The bulk of our Spagyric offerings are from plants- over 350 singles and formulas and counting! Plants are the most versatile and well-known subjects for natural medicine making, and they offer a myriad of health benefits on all levels of being. They’re also relatively easy to extract, although the creation of true Spagyrics at the level that we work is much more involved.
If we look back to before Spagyrics were created, however, we find a much older tradition of working with minerals and metals, both for healing and as part of the spiritual path of Alchemy. It is this lineage that informed Paracelsus’ techniques for extracting plants and making Spagyrics as we do, so it’s not too surprising that there are connections between how minerals and plants grow, live, and are worked with in the lab.
The important thing to understand when we start exploring these ideas is that, in Hermetic disciplines like Alchemy and Spagyrics, everything is connected and each thing relates to many other things through invisible ties of correspondence. You have worked with these ties yourself if you have burned a red candle to invoke the energy of Mars, or worn a silver amulet to bring in Lunar energy. Red carries the energy of Mars, above, and can both represent and invoke it for our purposes here, below. Silver looks like the moon and has long been considered her metal, carrying her properties of coolness, dreamy energy, reflection, and nurturing.
This “as above, so below” is probably not a new idea to many of you, but here, we need to stretch our conception of it a bit to include not just vertical correspondences, but also horizontal ones. This sounds a bit confusing, but I promise, it’s not!
In our example above, red and the energy of Mars are connected, and so the red candle for a Martial working. And, to energize that working even more, we could add other items to our altar: dragon’s blood resin, rubies, thorns and stinging Nettles, iron, and so on. All those objects are connected to Mars by sympathy, and each can bring a bit of Mars’ energy to your altar to act there in accordance with your Will for the working.
At the same time, since all those things are connected to Mars, they are also all connected to each other. Dragon’s Blood and rubies are red like the candle, stinging Nettles burn like the flame and are high in iron, and so on. Here we start to see “as above, so below” becoming a three dimensional net of interwoven influences.
So it may at first seem like a leap to draw parallels between the physical properties of the Nettles and the Ruby and talk about extracting both of them- the plant is obviously something that can be tincted, but the Rubies are much less so if we’re thinking only in modern terms.
Fortunately our newly opened perspective allows us to see more than that, and from both Spagyric and Alchemical philosophy, we understand that if a plant has extractable qualities like tinctures and essential oils, so do minerals. The process may be more complex and difficult, but the basic tenets are the same: ferment a mineral to create a liquid which will extract another mineral, in the same way that fermented plant (alcohol) can extract another plant (tincturing).
By now you’re probably realizing that what we’re talking about is different from the “gem elixirs” commonly sold in new age and healing circles. These are made by imbuing water or alcohol with the “essence” of a gem by letting it spend time in the liquid, perhaps under the moon or in sunlight, maybe following astrological timings, but working only etherically to capture the subtle vibrations of the gem’s energy. Even when they are well-made, they are not the true oils of minerals that we create in our lab.
In our work, the original mineral or metal is fully extracted by the menstruum- its colour is drawn out, along with some surprising properties like taste and scent. For example, the Oil of Ruby that we extracted years ago not only turned red as it opened up, a spicy, almost cinnamon-like taste came out and into the final medicine. This fiery note is part of the Mars nature of the Ruby, and gives a bit of spark to our Heart Opener Somalixir, where it is a key ingredient.
The other difference you can see here is that in our work, the original mineral or metal is broken down in the process of extraction, the same way a plant is in herbal work.
The beautiful golden Amber chunks we use for our many Oils of Amber are colourless sand at the end of their extraction as all of their qualities of colour, taste, and healing have left the stone and entered the liquid we offer to you.
You can see that in the bottle here, with amber chunks partway through processing and their extraction liquid already showing a warm brown colour. That colour will continue to move out of the Amber and into the liquid until it is fully imbued and ready for use.
The same is true of the Pearl in our Pearl Tigress, the golden Topaz in our Abundance, and the Gold in our Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh. There’s no reusing the minerals and metals we work with- everything they have to offer is given up in their processing.
That said, it’s important that the materials we work with are living and energetically intact before we work with them, which means that we use natural stones, uncut, not irradiated or dyed, and in their crystal forms as they came from the earth.
This can be a really fun part of the process- our Ruby was made from triangular ruby crystals, many of which had a pattern of three concentric triangles, the Yantra sacred to Kali, the goddess of purification through destruction- so apt for a Mars medicine!
In the case of minerals like our Gold, we use natural small nuggets, panned by hobbyists and small businesses, so we’re not supporting destructive corporate mining in any of our work. Natural nuggets are important because they have not been melted, and so they still contain their internal crystal structure, although it is not as dramatic as the Ruby’s, it is important to the life force intelligence of the mineral.
One of the most important things we learned in our early Alchemical studies with our teacher Jean Dubuis was that when a mineral is melted and its crystal structure broken, its intelligence and life force leave our plane and return to the Sephira of its ruling planet. This means that intelligence is not available here for extraction or healing, and won’t be in the resulting medicine, leaving it one-dimensional and not as healing as it could be.
This concern for always using the most living version of anything we process is what Dubuis called “working philosophically”, and it is the spark that is missing in mineral preparations made from previously melted jeweler’s gold and silver like most on the mass market.
Our focus on working philosophically is why all of our medicines have such dramatic and instant effects on the energy body- they are carriers of the life force of the original being of the mineral or plant they were made from, protected and magnified throughout their journey from Nature to you.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief tour of a little-known aspect of our work, one which we’re dedicated to following and developing because of its great healing potential, and also just because it’s something we really enjoy. You can find our mineral Spagyrics at this link– and maybe you’ll even look at them with new appreciation for their special nature and gifts!
