Essential Oil Distillations of The Week

Essential Oil Distillations of The Week

 

 

 

Claude Monet (French, Impressionism, 1840-1926): Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante à Pourville), 1882. Oil on canvas, 66 x 81.3 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA.

 

 

I am hoping your weekend was spent staying cool and relaxed, being safe and not forgetting

our companion pets and animals in this heat wave most seem to be experiencing this week.

 

And you  Aromatherapy enthusiasts keep a few essences in mind for dealing with

overheated bodies-  peppermint or spearmint are cooling in sensation, peppermint can be used neat

or in combination with other oils, increasing their efficacy and regulating excesses of essences.

Lavender is healing to skin damage, whether from working or accident, and can

be applied neat to wounds and scrapes. It is helpful to some folks for the bites of

mosquitos and other small insect pests. In combination with peppermint, can be used

in recipes for sunburns, something all of us need to be mindful of in this sweltering heat!

Rosemary is used with these types of things in combination, being very healing topically

itself. Its neutral to warm, so some cooling essence would augment it nicely. And

i always include some Lime or Brouts to freshen these blends, mixing very nicely with them.

 

Something known for ages, for heat rashes ("prickly heat") and other topical irritations

caused by fluxing high enviroment temperatures-  which is a little hard to find, but

authentic White Sandalwood powder, lightly rubbed on the body, like talc. It will amaze

you to feel how effective it is! sometimes Baroo's camphor (Borneol) is added at

1-3% to increase the usefulness of the sandalwood.

 

Now in this weeks essential oil news for The Old Civet Cat- i met some lovely men high

in oregons lush Applegate River area, that were gracious to offer a nice garden's worth

of Lavender and Clary Sage for distillation. I do beleive this was possibly the sweetest

lavender i have ever smelled, surley due to the Organic growing in these sweet

mountains.  And the Clary Sage was equally as captivating, having a deeper and

rounder note than most Clary. I co distilled Frankincense with it, which made it

even more pleasing and desireable. Overall, a productive week. And some joggling

on the formula for Red Hawk was finalized for production and distributions.  If you

may be intrested in being a distributor, do drop me a message so i may send

relevant details and qualifiers.

 

 

 

Be Well!

This Week in Essential oil deis



Spagyric
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spagyric /spəˈdʒɪrɨk/ is a name given to the production of herbal medicines using alchemical procedures. These procedures involve fermentation, distillation and the extraction of mineral comp...onents from the ash of the plant. These processes were in use in medieval alchemy generally for the separation and purification of metals from ores (see Calcination), and salts from brines and other aqueous solutions.



Origin: Greek: Spao, to tear open, + ageiro, to collect. It is a term probably first coined by Paracelsus. In its original use, the word spagyric was commonly used synonymously with the word alchemy, however, in more recent times it has often been adopted by alternative medicine theorists and various techniques of holistic medicine.
Spagyrics in practice
Spagyric most commonly refers to a plant tincture to which has also been added the ash of the calcined plant. The original rationale behind these special herbal tinctures seems to have been that an extract using alcohol could not 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 'essence.'
The concept of the spagyric remedy in turn relies upon the three cardinal principles of alchemy, termed as salt, sulphur and mercury. "The basis of matter was the alchemical trinity of principles – salt, sulfur and mercury. Salt was the principle of fixity (non-action) and in-combustibility; mercury was the principle of fusibility (ability to melt and flow) and volatility; and sulfur was the principle of inflammability."
The three primal alchemical properties and their correspondence in spagyric remedy are:
Mercury = water elements, representing the life essence of the plant, the very alcohol extract of the plant is the carrier of the life essence.
Salt = earth element, representing the vegetable salts extracted from calcined ashes of plant body.
Sulphur = fire element, virtue of plant, representing the volatile oil essence of the plant.
Paracelsus stated that the true purpose of Alchemy was not for the vulgar purpose of gold making, but rather for the production of medicines.The term 'Spagyria' has been used by Paracelsus in his book Liber Paragranum, deriving from the Greek words 'spao' and 'ageiro', the essential meaning of which is to 'separate and to combine'.
He formulated that nature in itself was 'raw and unfinished,' and man had the God-given task to evolve things to a higher level. As an example: The 'raw' medicinal plant would be separated into the basic components he termed 'mercurius', 'sulphur' and 'sal' and thereby cleaned of non-essential components. 'Mercurius', 'sulphur' and 'sal' were then recombined forming the medicine.
In contemporary terms, this would be the extraction of the essential oils with vapour gaining the 'sulphur'. Then fermentation of the remaining plant and distilling the alcohol produced thus gaining 'mercurius'. Extraction of the mineral components from the ash of the marc which would be the 'sal'. Diluting the essential oils in the alcohol and then solving the mineral salts in it would produce the final potion.Note that this is a simplified representation of the process which varies strongly depending on the source chosen.
Joseph Needham devoted several volumes of his monumental Science and Civilisation in China to Spagyrical discovery and invention. In 1965, Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst popularized the term as a result of their joint seminal work Principia Discordia.

M.C Ramos Sánchez, F.J. Martín Gil, J. Martín Gil. "Los espagiristas vallisoletanos de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y primera mitad del siglo XVII". Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia y de la técnica: IV Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas: Valladolid, 22–27 de Septiembre de 1986, 1988, ISBN 84-505-7144-8, pags. 223–228See More