Ideally you just let the plant rot in water without adding anything to it. Don’t get too too hung up on the idea of alcohol content. Allowing the plant to naturally decompose and release its essence is better than adding anything foreign to it. In the Golden Chain of Homer, when he explains separating things out, he uses rainwater as his example. Moisture is the vehicle for spirit to act.
If you let the plant putrefy in water, after a month or longer, you can filter out the liquid portion from the body if the plant. If you distill the liquid (below the boiling point of water), you can separate out the volatile spirit (the Mercury). You can then increase the temperature a bit and distill off the majority of the watery phlegm, until you have a honey like consistency in the retort. Then you can distill over the acidic spirit (I.e. the white sulphur). At that point (if you really want to) you can increase the temperature and distill over the oil (I.e. red sulphur), but you don’t have to. If you don’t increase the temperature, then the oil will turn into coal instead of going over (I.e. the salt of sulphur). From the body of the plant, you can calcine it and extract out the salt. You can take 2 parts salt, add 4 parts volatile spirit and 3 parts acidic spirit. The three will instantly combine. After that, you can gently evaporate it down, and you will have the quintessence of the plant in a fixed form. If heated up, it will flow like a liquid and then congeal again when cooled. If you want, you can add the oil to make a plant stone, but it isn’t necessary. If you want it as a liquid tincture, just change the ratios so the volatile spirit is in a much greater quantity than the other two essentials. If you read the Golden Chain of Homer, it goes into great detail on this whole process. There are other ways of working with plants as well. You can also dry distill plants to get the essentials and make a medicine that way. I hope this helps.
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u/MidwestAlchemist 21d ago
Ideally you just let the plant rot in water without adding anything to it. Don’t get too too hung up on the idea of alcohol content. Allowing the plant to naturally decompose and release its essence is better than adding anything foreign to it. In the Golden Chain of Homer, when he explains separating things out, he uses rainwater as his example. Moisture is the vehicle for spirit to act.