Spagyric products are alchemical preparations of herbs into a more potent form. In the days of un-inverted reality; adding the purified salt, oil and alcohol of a plant together was thought as a more spiritual preparation. Interestingly enough, full extracts of plants also tend to have more powerful effects.
In alchemy there are 3 things that make up everything: SOUL (sulfer), SPIRIT (mercury) and BODY (salt).
For plants this translates to the essential oils / organic acids (soul), alcohol (spirit) and the mineral salts (body) contained in the plant. These are the physical representations of the three philosophical aspects in herbal alchemy.
A Spagyric most commonly refers to a plant tincture to which has also been added (or re-added) the ash of the calcined plant. The original rationale behind these special herbal tinctures is that an extract using alcohol cannot be expected to contain all the medicinal properties from a living plant, and so the ash or mineral component (as a result of the calcination process) of the calcined plant was prepared separately and then added back to ‘augment’ (increase) the alcoholic tincture.
The roots of the word therefore refer first to the extraction or separation process and then to the recombining process. These herbal tinctures are alleged to have superior medicinal properties to simple alcohol tinctures, perhaps due the formation of soap-like compounds from the essential oils and the basic salts contained within the ash. In theory these spagyrics can also optionally include material from fermentation of the plant material and also any aromatic component such as might be obtained through distillation. The final spagyric should be a re-blending of all such extracts into one single ‘essence.’
