The Healer
by Jason Godesky
When Ivy swore her oath and became the Guardian, it sent many of the Grandfathers even deeper into their madness. “You see her betrayal!” they shouted. “Poison Ivy grows everywhere, hemming us in! It’s us against the whole world! We have lost the paradise of our ancestors, and now we must make war on the whole world!” Some among them retained their sanity, though, and tried to return them to reason; the most persuasive voice among them came from Ivy’s twin brother, a healer named Jason.
He went to implore his sister for mercy, but found her ever more dug-in and resentful as the Grandfathers likewise delved deeper into madness. “Can you not see your anger has caused?” Jason asked. “You turn against them, and so they turn against you, and it all just becomes worse and worse; where does it end?” But Ivy could not hear his words, and simply repeated again and again about the justifications of her anger.
Next, Jason went to the grasses, and repeated much of what his sister Ivy had already said to them. “The Grandfathers have fallen under your spell, and now they consume everything. You must release them from this enchantment before they destroy the whole world with their war!” But again, the grass laughed contentedly as their numbers grew upon the earth.
Jason despaired, and finally decided to seek out the wisest elder of all, Merlin, and seek his counsel. Merlin told him that the story of the Grandfathers and the grasses would take time, but that it must fall to him to counter his sister’s anger. He told Jason of the first spring where all rivers begin, and he gave Jason his own canoe, telling him that it could only be piloted by heroes, and it alone would know the way to the Peace-Healer.
Jason travelled throughout the land, recruiting the great heroes of that age to undertake the journey with him, and the stories of their adventures could fill many nights with stories, but in the end, they came to the first spring. Merlin had told him of the sacrifice he would have to make, for to drink directly from the first spring would imbue him with the peace and healing that flows in all rivers and streams, far too much for any mortal. Jason drank deeply of the stream, and moments later doubled over in pain, as leaves sprouted from his mouth. There, from Jason’s body, the first Jewelweed sprang, and its seeds were carried from the first spring along every river and stream valley. They have said that “Wherever Poison Ivy is found, Jewelweed grows close by,” but Jewelweed comes from the rivers and the streams, and does not reach some places where Ivy still stands guard.
The Grandfathers eventually heard of Jason’s sacrifice, and called the plant “Jewelweed,” for they considered it a gift like a precious jewel, a mercy to match Poison Ivy’s anger. And so to this day, when we transgress the boundaries that the Guardian has established, the gift of her twin brother remains to make her anger relent, to heal us and show us mercy.
Field Guide
Find more about the Healer from:
- [[Jewelweed|REWILD.info Field Guide]]
- Permaculture.info
- Plants for a Future
- Wikipedia
- USDA PLANTS Database
Oral cultures don’t memorize facts and figures about thousands of edible and medicinal plants. They learn stories—stories about the personalities and powers of plants, how they relate to each other, to the world, and to the people who seek them out. Here, we’re starting some new stories about our rediscovered friends.
- Last Week: The Guardian
- Next Week: The Scented Tree
The name Jason refers to the Greek hero, with the Argonauts tie-in. It’s also Greek for “Healer.” That it also happens to be my name is quite incidental; this isn’t me, or related to me in any way except for the coincidence of having the same name. A namesake, at best.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2007 @ 10:18 AM
Even so, you know this is going to come back and haunt you, right?
Comment by jhereg — 31 July 2007 @ 11:09 AM
In a great example of ecological parallel / convergent evolution, California Mugwort (Artemesia douglasiana)is found in the same habitats in southern coastal california as Poison Oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum), and is a good remedy for it. Too bad A. douglasiana isn’t as hardy this far north as the poison oak…
Comment by rich — 31 July 2007 @ 11:14 AM
That was Giuli’s warning, but it just seems wrong to change Jason of the Argonauts to some other name, especially when I’m fleshing out the reason for the name “Healer.” I figure most people here are probably grown-up enough to see what’s going on here, and that the character here really doesn’t have anything whatsoever to do with me. This isn’t some cloaked autobiography of how I became the Green Man.
This is actually pretty common, and I tend to think it has its ultimate origins in compensating chemistries: if compound A and compound B cancel each other out in the soil, and one plant starts pulling in compound A, then plants near it will adapt to doing more with compound B, right?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2007 @ 11:22 AM
Hmm…
Wikipedia and plants for a future both say that Jewelweed is an ineffective treatment.
Comment by MatthewJ — 31 July 2007 @ 12:22 PM
Scientifically, yes. When they isolate the “active ingredient” it fails to have a repeatable or demonstrable effect.
Such is the failure of reductionism.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2007 @ 12:44 PM
Straw man! Straw man! {Awk! Awk!} Science is God and technology will save us! {Awk! Awk!}
[Seeing as how we don’t have any science-worshipping skeptic trolls yet, I just thought I would occasionally fill in until such time as we get a real one.
]
Comment by Anonymous — 31 July 2007 @ 4:25 PM
Oh, they’ve been through from time to time, they just can’t take the cognitively dissonant heat of such blind, unthinking loyalty to the concept of doubt and criticial thinking for very long around here.
But this is very common in herbalism: you get some scientific study that says all those eons of direct experience is bunk, and then you look at the study, and you get something like this:
Emphasis added. Notice, we’re not talking about contact with poison ivy in all its complexity, we’re talking about contact with urushiol. And we’re not talking about jewelweed, either, we’re talking about an extract of jewelweed. So the conclusion—that jewelweed doesn’t help poison ivy—doesn’t follow. You showed that an extract of jewelweed doesn’t treat urushiol, but since the subjects never actually touched any poison ivy, or any jewelweed, to extend the results of this study to the conclusion made is simply ridiculous. Even in its own terms, this is just bad science, but it’s accepted because it tells us what we want to hear: that herbalism is ineffective (despite a million-year history of effective treatment), and only modern pharmaceuticals are actually effective.
You get this kind of thing again and again and again, and for precisely that reason.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2007 @ 4:37 PM
First, I wanted to say I noticed Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) in the photograph, and just want to give a shout out to this amazing plant.
Second, I think the article is great, and to add, I have also heard that soaproot (Chlorogalum pomeridianum) is a great remedy for poison oak in a similar way, and they also often share habitat. I also think that poison oak in my area is a sacred plant, telling humans to stay away, a defender of mystery and wildness in a place where there is little of it left unpaved and “untamed.”
– feralkevin
http://www.feralkevin.com
Comment by feralkevin — 31 July 2007 @ 8:51 PM
That’s very much what I was trying to drive at with the previous story about “The Guardian” (poison ivy).
Comment by Jason Godesky — 31 July 2007 @ 11:13 PM
That kind of thing can also be seen in how skeptizealots refuse to acknowledge the existence of a modern disorder known as candidiasis, in which candida albicans yeast organisms in the large intestine mutate into an aggressive fungus and cause a wide-range of debilitating symptoms such as chronic fatigue, irritable bowel syndrome, and rashes. The big reason for this irrational stance is because candidiasis is one of many problems caused by the techno-industrial empire in which they have such a huge ego-investment. Among the big contributors to the candidiasis epidemic are diets heavy in processed foods and refined sugar, cigarette smoking and excessive alcohol use, hyper-chlorinated urban water supplies, and especially inappropriate use of antibiotics. The hyper-chlorination and antibiotics often tip a person over into full-on candidiasis by killing off the other organisms in the large intestine that keep candida ablicans in check.
The skeptizealot prescription for people with these “nonexistent” disorders is psychiatric “help” at the hands of a skeptizealot psychotherapist [psycho the rapist?]. That rather reminds me of how dissidents in the USSR of course had to have something wrong with them to criticize the glorious Soviet socialist worker’s paradise, so it followed that they needed the “help” of Soviet psychiatry to cure them of their mental deficiency.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 31 July 2007 @ 11:33 PM
I love the story, and I second you on those damned scientifical studies.
Comment by Hobo Stripper — 1 August 2007 @ 5:58 AM
Hobo Stripper?!?!?
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 1 August 2007 @ 9:54 AM
Seems like it would have to be more than that, Venuspluto; there are plenty of well-known “diseases of civilization,” so what makes candidiasis special? Wikipedia makes it sound like it’s fairly frequently diagnosed. At least the rejection of herbal remedies is consistent.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 August 2007 @ 11:34 AM
What, an empowered ecofeminist can’t be a primitivist and a stripper? Check out her blog, it’s an interesting mix.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 1 August 2007 @ 11:45 AM
Well, candidiasis as a vaginal yeast infection is diagnosed pretty frequently. What is controversial is systemic candidiasis. Here is People’s Commissar Stephen Barrett’s “Quackwatch” page on systemic candidiasis. And I encourage readers to look at the rest of the website. It really should win an award for one of the most fundamentalist high-traffic websites on the Internet.
I have read Wikipedia’s entry on candidiasis, though perhaps it has changed since my previous viewing of it.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 2 August 2007 @ 12:56 PM
LOL Yep, I’m a hobo an a stripper.
Jason, you’ve totally inspired me. I’m gonna write a Rose story (as soon as I get back from the river). Do you have other plant stories? Wanna do a plant story project?
Comment by Hobo Stripper — 3 August 2007 @ 12:32 AM
This is part of a weekly series called “The Storied Landsape.” In summer, we post stories like this about plants; in autumn, animals; in winter, we post stories on bigger subjects like gods, creation, etc.; in spring, stories about geographical and geological locations. It’s an attempt to start laying the foundations of a new, animistic mythology that weaves together strands we already have (Jason & the Argonauts in this one), and the seasonality also reflects the usual native understanding that stories are persons too, and must be told in the proper season.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 6 August 2007 @ 8:31 AM
Have any of you actually looked up and understood the mechanism that poison ivy uses to cause a reaction?
For those who havent, organic compound called urushiols (common in the wider family (including mango and cashew) but also found in Ginkgo seeds (a wonder herbal drug to some) and some Proteaceae (Macadamia nut anyone?) from the plants permeates across the skin, oxidises to become reactive, binds to the proteins that cover cell membranes, which then triggers an immune response to kill off the “foreign” cells. This is why it can take days for the reaction to appear.
In light of this quickly rubbing jewel weed (Balsaminaceae) (or any other readily mashed up source of proteins) would simply give the urushiol another set of proteins to bind to outside the body and away from the immune system response.
This may explain why widely unrelated plants (mugwort (Asteraceae) or Chlorogalum (Agavaceae) and are capable of giving a similar effect, as long as the juice can be easily released by hand along with its protein load before the urushiol penetrates the skin too deeply. The fat content probably also helps absorb the hydrophobic urushiol (kind of like diluting a hot curry with a drink of milk while plain water makes it feel worse because the active compound is also hydrophobic).
This would also explain why the experiment you talked about showed no effect- they were looking for evidence of a small organic molecule with an antidote/anti-inflammatory effect (proteins don’t travel into the solvents used for small molecule extracts).
Comment by Void_genesis — 7 August 2007 @ 10:28 PM
That’s not quite how it works. There’s a nearly universal human allergic response (which is basically what you described) to urushiol, which is also found in poison oak and poison sumac (not quite universal, though; about 10% of the population appears to have little or no reaction). There are any number of ways that jewelweed might be effective: it might simply be other proteins as you suggest, it might contain other chemicals that individually or in combination might bind with and thus neutralize urushiol, or it might even act as a histamine blocker. There are may more possibilities than simply what you’ve suggested. Unfortunately, those questions have not really been asked. We’re too interested in debunking herbal remedies to actually ask if they might be effective, and that leads to the kind of useless studies we talked about above.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 8 August 2007 @ 7:40 AM
Great idea for a series. I won’t steal it.
Comment by Hobo Stripper — 9 August 2007 @ 6:31 PM
By no means, the more the merrier! The whole idea is to inspire people to pick up similar ideas and run with it. We’re laying the foundations of our own mythology, and if that helps you to start doing something similar, well, that just means it’s been effective!
Comment by Jason Godesky — 9 August 2007 @ 10:10 PM
I love these kind of stories and they’re a big part of the way I teach others to work with the plants. I thought you might like this other, but parallel, Poison Ivy story by Michigan herbalist, Jim McDonald: http://herbcraft.org/poisonivy.html
Nicely done.
Comment by Kiva Rose — 13 August 2007 @ 9:25 PM
That’s great! I’m not sure I like the moral of that story, but hey, the more the merrier. If we’re going to create a new growth mythology, it’s going to take many different perspectives. And you say that’s a big part of the way you teach? That’s great, too; because that’s how wild humans learned about plants, and that’s how feral humans will need to learn about them, too.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 13 August 2007 @ 9:50 PM
I’m sorry to disagree but that is exactly how it works. The allergic reaction is to the urushiol that gets stuck onto your cells surfaces. Incidentally the Amerindians apparently used to chew young poison ivy shoots during the early spring to induce a hypoallergenic response to skin exposure. Anyone willing to give it a go and report back the results?
Most of the money making drugs being pumped out by the evil pharmaceutical companies have their origins in living organisms, usually land plants, and they love stealing from the herbal traditions that tapped into them previously. To imply that scientists run these kind of experiments (ie the jewel weed/urushiol trial) just to debunk herbalism is pretty misguided. If a reasonably stable and active small molecule (or suite of them that acted together, also well established in mechanistic studies of herbal remedies) were present in the extract there was a good chance the experiment would have observed some result. Doing the same kind of experiment for other plants with more distinct activities certainly would.
Being too certain without critical evaluation in either direction is what holds us back, either when we blindly believe that a miracle cure will treat everything, or that it is a useless backward superstition and not worth trying. Being too certain of anything leads us down the road of dogma and dictum.
A positive though out of date study was easy enough to find:
“The Results of a Clinical Study, in which a 1:4 jewelweed preparation was compared for its effectiveness with other standard poison ivy dermatitis treatments was published in 1958 (Annals of Allerty 1958;16:526-527). Of 115 patients treated with jewelweed, 108 responded ‘most dramatically to the topical application of this medication and were entirely relieved of their symptoms within 2 or 3 days after the institution of treatment.’ It was concluded that jewelweed is an excellent substitute for ACTH and the corticosteroids in the treatment of poison ivy dermatitis. The active principle in the plant responsible for this activity remains unidentified.”
Curse those evil scientists! They just refuse to believe in anything that isnt reductionist!
Comment by Void_genesis — 14 August 2007 @ 12:35 AM
Modern medicine has a definite love/hate relationship with herbalism. Debunking folk traditions has been a cultural objective for science since the Enlightenment. You’re right that nearly all of our pharmaceuticals have been appropriated from herbal remedies, but that hasn’t stopped the ethnocentric and typically ethnomedical response that all other ethnomedical systems (like herbalism) are just superstitions. I’m not saying they did the study just to turn their nose up at herbalism; I’m saying that there’s a cultural bias, which leads to blinders, which leads to studies like these that are so sloppy that they’d never be allowed to stand, except that they told us what we want to hear. Science is typically at its most sloppy when it tells us what we want to hear, because then we don’t bother to examine it very closely.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 14 August 2007 @ 8:34 AM
I like the different perspectives, and I will often share more than one teaching story about a certain plant with students, since different people will connect and heal in a different way depending…
It is difficult to find stories that honestly reflect the plants and their teachings rather the projections of the human telling the tale though. It takes a pretty intense awareness of ourselves, others, and our innate connection to other (a seeming contradiction, but not so) in order to “hear” the lesson and gift the plants have.
Thanks again.
Comment by Kiva Rose — 16 August 2007 @ 6:13 PM
Oh, I don’t know. I think we’ve become entirely too wrapped up in the traps of subjectivism vs. objectivism. I think the time’s certainly come to trust our feelings a good deal more, and stop second-guessing them all the time.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 August 2007 @ 7:29 PM
exactly…. but you have to take into account, the injured instincts aspect of it… people often have to peel back a few layers of skin before they can feel again… not true of everyone, but true for many… when i lead rewilding experiences here, it’s part of the process to lay down the baggage, armor and expectations in order to feel what we’re really feeling…. people often try to feel with just their brains, or react from fear or unfamiliarity.
I should point out that I don’t mean objectiveness by awareness, I mean being open to experiencing sensation… the kind of awareness one needs to hunt, or heal, or pray.
Comment by Kiva Rose — 16 August 2007 @ 9:42 PM