Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Maya Healer

otanical treasures. It was as he said, all in his head. I thought, it was all in
his heart.
He showed me how the female vine or Ix Ki Bix (Ix means “female” in
Mayan) grew right beside the male plant. It was the female, he said, that he
used for birth control. The male was used to stop hemorrhaging and
dysentery.
The male was an enormous, if spindly, rough-barked dark vine that
stretched precariously many hundreds of feet into the dappled sunlight of
the rainforest canopy. It looped itself around branches of the towering trees.
Three feet away from the large male trunk was the female. Her vine,
smooth barked and bearing three-inch thorns, gracefully loped around the
same branches as the male, as if in pursuit. Twenty feet in the air above us
the male and female Ki Bix entwined in an embrace.
“Amantes de la eternidad,” giggled Don Elijio. Eternal lovers.
Don Elijio scratched the bark of the male vine and showed me the white
inner bark. He told me to scratch the bark of the female with my machete. I
did and uncovered a mahogany-colored inner bark. The vine was red and
layered throughout, resembling the female uterine membrane.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the redness of the vine. I was always amazed
by nature’s way of letting us know what a plant might be used for by
matching the color or shape with the complaint. I had noticed that this
relationship between color and use—the Doctrine of Signatures—seemed
most evident when it came to plants connected to women’s needs.
Many Maya medicinal plants used for women’s ailments were reddish
of tint, and often the female leaf was broader than its male counterpart, as
was true of Ki Bix.
“See how this leaf is split and looks just like a pair of trousers,” said
Don Elijio.
I couldn’t resist a joke and said, “The sign here is clear. Keep your pants
on.”
We laughed until our eyes teared. Then we got back to work. We cut a
twelve-foot length of the female vine, chopped it into one-foot sections, and
stuffed them into my sack. We then cut some of the male vine and, as was
our wont, went on to collect the leaves of the Ki Bix as the first of the day’s
Nine Xiv.
Many hours later, we returned to the clinic, laden with our usual cargo.
Immediately after lunch, Don Elijio had me chop the Ki Bix vine for Berta.