Spagyrics: the alchemical art of healing — Paracelsus, Hildegard, and the Salt-Sulphur-Mercury triad

Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

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Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

— Les plantes qui marchent avec les cycles — pas pour les optimiser, pour les habiter.

— The short answer. Spagyrics is the application of the alchemical method to plant medicine. The word comes from the Greek — spaō, to separate; ageirō, to reunite — and in two gestures it describes what the practice orders in three: separating the plant into its three Philosophical Principles (Mercury, Sulphur, Salt), purifying each one individually, then recombining them — the chymical wedding. Paracelsus (1493-1541) names the practice and codifies it in the Liber Paramirum (1531). Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), three and a half centuries earlier, carries its cosmology: viriditas, the green divine sap, runs through stones, plants, and bodies as a single circulation. The spagyric triad Salt-Sulphur-Mercury designates: the material body (Salt = calcined ashes rich in alkaline salts), the individual soul (Sulphur = essential oils, the specific individuality of each plant), and the anonymous breath (Mercury = distilled ethyl alcohol, the vital principle identical across the whole plant kingdom). The absolute point: spagyric Mercury is not metallic mercury Hg — it is a symbolic principle naming the volatile, vital part, with no relation to the toxic metal. To confuse the two is the error that immediately disqualifies the reader from the tradition. Spagyrics is still practised today by a few European laboratories (Australerba in Australia, Spagyros AG in Switzerland, Soluna in Germany, Phylak), carrying forward the Glauber-Hollandus-Urbigerus-Junius-Frater Albertus lineage. INFUSE does not sell spagyric elixirs in the strict sense — the calcination of the ashes and their cohobation back into the distillate lie beyond the artisanal frame of the INFUSE elixirs — but the house understands, practises, and honours the tradition of which its own macerated-distilled elixirs are the partial functional heirs. This article documents the historical genesis, the Salt-Sulphur-Mercury triad in its conceptual rigour, the canonical operations (solve et coagula, cohobation, circulation, pelicanisation), the founding figures (Hildegard, Paracelsus, Glauber, Hollandus, Junius, Bartlett, Frater Albertus), and the ethical stance INFUSE holds toward contemporary commercial pseudo-alchemy. —

The name as a signature

Spagyria. The word is forged by Paracelsus in the early sixteenth century from two Greek verbs — spaō, meaning to draw out, to separate, to wrest; and ageirō, meaning to gather, to bind, to join. The word carries within it the double movement of the whole operation: one separates in order to reunite. Not one without the other. A dissolution that never reaches recomposition is, for a spagyrist, an interrupted work — an operation left half-finished, with no real therapeutic value.

The formula that condenses this operative grammar is engraved across the entire Latin tradition — solve et coagula. Dissolve and bind. Dale Pendell liked to say that all of modern chemistry has performed the solve with unrivalled technical virtuosity, but forgot the coagula. It extracts, purifies, isolates, standardises — and throws the residue away. The spagyrist, for his part, holds that the calcined residue contains an essential part of the remedy — the soluble salts of the plant ashes — and that it must be brought back into the distillate to make a complete remedy. The difference is not methodological. It is cosmological.

The Latin alchemical tongue adds two formulas that mark out the ethics of the work. The first, attributed to Basil Valentine — orare et labora, to pray and to work. The spagyrist's practice is rooted in a contemplative intention; the workshop is also an altar, as Rudolf Steiner would write in the twentieth century. The second formula, more austere still, comes from the hermetic manuscripts of the Renaissance — ora, lege, lege, lege, relege, labora, et invenies. Pray. Read. Read. Read. Read again. Work. And you will find. The fivefold imperative of reading before the labour speaks the posture: one invents nothing, one transmits; one receives the tradition before setting it to work.

The Salt-Sulphur-Mercury triad: precision before anything else

Here is the distinction that sets the serious reader apart from all the rest. When an alchemist writes Mercury, he is not naming the silvery liquid metal that runs across the table — Hg, element 80 of the periodic table, highly toxic to the nervous system. He is naming a philosophical principle. A cosmological category. The word, like Sulphur and Salt in the same context, is used analogically — not in the modern chemical sense. To confuse the two is the error that immediately shuts the door of the tradition.

Within the plant kingdom, here is what the three Principles concretely designate, according to the Junius-Bartlett-Frater Albertus lineage that codifies contemporary spagyric practice. Mercury: ethyl alcohol. The volatile part, the breath, the spiritus, the prana — anonymous and identical across the whole plant kingdom. It is precisely because Mercury is anonymous that it can be supplied from outside (pharmacy-grade alcohol) when the plant's own fermentation does not produce enough. Sulphur: the essential oils. A double form — volatile Sulphur (the essential oils proper, the specific soul of each plant) and fixed Sulphur (the tarry residue obtained by evaporating the fermented liquid after the distillation of the Mercury). It is the Sulphur that carries the plant's individuality — its signature. Salt: the calcined ashes of the plant residue, divided into Sal Salis (water-soluble salts, chiefly potassium carbonate with traces of other alkaline salts) and Caput Mortuum (death's head, the insoluble residue — calcium, silicon, phosphorus, magnesium).

Manfred Junius, who directed the Australerba laboratory for decades, formulates the truest distinction — the one that carries the full weight of the tradition. Mercury is anonymous. Sulphur is individual. Salt is the material condition of their permanence. Three planes, three functions, three operations. The spagyric work draws out all three, purifies them apart, and recombines them — this is what is called the final cohobation, the chymical wedding, the marriage of King and Queen in the illuminations of the Rosarium philosophorum.

A remark that lights up everything. Salt, in the spagyric system, is not a cosmetic addition. It is the body without which the spirit (Mercury) and the soul (Sulphur) have no material anchoring. Spagyric essences prepared without the return of the calcined salts are, according to the tradition, incomplete preparations — they do not last, they are not stable, they lack the operative depth of the finished works. Simple alcoholic maceration, which discards the marc after filtering, performs the solve without the coagula. It is exactly the gesture that spagyrics reproaches in modern phytotherapy. The faithful return of the salts to the distillate is what separates the true spagyric elixir from the ordinary tincture — a precision that is not formal but operative.

Hildegard of Bingen — the medicinal cosmology upstream

Before Paracelsus codified spagyrics in 1531, a Rhineland visionary already carried, three and a half centuries earlier, the cosmology that makes the practice thinkable. Hildegard of Bingen — Benedictine nun, herbalist, theologian, composer, preacher — was born at Bermersheim in 1098, entered the monastery of Disibodenberg at the age of eight, and would live there thirty-eight years before founding her own convent at Rupertsberg, near Bingen on the Rhine, in 1150. She wrote two major medical treatises: Physica (c. 1158), a natural history of plants, trees, stones, fish, birds, mammals, and reptiles, and Causae et Curae (c. 1155-1165), a theological-clinical treatise on the origins and remedies of human afflictions. To this medical work is added the visionary work — Scivias, Liber vitae meritorum, Liber divinorum operum — and a musical and linguistic body of work (the lingua ignota) without equal in the Middle Ages.

Let us be clear about what she is not. Hildegard is not a medieval witch dancing naked in the forest — the New Age imagery here is a gross misreading. She is a Benedictine nun bound to the Rule of Saint Benedict, who corresponded with four successive popes (Eugene III, Anastasius IV, Adrian IV, Alexander III), with the emperor Frederick Barbarossa, with abbots and bishops across the whole Rhenish-Germanic Europe, and who led four public preaching tours through cathedrals and monastic chapters — something formally forbidden to women in the twelfth century, which she obtained by the sheer force of the recognition of her visionary gift. Her sacred botany belongs to a precise Christian cosmology, not to a vague spirituality of nature.

The concept that forms the bridge to later spagyrics is that of viriditas — greenness, green force, divine sap. Hildegard forges it from the Latin viridis (green) and raises it to the rank of a cosmological category: viriditas is the uncreated sap given by God to the world, which circulates equally through stones, plants, animal bodies, and human bodies. Health, for Hildegard, is the full circulation of viriditas. Illness is its dryness — its withering, its local retreat. And plants are the most concentrated reservoirs of viriditas accessible to humans: to eat them, to drink them, to bathe in them, is to re-green the depleted body.

Hildegard names her medicinal cosmology by the four elements and the four primary qualities: hot, cold, dry, moist. Every plant carries a combination of these qualities, and illness is an imbalance — a broken temperamentum — that the plant's contrary or complementary quality restores. This Hippocratic-Galenic grid structures, in full, the two hundred and thirty chapters of the Book of Plants and the sixty-three chapters of the Book of Trees in the Physica. But what is singular in Hildegard is the theological rooting of this grid: before the Fall, the four humours were in balance; after the Fall, they war against one another and produce illness. To mend, for Hildegard, therefore has a moral-spiritual dimension inseparable from the physical one. To abstain from sin is in itself a humoral therapeutic.

A point that matters. Hildegard does not practise spagyrics in the technical sense of Paracelsus — no calcination of ashes, no cohobation, no pelican. Her pharmacopoeia centres on the luterdrank (a clear drink: wine + honey + boiled and filtered aromatics), the electuary (powder + cooked honey), the cake (powder + flour + water dried in the sun), the ointment (melted lard + ground plant). But the metaphysical horizon in which her preparations are set — the viriditas that circulates, the macrocosm-microcosm, the signature of forms — is precisely the horizon that Paracelsus inherits and codifies into an operative method. Without Hildegard and the medieval monastic tradition she represents, the Paracelsian gesture would have had no cosmological ground to stand on.

Paracelsus — the founder who names spagyrics

Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim — known as Paracelsus, a pseudonym he chose himself to signal that he considered himself equal or superior (par-) to Celsus, the first-century Roman physician — was born at Einsiedeln in Switzerland in 1493, the year after Christopher Columbus's first voyage, and died at Salzburg in 1541, aged forty-eight. An itinerant physician, lay theologian, practising alchemist, miner, theorist of medicine, untimely preacher, and furious polemicist, he remade European medicine in a few decades. His father was a physician and alchemist; he learned mining in the Fugger mines; he studied in Italy; he taught at Basel in 1527 (where he publicly burned the works of Avicenna and Galen on the Saint John's bonfire — a gesture that got him dismissed within the year).

His central thesis, the one that radically sets him apart from Galen and Avicenna, is that medicine must rest upon alchemy. Not merely as a technique of preparation — as a philosophy. For Paracelsus, the human body is an alchemical laboratory: digestion is a distillation, nutrition is a cohobation, illness is an imbalance of the three Principles (Salt, Sulphur, Mercury) in a particular organ. The physician who ignores alchemy works blind. And Paracelsus writes it, in the Liber Paramirum of 1531, with a vehemence that has lost none of its edge:

Paracelsus also wrote a more mysterious and more ambiguous text — the De Magisteriis, the seventh book of the Archidoxis Magica, published posthumously in 1570. There he gives partial instructions for the preparation of the plant Magisterium: extract the plant in burnt wine (grain spirit) over a philosophical month (forty days, not thirty), distil, begin again with fresh plants until the alcohol amounts to a fifth of the whole, then circulate for a month with novis additamentis — new additions. The text is notoriously opaque about what these additamenta are. Junius, in his chapter 9, reads the new additions as a Circulatum — a particular separating solvent, the mastery of which is the threshold the serious spagyrist must cross to enter the Great Work of the plant kingdom. The mystery Paracelsus deliberately left open is the engine of an unbroken lineage of four centuries of interpretations and experiments.

Historical timeline — fifteen centuries of transmission

Fifteen centuries. A lineage that has crossed the fall of Alexandria, the Arabic mediation, the renaissance of the Rhineland monasteries, the Paracelsian fracture, Lavoisier's chemical revolution (which ought to have killed alchemy and only half-killed it), the positivist night of the nineteenth century, and the quiet revival of the European and North American laboratories in the twentieth. The tradition is not linear. It is passed on in pockets — a workshop here, a manuscript there, a disciple who finds a master again. But it has never wholly stopped.

The canonical operations — solve, coagula, cohobation, circulation

The complete spagyric cycle, in its simplest form applied to a medicinal plant, unfolds in seven stages that Junius codifies methodically in Spagyrics. First stage: harvesting the plant at its balmy period, what Hildegard called the moment when viriditas is most active — typically at full maturity, at the corresponding planetary hour, astrology here having an operative and not a decorative function. Second stage: grinding and fermenting the plant in an aqueous solution, sometimes sweetened to activate fermentation, over a philosophical month (forty days) — yielding the fermented liquid that holds the Mercury and the volatile Sulphur in suspension. Third stage: slow distillation of the fermented liquid at low temperature — separating the Mercury (alcohol) from the fixed Sulphur and the aqueous residue (phlegma).

Fourth stage: evaporation and calcination of the fermented residue — yielding the fixed Sulphur (tarry residue) and then, through prolonged calcination to white, the alkaline salts (Sal Salis) of the Sulphur. Fifth stage: separate calcination of the post-distillation plant marc — yielding the ashes from which, by leaching with distilled water and recrystallisation, the Sal Salis of the body (the soluble salts of the Salt) is drawn. Sixth stage: cohobation — the great signature operation of spagyrics. One pours the distilled Mercury over the purified salts, stirs, lets it circulate. Sometimes one distils again, recovers the distillate, pours it back over the salts, begins again — twenty times, fifty times, sometimes more. Cohobation, Junius writes, opens, exalts, and volatilises what was fixed. Seventh stage: circulation in a pelican (a double-bulbed vessel inspired by the beak of the pelican, which pierces its own breast to feed its young — the alchemical emblem of self-regeneration) over seven days — heated by day, cooled by night — seven full cycles. The Quintessence forms, or does not form. The operator knows it by the change of colour and the transparency of the liquid.

Junius distinguishes four levels of preparation according to the depth of the work. A simple spagyric tincture — maceration-distillation with the return of the calcined salts to the distillate. A spagyric essence — purely distilled, containing only the volatile principles plus the volatilised salts, subtler but more delicate, reserved for experienced practitioners. A magisterium — an exalted preparation requiring a Circulatum (the separating solvent Paracelsus spoke of in veiled terms); Paracelsus wrote that one part of magisterium carries the curative power of two hundred parts of dried plant. The Vegetable Stone (Lapis Vegetabilis) — the highest form, a transparent ruby-red fluorescent solid prepared by ten successive cohobations and a prolonged circulation in the pelican. A recipe given by Hollandus in 1605 from honey. Junius notes honestly that the production of the Vegetable Stone belongs to a horizon more aspirational than experimental for most contemporary spagyrists.

The founding figures — the chain of transmission

Seven figures form the historical spine of Western spagyrics, and one must be able to name them if one claims to speak of it seriously. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) — the medicinal cosmology upstream, viriditas, macrocosm-microcosm, the theory of primary qualities applied to plants. Paracelsus (1493-1541) — the founder who forges the word spagyria and codifies the theory of the three Principles applied to the plant kingdom. Basil Valentine (fifteenth or sixteenth century — his historical identity is debated, some scholars granting him a posthumous reality) — The Twelve Keys of Philosophy, a mystical codification of the alchemical operations. Johannes Isaac Hollandus (sixteenth-seventeenth century) — detailed operative recipes, notably the Quintessence of honey and the Vegetable Stone, transmitted to the Dutch Paracelsian circle. Johann Rudolph Glauber (1604-1668) — the bridge between medieval alchemy and nascent chemistry, the discovery of the sodium sulphate that bears his name (Glauber's salt, still used in pharmacy today), Furni Novi Philosophici. Baron Urbigerus (seventeenth century) — Circulatum Minus, a rapid separating solvent, a technique still taught by Junius in 2007. Frater Albertus, Albert Richard Riedel (1911-1984) — founder of the Paracelsus Research Society in Salt Lake City in 1960, trainer of the living contemporary lineage, author of The Alchemist's Handbook.

And three contemporary figures who keep the transmission alive in the living languages. Manfred M. Junius (1929-2004) — spagyric pharmacist, student of Frater Albertus, founder of Australerba Laboratories; his Practical Handbook of Plant Alchemy of 1985, reissued under the title Spagyrics in 2007, is the reference manual in English. Robert Allen Bartlett (born 1951) — student of Frater Albertus at the PRS, author of Real Alchemy (2006), an active teacher in the United States. And the European institutional lineage — Spagyros AG in Switzerland (a laboratory founded in 1981), Soluna Heilmittel GmbH in Germany (the Alexander von Bernus lineage, since 1921), Phylak Sachsen GmbH, Heidak AG — which produce spagyric preparations under a legal pharmaceutical regime, direct heirs of the nineteenth-century Zimpel spagyrics.

The Jung-Burckhardt quarrel — psychology or metaphysics?

A foundational quarrel runs through the modern reading of alchemy, and one must name it so as not to fall on one side or the other without knowing it. C.G. Jung, in Psychology and Alchemy (1944), proposes a psychological reading of the alchemical corpus: the alchemists' material operations are, in his view, the unconscious projection of the individuation process — the movement of the psyche toward the wholeness of the Self. The prima materia stands for the undifferentiated unconscious; the coniunctio stands for the union of intra-psychic opposites; the lapis philosophorum stands for the realised Self. For Jung, the alchemists were in fact doing a psychological work of active imagination, for which chemistry was only the material support.

Titus Burckhardt, in Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul (1960), explicitly rejects this reading. For Burckhardt, Jung commits a fundamental error in collapsing the supra-personal Spirit (uncreated, transcendent) into the sub-personal unconscious (a reservoir of psychic contents): he flattens a vertical hierarchy (body → soul → Spirit) into a horizontal circle of psychic contents. Alchemical gold, for Burckhardt, is not psychic equilibrium — it is union with the uncreated Real. To confuse the two is, for the true hermetic tradition, a major metaphysical impoverishment.

The INFUSE stance toward this quarrel is one of productive tension — a refusal to settle it. Jung captures an undeniable partial truth: the work upon matter transforms the operator. Bartlett puts it this way in Real Alchemy — « As we work on our matter it is working on us. » But Burckhardt recalls a higher truth: if the alchemical operation is reduced to a private psychological work, it loses its cosmic dimension — its participation in an order of the real that exceeds the individual. True spagyrics holds both: it is an operation upon matter that is at the same time an operation upon the operator's psyche that is at the same time a participation in the cosmology of viriditas-prima materia. Three planes, not one. The hierarchy does not collapse.

INFUSE elixirs inspired by the alchemical tradition — the honest stance

Here a thing must be said precisely, with no blur. INFUSE does not sell spagyric elixirs in the strict sense of the Paracelsus-Junius-Frater Albertus tradition. The INFUSE elixirs — Dream Élixir, Love Élixir, Bobinsana Élixir, Blue Lotus Élixir — are alcoholic macerations of plants in an organic apple eau-de-vie at 45°, sometimes enriched with double aqueous extractions. They faithfully accomplish the solve: extraction of the volatile principles and essential oils by the alcohol, the capture of the volatile Sulphur and the Mercury of the plants. But they do not accomplish the calcination of the ashes and their cohobation back into the distillate — the complete coagula operation that would make them finished spagyric preparations in the Junian sense. The precision is deliberate and rests on an ethical choice: INFUSE refuses to claim a lineage it does not practise in its full rigour.

The INFUSE elixirs are therefore partial functional heirs of the alchemical-spagyric tradition — not its strict practitioners. They belong to the broader gesture of the solve, in continuity with post-Paracelsian alcoholic maceration — Hollandus, Glauber, and more recently the mother tinctures of nineteenth-century homeopathic pharmacopoeia. They honour the long temporality (maceration over weeks, sometimes over a philosophical month of forty days for certain elixirs), the quality of the alcohol (organic apple eau-de-vie, not industrial alcohol rectified to 96°), and the contemplative intention of the preparation. But the complete spagyric horizon — the cohobation of the calcined salts, the pelicanisation, the production of a true Quintessence — belongs to another level of work that would require a pharmaceutical laboratory under a European legal regime, technical competences the house does not claim, and an industrial investment that would strip the elixirs of their artisanal character.

When a visitor seeks a spagyric elixir in the strict sense — a complete pharmaceutical preparation, Salt-Sulphur-Mercury cohobated — the house points without hesitation toward the specialised European laboratories: Spagyros AG in Switzerland, Soluna in Germany, Phylak Sachsen, Heidak AG, Cosmic Nutrition. These are the strict contemporary practitioners of the lineage. INFUSE is not in competition with them; INFUSE stands in another position — that of a house that understands the tradition, respects it, draws inspiration from it, and offers artisanal preparations in long maceration that are its partial functional cousins. Transparency about the limit is, here, the very condition of editorial dignity.

Commercial pseudo-alchemy — the clear refusal

The contemporary wellness market overflows with products that lay claim to the word spagyric or alchemical to dress up a simple hydroalcoholic mother tincture. It is a misappropriation that must be named. A maceration that does not calcine the marc, that does not recover the soluble salts, that does not cohobate them with the distillate, is not a spagyric preparation. It may be a quality tincture — it may even be an excellent phytotherapeutic remedy. But to call it spagyric in order to raise its commercial value is a lie that dilutes the meaning of a precise word five centuries old. The word loses its perceptual frontier. When everything is spagyric, nothing is.

INFUSE explicitly refuses this drift. When the house speaks of spagyrics in this pillar, it is to document it with rigour, to source its lineage, to honour the strict practitioners, and to make clear that its own preparations are partial heirs and not complete incarnations of it. The word spagyric does not appear in the INFUSE elixirs' product pages — precisely because the house does not practise spagyrics in the strict sense. The precision is not a commercial reticence; it is an epistemic fidelity. The word must keep its content. If someone seeks a spagyric elixir stricto sensu, they should be able to find at Spagyros or Soluna what those houses actually make — and at INFUSE elixirs in artisanal maceration that present themselves honestly for what they are.

Nuggets & legends — nine details the generalist web pages do not give you

First nugget. The aqua vitae — distilled ethyl alcohol, what today we simply call eau-de-vie — has not always existed in the European pharmacopoeia. Its discovery is attributed by tradition to Ramon Llull (or to Arnaldus de Villa Nova, depending on the source) in the thirteenth century, and Llull is said to have thought, according to Junius citing the medieval alchemical chronicle, that his discovery announced the end of the world. Why? Because a new solvent had just appeared in the world — an anonymous, universally available Mercury — that made spagyric work on every plant of the plant kingdom theoretically possible. The eschatological signature of the moment speaks to the gravity the tradition attached to the invention.

Second nugget. The word laboratory comes from the Latin labora — work — and more precisely, according to Bartlett in Real Alchemy, from the Paracelsian formula ora et labora — pray and work. The laboratory is not, etymologically, a place of neutral manipulation — it is a place of manual prayer, of contemplative work. The secularisation of the word in modern scientific vocabulary erases this origin. When Rudolf Steiner writes in the early twentieth century that the laboratory bench is also an altar, he is not making a metaphor — he is recalling the etymology of the word. Spagyrics asks for the unity of the two gestures.

Third nugget. The alchemical pelican — a double-bulbed vessel with lateral arms that return to the main body — bears that name because it imitates a legendary gesture attributed to the biological pelican: the medieval belief held that the pelican, in times of famine, pierced its own breast with its beak to feed its young with its own blood. It is the alchemical emblem of self-regeneration, of the eucharistic Christ, and of the cohobation operation in which the distillate feeds on its own residue. The vessel performs, symbolically and materially, the same gesture. The name is not decorative — it is conceptual.

Fourth nugget. The philosophical month — forty days, not thirty — appears everywhere in the alchemical texts. Junius makes it clear in chapter 9 of Spagyrics: it is the unit of time of alchemical patience, and it aligns with the forty biblical days (Moses on Sinai, Jesus in the desert, the risen Christ before the Ascension), with the forty yogic days (the traditional Indian sādhanā), with the forty days of medieval medical isolation (the quarantine — which itself comes from forty, quarante). The number is not arbitrary: it is the time it takes, in the alchemical cosmology, for a deep transformation to be accomplished in matter.

Fifth nugget. Glauber's salt — sodium sulphate decahydrate — is still sold in pharmacies today as an osmotic laxative. Discovered by Johann Rudolph Glauber in the mid-seventeenth century in the course of his alchemical research on mineral salts, it is one of the very few products of historical alchemy to have crossed Lavoisier's chemical revolution intact and still to figure in contemporary pharmacopoeias under its original alchemical name. The continuity is physical: when a pharmacy sells Glauber's salt, it literally sells a product named by a Paracelsian alchemist almost four centuries ago.

Sixth nugget. Carl Friedrich Zimpel, a nineteenth-century German homeopathic physician, refounds spagyrics in 1834 by proposing a standardised pharmaceutical method — Zimpelian spagyrics — that is still practised today in Germany and Switzerland. There are currently more than a dozen pharmaceutical laboratories in Germany producing spagyric essences under a European legal regime, direct heirs of the Zimpel method or of close variants (Glauber, Krauss). Spagyrics is not dead. In Germanic Europe it is a minority parallel pharmacopoeia, but a legally recognised one, prescribed by certain anthroposophical and homeopathic physicians.

Seventh nugget. The Quintessence of honey — a recipe detailed by Johannes Isaac Hollandus in 1605 in his Opus Vegetabile, reproduced in full by Junius in chapter 11 of Spagyrics — yields, according to the tradition, a transparent ruby-red fluorescent solid, of which Hollandus writes that a grain in wine each morning heals every illness. It is the highest form of plant spagyrics, the Vegetable Stone (Lapis Vegetabilis), the plant-kingdom analogue of the Philosopher's Stone of the mineral kingdom. Junius notes honestly, as a practising pharmacist, that no contemporary spagyrist of his acquaintance has reproducibly documented the actual production of this Stone — it remains a horizon more aspirational than empirical. Epistemic precision is what distinguishes the serious manual from mystification.

Eighth nugget. Hildegard of Bingen grants spelt — Triticum spelta — an almost axiomatic status throughout her pharmacopoeia. She writes in the Physica that spelt is the best of grains, the warmest, the most nourishing; that it makes healthy flesh and blood; that it puts the human spirit in good humour. It is the only grain she prescribes both in illness (a decoction of whole spelt with egg yolk for the bedridden) and in the daily regimen of health. The fact that spelt has today become central again in conscious diets in Germanic Europe — sourdough bread, soups, kuchen, biscuits — is no accident: it is the quiet persistence of a Hildegardian medical injunction eight hundred and fifty years old.

Ninth nugget. Frater Albertus, founder of the Paracelsus Research Society in Salt Lake City in 1960, was not an academic — he was a man born Albert Richard Riedel in Düsseldorf in 1911, who emigrated to the United States in the 1930s, founded his school of practical alchemy with almost nothing, and trained three generations of contemporary Western practitioners, among them Manfred Junius and Robert Bartlett. His transmission is entirely oral and experiential — Junius makes clear in the dedication of Spagyrics that he owes to Albertus not a theory, but hundreds of hours beside the furnace, learning through the repeated and corrected gesture. The living lineage of contemporary Western spagyrics passes through this man, almost unknown to the wider public, who kept the transmission unbroken from Paracelsus through war, emigration, and academic indifference.

INFUSE elixirs inspired by alchemy

As explained in the section on the honest stance, INFUSE does not practise spagyrics in the strict sense. But the house makes elixirs in long maceration in organic apple eau-de-vie, which are the partial functional cousins of the tradition. Here are the main ones. Dream Élixir — seven master plants of the dream (Calea zacatechichi, Mugwort, Blue Lotus, Bobinsana, Silene capensis ubulawu, Kanna, Passiflora, Yauhtli) in synergistic alcoholic maceration. Love Élixir — a cardio-aphrodisiac composition inspired by the medieval love elixirs. Bobinsana Élixir — single-plant, the Amazonian root of Calliandra angustifolia, a cardio-oneiric accord. Blue Lotus Élixir — the Egyptian Nymphaea caerulea, single-plant, the pharaonic lineage. And the limited seasonal Elixirs Winter Edition 2026, which gathers the winter compositions — deep adaptogens, plants of inward gathering. For spagyric elixirs in the strict sense — complete Salt-Sulphur-Mercury cohobation — see Spagyros AG, Soluna, or Phylak.

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