Meeting the Melissae

"The Secret Healer books investigate essential oils from a plant's earliest mentions in history to the latest scientific research and evidence from the laboratories. A strange oddity exists if you look up Lemon Balm in old herbals. Amongst the claims of how the plant can help menstruation, memory and meloncholy, each ancient source confides that the Melissae were the priestesses of the ancient Greek goddess Demeter. Who were these women? What they were for? And what on earth did they have to do with Lemon Balm anyway? Melissa means bee. So these women were bee shamanesses. As the priestesses of Demeter, they presided over one of the most famous religious festivals in history, The Eleusinian Mysteries. The author discovers how, rather than disappearing when the Roman emperor Theodosius ordered the persecution of the pagans in 392CE, the tradition headed up to Scandinavia and across to Lithuania, where it has been preserved. The same meditations and skills are still quietly practiced in Lithuania just as they had been, in the temples of Demeter, in Classical Greece. The book thus tells of the author's odyssey to explore the arcane relationship between these women, their bees and the Melissa officinalis plant, as well as the strange metaphor that has lain hidden between the lines of the myths that have endured for over 4,000 years"--