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Airmed's Cloak: The Catalogue That Never Survived

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Airmed's Cloak: The Catalogue That Never Survived

The story of the lost herbs does not end with Miach's death and burial. According to the fullest tellings, it was his sister Airmed, herself a skilled healer, who kept vigil at his grave, and when three hundred and sixty five herbs, one for every joint and sinew of the human body, sprang up from the earth where he lay, she gathered them with care and arranged them on her cloak according to their properties, effectively compiling the first complete pharmacopoeia of Irish tradition, a systematic map of which plant cured which ailment.

Dian Cecht, still consumed by the grief and jealousy that had driven him to kill his son, could not let this knowledge stand either: he came upon the cloak and scattered the herbs, mixing their order so thoroughly that no person since has been able to reconstruct which plant answers which sickness with certainty. The tale thus doubles its tragedy, first the death of the more gifted son, then the deliberate destruction of the daughter's careful ordering of his legacy, and it leaves Irish herbal medicine, in the logic of the myth, permanently incomplete, practiced by trial, tradition and partial knowledge rather than by the perfect system that once, briefly, lay spread on a cloak beside a grave. Airmed herself continued to be remembered in later Irish tradition as a patroness of herbalism and healing wisdom in her own right, a quieter counterpart to her father's more institutionally central but morally compromised role as physician of the gods.

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