan-p.

Anthopleura xanthogrammica Giant Green Sea Anemone Anthop-x.
Asterias rubens Red Starfish Aster.
Calcarea carbonica Middle layer of oyster shell Calc.
Chironex fleckeri Box Jellyfish Chir-fl.
Conchiolinum Mother of Pearl Conch.
Corallium rubrum Red Gorgonian Coral Cor-r.
Cypraea eglantina Dog Rose Cowrie Cypra-e.
Eledone cirrhosa Lesser Octopus Eled-c.
Homarus gammarus European Lobster Hom.
Limulus cyclops Horseshoe Crab Lim.
Medusa or Aurelia aurita Moon Jellyfish Medus.
Murex Tyrian Purple Dye Murx.
Mytilus edulis pearl Pearl from Blue Mussel shell Myt-e-p.
Nautilus Nautilus Naut.
Onychoteuthis banksii Clubhook Squid Onych.
Pearl Pearl of Oyster Pearl 5
Pecten jacobaeus Scallop Pect.
Physalia pelagica Portuguese Man of War Physala-p.
Sepia officinalis Sepia/Cuttlefish Ink Sep.
Spongia tosta Roasted Sea Sponge Spong.
Stichodact yla haddoni Haddon’s Sea Anemone Stich-h.
Toxopneustes pileolus Flower Urchin Toxopn.
Venus mercenaria Clam Ven-m.

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GASTROPODS & SHELLS

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 C ORRESPONDANCES
La nature est un temple où de vivants piliers
Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles
L’homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent

Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,
Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,
Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.

Il est des parfums frais comme de chairs des enfants,

Doux comme les hautbois, verts comme les prairies,
— Et d’autres, corrompus, riches et triomphants,

Ayant l’expansion des choses infinies,

Comme l’ambre, le musc, le benjoin et l’encens,
Qui chantent les transports de l’esprit et des sens.
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

C ORRESPONDENCES
At times, the living temple, Nature, allows faint whispers to
filter through her sentient pillars.

Meanwhile, we thread our way through forests of symbols,

where the untainted mirrors of hidden eyes, observe us, all
knowingly, as we pass.

We strain to hear her distant echoes, yielding to the commun-

ion of undivided memory, to a source vast as night and as en- 7
lightenment: an empire of correspondences where perfume, col-
our and sound meet in profound harmony. Where pure scents
– like that of a baby’s skin; mellow as an oboe; or green, as a
meadow after rain; and others, darkly compelling, heady and
exultant – like ambergris, musk, benzoin and incense – an
exalted chorus of infinite substance, they sing of the ascendant
soul, in the unity of the senses.

An interpretation, after Charles Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’

by Isabelle Waterstone Spinosa and Jo Evans

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 EVOLUTION AND THE UNITY OF THE SENSES

S
ea Remedies: Evolution of the Senses provides a comprehensive guide to the
marine invertebrate remedies used in homeopathy. Additional chapters ex-
plore the evolution of the senses and the relationship of our human sensory
experience to that of this group of early animals: in nature, symbolically and as
medicines.
GASTROPODS & SHELLS

In conventional medicine, marine invertebrates are the focus of research into fun-
damental biological processes, allowing scientists to observe and test life at work
in single cells and cell membranes. Researchers also benefit from the evolutionary
adaptations of certain species, such as the squid’s giant eyes and super-sized nerves,
the immune system of a sponge and the blood of the horseshoe crab. Molluscs are
used to learn about human diseases such as diabetes, neurodegenerative disease, can-
cer and the ageing process. Invertebrate poisons – from cone shells to sea anemone
venom – are of special interest in connection with diseases of the nervous system.
There are many other examples in the pages of this Materia Medica, accessible in a
section towards the end of individual remedy chapters, entitled Other Medical Uses.

Are we ruled by heart, head or senses? The answer to this can never be simple for
anyone, but by exploring the evolution of the senses, insights can be gained into the
way we perceive, experience and respond to life. Sensory cells began to form before
hearts and brains, and we look to the sea – our original home – and to the earliest
animals in evolution, to understand how our bodies evolved, how they work and
how they may be cured.

Scientific research has shown how, despite their diverse forms and functions, the
8 human instruments of sight, smell, taste, hearing and touch evolved from the same
genetic code.1 Our senses have their genetic roots in the very first multi-cellular ani-
mals, such as sponges, whose aggregation of single cells specialise and co-operate.
Sponges have certain sensory abilities but no actual sensory organs, and have been
found to possess, yet leave dormant, the precursory genes that enable the develop-
ment of sensory organs in animals higher up the evolutionary tree. This has been
likened to a black box that has never been unpacked.

Early animals, such as jellyfish, provide clues to the story of the senses, with their
combined sensory apparatus located in hubs called rhopalia. The synaesthetic nature

1 E.g. Gehring, W.J. and Ikeo, K. (1999). ‘Pax 6: Mast ering eye morphogenesis and eye evolution’. Trends Genet
15: 371-7.’

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 Evolution and the Unity of the Senses

of perception is clear in the sensory life of marine invertebrates. Smell and taste are
chemically infused; movement, balance, sound and touch form a quartet; and touch
melts fluidly into taste, sight and sound. The traditional five senses normally applied
to human beings appear to know no boundaries in sea life, and indeed more than
five senses operate in the oceans, electric and magnetic being just two of them. From
sensorially unified beginnings, over 500 million years ago, animals have developed
ever more sophisticated, specialised and separate means of sensing.

The evolution of the senses begins like an ancient map of the world on which conti-
nents now separated by vast oceans were once one land mass. We can trace common
origins, despite the great divide and drift of plates, or the pull of tides under count-
less moon cycles, just as linguists can chart the evolution of language using arrows
on an atlas. Language drifts over an infinitely narrower time-scale than tectonic
plates, changing within months and years rather than millennia.

Homeopaths work with the tension between language and sensation. We work
with the script of the case, the exact words of the patient describing how they feel,
in relation to the words that originally stem from homeopathic provings.2 Proving
experiments represent the language of nature expressing its healing capacity through
individual forms: animal, mineral and vegetable. Each remedy ‘speaks’ in emotional
and physical symptoms, through the participants of a proving, as if they were one
voice. In case-taking, after studying the manner in which the patient’s subjective sen-
sations and symptoms are expressed, verbally and physically, an appropriate homeo-
pathic medicine will be prescribed. This decision is made according to the degree of
correspondence between the ‘voice’ of the medicine and that of the patient.

The prose interpretation of Baudelaire’s Correspondences, at the opening of this chapter,

suggests that without fully exploring sensory experience, we are simply navigating a
path through self-seeded, solipsistic forests of symbols, attempting to grasp the true
and essential messages that occasionally slip through the pillars guarding the entrance
to nature’s temple. Baudelaire expresses a longing to perceive nature’s true voice: the
authentic language of the senses. Accessing the realm of the senses reunites us with
this well of wordless, sensory correspondences, however lost we are in life, in the depths
9
of the forest of symbols.

Are we moving senselessly through a denatured landscape, amongst abstractions

of our own creation, or, as the French philosopher and phenomenologist Maurice
Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has suggested, has verbal and written language evolved
out of the language of nature and indeed that of the senses? Merleau-Ponty under-
stood the act of perception to be a reciprocal exchange between the body and the
animate landscape, of which we are an inseparable part. In his thesis, beginning with
preverbal expressions such as gestures and cries, language was first conceived and
2 For non-homeopaths reading this: A proving is the procedure for ascertaining the effect s of substances by
administering them to healthy human subject s in order to observe and record symptoms (Jay Yasgur, A
Dict ionary of Homeopathic Medical Terminology).

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 Introduction

developed as a preconscious sensory response to the living environment. Automatic

or instinctive sensory responses are the antecedent forces sculpting the symbols we
know as words. If Merleau-Ponty is correct – as I believe he is – one can understand
why following the language of the patient closely, as Hahnemann originally advised,
leads to a closer understanding of the essence of a case, reuniting psyche, symbol
and substance.3

The idea of language as an outcome of sensory evolution has been richly explored
by David Abram in Th e Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a
More than Human World.4 Abram points out that Plato, the Italian philosopher
Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) and Johann
Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) had also argued that language has its roots in our
instinct ive sensory response to the natural world’s shapes, colours, sounds, smells,
textures, tastes and shadows.
GASTROPODS & SHELLS

The relatively recent discovery of mirror neurons, found in humans, primates and
some birds, lends a physiological basis to this view. Eminent neuroscientist Vilayanur
S. Ramachandran has suggested that mirror neurons are likely to be fundamental
to the process of language acquisition. First discovered in the early 1990s, these are
the neurons of recognition, mimicry and sympathy: a type of brain cell that fires
equally when we perform an action and when we witness someone else perform the
same action, mirroring the movement. On the cellular level, it as if the observer
is acting out the actions of the observed. An example might be when we witness
someone having an accident, and we flinch or flail as they do. Mirror neurons allow
us to put ourselves in the position of the other and to feel or act as they feel or act,
empathising and learning how to respond.

In the sea, invertebrates such as the octopus and cuttlefish mirror their immediate
environment by means of a language of the skin, merging seamlessly into the sea-
scape of shadow, reef and sand; they also converse using body patterns and gestures.
This mirroring and patterning is said to be an automatic reaction of the nervous sys-
tem, relating to moments when visual silence is required, and also when it becomes
necessary to communicate.
10
The mirroring process in cephalopods (such as cuttlefish, squid and octopus) takes
place by means of reflector cells in their skin; these sense the wavelengths of ambient
light and instantly replicate the brightness and tone of the environment. Is there an
evolutionary link between the mirror neurons in our brains and the reflector cells
in a cephalopod’s skin? I cannot provide the answer to that question, but do explore
crypsis and communication amongst cephalopods in The Sense of Touch, under the
sub-heading The Language of the Skin.

3 Hahnemann, S, 1842, Organon of the Medical Art, paragraph 84. All references to the Organon in this book,
relate to the edition: ed. Wenda Brewster O’Reilly, 1996, Birdcage Books, USA.
4 Abram, David, 1996, The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and Language in a More than Human World,
Vintage Books, Random House, USA. See the sect ion The Flesh of Language in particular.

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 Evolution and the Unity of the Senses

In The Phenomenology of Perception, in a chapter titled ‘The Body as Expression and

Speech’ Merleau-Ponty emphasised the emotional resonance of words, the reciproc-
ity and poetry involved in the transfer of meaning:
“If we consider only the conceptual and delimiting meanings of words, it is true that
the verbal form – with the exception of endings – appears arbitrary. But it would
no longer appear so if we took into account the emotional content of the word,
which we have called above its ‘gestural’ sense, which is all-important in poetry, for
example. It would then be found that words, vowels, phonemes are so many ways of
‘singing’ the world, and that their function is to represent things not, as in the naive
onomatopoeic theory had it, by reason of an objective resemblance, but because they
extract, and literally express, the emotional essence.”5

In a similar vein to Baudelaire’s forest of symbols, Ralph Waldo Emerson defined

the human predicament in terms of nested abstractions, describing us as symbols
inhabiting symbols. It is a potentially alienating vision of humanity. If we do not
pay attention to language, we often lose our sense of the connections between word,
symbol and energy. Emerson wrote: “Language is fossil poetry. As the lime stone of
the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is
made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased
to remind us of their poetic origin.” 6 The poet is a conduit. He or she, Emerson
observes, comes closer than any other mortal to seeing the true essence of a thing
and naming it. But this is not a result of the poet’s art; it is a consequence of the true
forces of nature working through the poet:

“This expression or naming is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as
a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change;
and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptize
her, but baptizes herself; and this through the metamorphosis again.”7

Like the poet, the homeopath is a conduit for the voices of nature. Poetic insight
is required in order to tentatively and delicately break open the fossil specimens
provided by patients – the script of their lives, both verbal and physical – to see the
11
evolutionary roots of their true essence, to unify past and present and to facilitate
healing on an immediate energetic level. Rather than seeing and hearing life-his-
tories of dates, conditions and events transferred onto a page, homeopaths listen to
their patients, as Merleau-Ponty put it, “singing the world”.

The mission of the palaeontologist is to devote his or her life to walking the length
and breadth of a beach on which there is an infinite number of grey pebbles. Here,
he or she hopes to tap the right pebble with a hammer, carefully break it open and
find a prized specimen; the prize will contain precious signs, meanings and messages
5 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1945/2005, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge Classics, Page 217
6 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1844, Essays: The Poet
7 Ibid.

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 Introduction

dating back to early evolution. So it is with the homeopath in case-taking and analy-
sis; one hopes to understand the essential nature of the patient and the roots of their
illness: the essence beyond the symbol.

This is the homeopath’s great prize: to recognise the correspondence of energetic

expression – of patient and medicine – and by means of similia similibus currentur
(like curing like), to liberate our patients from limiting physical and emotional
symptoms.

These thoughts led me to feel that there was much to be gained from a study of
early life in the sea and the evolution of the senses; hence the creation of this book.
Language, symptoms, sensations, patient and remedy: all are energy, and all are in
the process of evolution; each individual life is evolving, and is part of the evolution
of life on earth as a whole. The sea sponge, jellyfish and squid are our sensory ante-
GASTROPODS & SHELLS

cedents. For all the reasons explained in this opening chapter, this Materia Medica
has been organised around the senses, allowing sensations to be accessed more
readily in the text, distinct from functions. The word sensation is used throughout
this book in the sense that the homeopath Dr Constantine Hering (1800-1880)
intended in his Guiding Symptoms, taking the sensation from provers’ language and
from rubrics.8

Hering wrote: “Things in nature are words in colour and form; a language which
expresses itself to those who can read”. I would add to Hering’s colour and form:
the perceptions of all the senses combined. It is vital for homeopaths to know how
to read the homeopathic materia medica and their patients’ expressions as the lan-
guage of nature. In nature lies the analogous cure: the reflection of the patient’s inner
disturbance. And to find the simillimum9 requires observance of all the senses and
a synaesthetic approach.

David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous is partly responsible for the inspiration to write
this book and to find a new way of presenting homeopathic Materia Medica. I
develop these ideas further throughout the book, particularly in the sensory chapter
on hearing, under the subtitle, ‘Singing the World: Homeopathic Poetry’.
12
As much as it aspires to inspire healing connections and enjoyment of nature’s cor-
respondences, this book is intended to delight the senses and inspire the imagination,
connecting you to the wonder of sea life visually as well as through the written word.

8 Distinct from the definition of the current Bombay School, who use a capitalised ‘Sensation’, which loads the
word with specific connotations. See the works of Rajan Sankaran.
9 The remedy with a symptom complex as similar as possible to that of the patient’s.

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