Solomon's Seal
On the doctrine of signatures, aikido, toddler art, and herbal healing
Solomon’s Seal is an important plant for me. It may not have provided my first experience of the healing power of herbs but it gave me a miracle-level healing that greatly increased my faith in herbal medicine. There’s a marked difference in believing something works because you read about it in a book or because someone you respect says that it works — and actually experiencing the healing taking place in your own body.
Smokin’ in the Bywater…
After my daughter was born, a year or so after Hurricane Katrina, I was still living in the Bywater. I had been working a series of odd jobs — painting houses, doing construction labor, working at Frank’s Nursery across St. Claude Ave., teaching at “America’s toughest high school,” making vegetable juices…
I was giving a large percentage of what I made to my daughter’s mom for child support and I was moving from rented room to rented room, trying to live as cheaply as possible so I could spend as much time with my kid as I could. And so I could keep writing about and studying astrology; I had started doing readings after returning to NOLA post-Katrina and, by the time my daughter was two, my practice was really starting to take off.
I was living in some super-loud guest room with a landlady who took me in out of pity but didn’t really want me there. I ran into my friend Firefly at the coffee shop on Dauphine and he told me I should talk to Kim. “Mr. Kim,” as my daughter and I called him, was a sailor in the merchant marine and would sublet the bedroom and kitchen in the back of his shotgun on Louisa Street once or twice a year when he went off to sea.
Firefly introduced me to Mr. Kim, who happened to be heading off for a tour lasting several months; I checked out his place, he checked me out, and everything was good. The back quarters were a little stuffy, but they had a nice, firm king-size bed and a big kitchen and a door opening onto a little sidewalk back to the fenced-in patio in the back. It was a great little place for a great price and it also happened to be right around the corner from where my daughter lived with her mom. No more riding my bike back and forth from Mid-City every day to babysit her at her mom’s house, which was often the case the previous year.
I was still white-knuckling it through my first stab at sobriety at the time. My nervous system was shot. I had switched from Winstons to American Spirits in an effort to stay a little healthier but I was still smoking.
It was right around the time I moved into Mr. Kim’s that a guy started teaching aikido classes at Yoga Bywater, just down the street. I had taken tai chi classes in Detroit before moving to New Orleans and had faithfully kept up my practice even after leaving Detroit and hitting the road. I’d do the 24 form anywhere I could, in the park, on the back lawn at someone’s house where I was crashing for a few days — and then one day I went to the park to do my daily practice and I couldn’t remember any of the form. It was as though it had just been erased from my brain. I tried to slow-walk myself through the form to get it back, but it was gone.
I looked up aikido and learned that it was called the world’s first nonviolent martial art and that even though it could be used for self-defense or just kicking some evildoer ass, it was considered a gentle, lyrical martial arts modality. A lot like tai chi.
So I jumped at the chance to get back into a regular martial arts practice.
Sensei Bryan was a great teacher, very kind (and appropriately strict) and I was making progress quickly. I freaking loved it. My life felt so ungrounded and upended at the time, I was getting a lot of benefit from the discipline and energy-containment of having a martial arts practice again.
About three months into my aikido journey, I slept through my alarm. I didn’t want to miss class so I did a sped-up and stripped down version of my normal morning routine. The normal routine was at least two cups of coffee and a couple of cigarettes on the back stoop. On this day, I made a cup of coffee and bolted it down with a single cigarette. Brushed my teeth and washed my hands to get the smoke smell off, and hurried out to the sidewalk and across Burgundy St. to class.
A brief excursion on chronic lack of sleep, the odd placement of Mr. Kim’s spice rack, and my kid’s artistic genius…
I tended to stay up late in those days. I’ve always been a night owl — at least until we moved off grid and out into the woods. Once the rest of the world around me started winding down at night, I actually felt like I could hear myself think and not feel like I was staggering around under the weight of everyone else’s psychic emissions.
I told myself it would be physically way better for me to train myself to go to bed early; I was always tired in those days and — rationally, at least — I knew that getting more sleep would help me feel better and get healthier.
But the allure of having quiet time to think, write, study astrology, and just be with myself in a clear psychic space was too strong.
On the days when my daughter stayed with me, the mornings could feel exceptionally brutal. (Neither of my kids were much for sleeping when they were young.) One night at Mr. Kim’s, I finally got my daughter to sleep. I went out to the kitchen and did some writing at the kitchen table, quietly slipping the door open a couple times to go out and have a smoke on the stoop, listening through the crack in the door to make sure she hadn’t woken up.
I think I got to bed around 1 a.m. The next morning she was up at sunrise, talking to me happily and ready to go. I would always get up when she woke up but on this particular morning I was so exhausted that every cell in my body hurt. I said something to the effect of, “Hey baby, get up and play with your toys for a minute. Daddy just needs five more minutes of sleep and then I’ll get up.”
To my surprise, she said, “OK, Daddy!” I heard her slide off the bed and I fell hard asleep.
When I woke up, the house was quiet. Too quiet. (All you parents know exactly what I mean!)
I sat bolt upright in bed and listened hard for a moment. I didn’t know what time it was but the sun was well and truly up and I knew I had slept far longer than I had intended.
I jumped out of bed and stumbled toward the kitchen, terrified she would be gone or hurt, or…
“Look, Daddy!” she squealed. “I made art!”
Mr. Kim’s spice rack was positioned on the wall across from the side door, in a sort of tiny entryway between the bedroom and the kitchen. It was around the corner from the stove, within reach of the stove and — as I hadn’t noticed before — it was at just the right height for a two-year-old to be able to reach up and grab all but the top rack of spices.
Below the spice rack, filling the little entryway between the bedroom and the kitchen, were all of the spice bottles that my daughter was able to pull off the rack. She was sitting just inside the kitchen, naked on the floor, admiring her artwork. Which consisted of a giant turd standing bolt upright from the linoleum and encircled by a ring of powdered ginger, cinnamon, turmeric, basil, cloves, garlic and ten other spices from the half-empty bottles littering the entryway.
My first thought, other than immense relief that she was ok, was to check the spice bottles and see how many I would need to replace. But she had judiciously refrained from emptying any of them, seemingly choosing to go with a “little bit of this, now some of that” approach.
As it sank in that I had actually gotten some desperately-needed rest, that my daughter was healthy (and super happy), and that everything was going to be all right, I stepped back to appreciate her work. I was pleased to note that she had made good use of available materials and found objects and that the whole arrangement had a rather pleasing symmetry to it!
Blowing out my knee…
For years afterwards — until I started doing the inner child healing work in earnest and was able to go back and forgive my Louisa Street self — I blamed myself for what happened in that aikido class. I should have gone to bed earlier, knowing I wanted to make class in the morning.
I should have skipped class that day, since I’d woken up late and didn’t have time to warm up and stretch.
I should have skipped my morning coffee and cigarette and used that time to walk around the block a couple times to get warmed up.
But I didn’t and I was doing the best I could at the time. I went to class without warming up appropriately and maybe that’s why I blew out my knee or maybe it would have happened anyway. Halfway through class, I was working with Sensei Bryan and he threw me and I executed mai ukemi, (forward shoulder roll) and I popped back up and something in my knee popped at the same time.
I knew it was bad as soon as it happened. I left class early and went back to Mr. Kim’s and iced it. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t walk and when I felt well enough I rode my bike gingerly down to Walgreen’s and bought a knee brace and it eventually healed to the point that it didn’t bother me too much.
But it brought an untimely end to my burgeoning aikido career.
The doctrine of signatures
A couple years later, I was living in Detroit and taking Jim McDonald’s 9-month herbalism intensive course. My knee was ok to the point I could do pretty much everything normally. But, if I put too much strain on it, the tendon or ligament on the inside of my left knee would pop out again and swell up to the size of a blueberry.
I hadn’t had health insurance for nearly a decade at this point, so I figured it was just something I had to live with.
Jim’s class was really cool. We’d meet at his house on Saturdays and he’d lecture for a couple of hours and then we’d usually go on an herb walk either around his property or at a local state park.
One of the things Jim taught us about is the ancient Western medical tradition of the doctrine of signatures. This basically boils down to the idea that you can tell what a plant will heal by looking at the plant’s features. St. John’s Wort (hypericum perforatum) has tiny translucent dots on its leaves that look like perforations or punctures; St. John’s Wort is used to treat puncture wounds. Herbalist Matthew Wood writes of true Solomon’s seal: “The soft, sweet white/yellowish rhizomes look like bones and vertebrae, while the leaves wrapping around the stalk look like tendons and ligaments wrapping around bones, so Polgygonatum has been used to strengthen the bones, marrow, and tendons.”
N.B. The doctrine of signatures carries a lot of value but should be used wisely. To paraphrase Jim McDonald — because I can’t remember the exact quote, which was probably pithier — “Don’t ever put a plant in your mouth unless you absolutely know that you’ve got the right plant and that it is safe to ingest.”
One week, Jim was talking about Solomon’s Seal and how good it is for healing tendons. I asked where you could get it and he suggested I could find it in one of the state parks nearby or try ordering it online.
The next week, Aaron, another student, said he had found some near his house and made a tincture and that he would give me a bottle when it was ready. A month later he handed me a little brown two-ounce bottle with “Solomon’s Seal” written on a piece of masking tape.
I started applying it faithfully to my knee in the manner Jim had recommended — a couple drops topically on the injured area, one drop at the base of the spine, and another drop under the tongue.
I did this until the bottle ran out, not really expecting that one plant could heal such a longstanding injury. In fact, nothing seemed to be happening. The knee was ok most of the time; if I stressed it too much the tendon would pop out and swell and hurt for a few days; I’d forget about it until the next time it happened. But a few months after I used up the last of the tincture, I noticed the tendon hadn’t been popping anymore.
A few more months passed and it still hadn’t happened. Also, the pain was gone. I seemed to have my mobility back. I could jog and do squats and it was totally fine.
And so it has continued to this day.
Giving thanks for Nature’s abundance…
So, Solomon’s seal is an important plant for me. I don’t know how to explain this, but the woo people will get it: it’s a highly intelligent plant.
(The tonic herbs fascinate me — plants that heat you up if you’re cold and cool you down if you’re hot or relax you when you’re anxious but energize you when you’re feeling torpid.)
When we first moved up here on the mountain, we saw a couple of Solomon’s seal plants on our walks through the woods. But we didn’t see enough that we would feel good about wildcrafting them (the medicine is the root). Tatiana bought some seeds from Richo at Strictly Medicinal Seeds1 and we planted them in a wild bed in the forest. We kept going back and checking on them throughout last year but they never seemed to make it.
We transplanted a couple wild guys from up by the cabin into our shade house in the garden last year. But they didn’t like it and gave up the ghost within a year.
And then, about a month ago, we suddenly started seeing them everywhere around the cabin. A profusion of false Solomon’s seal (smilacina) and quite a few of the true Solomon’s seal (polygonatum spp.). Mother Nature knows how much I love those plants; to have moved to a place where they are growing in such profusion feels like a little nod and a wink from Creator.
I’m going to close this with a couple of passages from Matt Wood’s The Earthwise Herbal, Vol. 2.
On true Solomon’s seal:
The “seals” on the rhizomes, where the stalk rises up, look like the sigils used by magicians (circles with marks inside them). Hence, the plant was named sigillum Salomanis or Solomon’s Seal, after the wise king.
True Solomon’s seal is used in Asia, Europe, and North America as a sweet nutritive for tendons and joints…It is of such widespread utility that it can help almost anyone with muscular and skeletal problems. It adjusts the tension on the tendons and ligaments; if they are too tight the tendon will not stretch as necessary or, if stretched, will not shrink back into place.
On false Solomon’s seal:
False Solomon’s seal is related to Polgygonatum (true Solomon’s seal), in botany and in properties. Both are useful for dehydrated, inflexible tendons and ligaments, so it is often hard to determine when one is needed rather than the other…In addition, Smilacina possess its own unique characteristics. It appears to be more active on the nervous system.
[…] In addition to its use with tendons, Brent Davis, DC, points out that smilacina is beneficial for the liver. It is restorative to the cells or tissues and functions. He recommends it in women who are experiencing hormonal irregularities…and suffer from a history of mental and emotional stress.
Till next time, thanks for reading. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Feel free to forward this to all of your friends.
Richo Cech is a lyrical writer and very generous with his knowledge and wisdom. I highly recommend the Strictly Medicinal annual catalog — it’s a work of art and a rousing good read!
So glad you’re writing regularly again! 🥰