We have had many requests over the years to work with seaweeds Spagyrically, and now that we live near the “garden” that they grow in (the ocean!) we have been able to work with some. The first seaweed Spagyric that we are offering is a Grapestone Spiritualized Essence, Gigartina papillata, a red seaweed with many interesting healing properties.
All seaweeds are powerful sources of concentrated nutrients, minerals, and healing constituents. The brown types, such as Kombu, Kelp, and Wakame, tend more towards high mineral content, while the red types like the Grapestone show stronger medicinal activity, especially against viruses.
Of course, being lower in minerals relative to other seaweeds does not make Grapestone a poor source of minerals- it still contains up to 20 times the minerals in land plants. But Grapestone really excels as an immune tonic, and so we’ll discuss that first and talk about the minerals later.
Grapestone is high in carageenans, which are polysaccharides, related chemically to many of the plant realm’s most powerful tonics. Herbs like Ginseng, Astragalus, and Codonopsis get their immune-boosting effects largely from polysaccharides, as do most medicinal mushrooms.
The polysaccharides in Grapestone have shown strong activity in both boosting the body’s own defenses against pathogens, and in acting directly to inhibit viruses, preventing them from binding to our own healthy cells. The most researched viruses that Grapestone has been shown to fight are HIV and all types of Herpes, even outperforming pharmaceutical anti-virals commonly used for Herpes. Grapestone has also been used to treat other viral infections, as well as fungal and bacterial invaders such as candida and antibiotic-resistant streptococcus.
Grapestone has a tonic effect on the digestive system, useful for ulcers and irritable bowel, as well as on the respiratory system in cases of asthma, emphysema, and hard-to-heal infections. These conditions are helped both by the immune-boosting activity of the seaweed, but also by its anti-inflammatory properties.
Another application of the anti-inflammatory and polysaccharide tonic effects of Grapestone is its use for skin conditions, especially for dry, flaky, poorly-structured skin tissue as in eczema and psoriasis. Unlike many skin treatments, Grapestone heals from the inside, working as an oral supplement rather than a lotion or salve. This deeper approach of nutritional balance may be helpful in cases where external treatments haven’t worked, or in conjunction with topical remedies such as our Oil of Egg.
As for the mineral content of Grapestone, it is lower than other seaweeds, but still much higher than land plants. Potassium, selenium, and iodine are the main mineral components of seaweeds, along with calcium and healthy sodium. All of these minerals are in colloidal form,transmuted from their elemental metallic state to a more bioavailable form which is suspended in liquid by a natural negative electrical charge which also facilitates better absorption of other nutrients taken at the same time.
Besides a lack of access to seaweeds, a big reason we did not work with seaweeds until now was the special nature of their mineral content, which we wanted to research more to fully understand. Just eating raw seaweeds gives us their mineral benefits, whereas a normal tincturing process does not extract much mineral content. We knew that our Spagyric process would extract the minerals as part of the Salt constituent, but we wanted to be sure that the result would be true to the natural balance of the plant.
After working with the Grapestone over the past few months, we feel that the Spagyric process has done the same, very special extraction that we have come to rely on in the land plants. The Salt aspect of the process yielded a very different mineral quality than with land plants, and the taste balance of the minerals in the Grapestone Spagyric is much like in the original plant.
Once again, we are amazed by the effectiveness of the ancient Spagyric process, designed by Alchemist-healers who most likely worked only with the old-world land plant pharmacopeia. Without modern analysis of the “active” constituents as they differ from plant to plant, and without chemical insight into alkaloids, polysaccharides, and all the other subtleties of pharmacokinetics, they were able to create a process that extracts the best of a plant, any plant, in a living, whole, and complete way.
We hope you will enjoy working with our new Grapestone Spiritualized Essence, available at our online store. For more information on the healing properties of seaweeds, see this website, by the herbalist Ryan Drum.
We also invite you to read the first in a series of three in-depth articles about the Spagyric levels of being and extraction. Inspired by our studies and experience with the minerals of seaweeds, we’ve written about the Salt level in Spagyrics- its role in a plant’s life, what exactly the Salt process extracts, and why those important constituents are impossible to extract in normal tincturing. Click here to read more . . .
