➡ The article is about a podcast episode of the True Health Report, hosted by Dr. Andrew Kaufman. He interviews a young man named Owen Weinman, who is a practicing alchemist. Owen shares his journey into alchemy, which started with a trip to Egypt nine years ago. They discuss the history of alchemy, its roots in Egypt, and its evolution through Greece, the Arab world, and into medieval Europe.
➡ The text discusses the secretive practice of alchemy, which is making a comeback. Alchemy is a holistic approach to understanding nature and material reality, using human ingenuity to experiment with natural principles. The goal is to bring things to a higher state of perfection. The text also explains the difference between alchemy and modern practices, emphasizing that alchemy acknowledges the spiritual nature of reality.
➡ Some farmers have noticed that plants respond to natural cycles, such as lunar cycles, which can affect their growth. This knowledge, based on centuries of human experience, is used in farming and in the creation of spagyric medicines. The process involves observing the moon and the elements associated with its astrological sign to determine the best time to work with different parts of plants. This practice, rooted in alchemy, views substances as containing different mixtures of elements, which can be manipulated through various processes for transformation.
➡ The text discusses the process of alchemy, specifically the creation of a medicinal tincture from cilantro. Alchemy involves separating a substance into its base components, purifying them, and then recombining them in a way that enhances their beneficial properties. The cilantro tincture is made using a process called spagyric, which makes the medicinal properties of the plant more effective and long-lasting in the body. The tincture is particularly useful for removing heavy metals from the body due to the sulfur principle found in fresh cilantro.
➡ The text discusses the process of extracting medicinal properties from cilantro using alcohol and water. The cilantro is dried, then soaked in alcohol to extract its sulfur component. The soaked cilantro is then filtered, incinerated to ash, and the ash is further processed to extract pure salt. This salt is then combined back with the alcohol extract, heated, and left to react for two weeks, resulting in a medicinal tincture.
➡ Owen, an expert in plant-based alchemy, shares his experiences of working with different plants, particularly yarrow, to create medicinal substances. He explains how he develops a unique relationship with each plant, understanding their individual ‘consciousness’. He also discusses his process of distilling essential oils and fermenting leftovers to create alcohol. Lastly, he introduces a free 30-day detox protocol that uses nature-based detox methods to help improve health and wellbeing.

Modern day chemistry is the child of alchemy. They just removed a couple letters from the word, you know, and a lot of people that we attribute to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton considered himself an alchemist. All of these people, all these natural philosophers descended from this tradition and they were working with xeric and alchemy. This is the true health report, where critical appraisal fuels true freedom. Hello everyone and welcome to the True Health Report. I’m your host, Dr. Andrew Kaufman. Today I have a very interesting guest and we’re going to cover a topic that is often maligned and somewhat controversial, but really a key subject whenever we’re talking about science.

This is really the foundational principles that are behind all of the modern materialist scientists. And there has been an intellectual resurgence of this subject. And of course I’m talking about alchemy. So today I have a guest, Owen Weinman, who has never before appeared in a public forum like this. But we have had a relationship behind the scenes for quite a while now. And he is extremely impressive for a young man and has pursued a path that is certainly not a popular path for the youth of our day. And we can call him a practicing alchemist, a spagyricist or a spagyric chemist, but really he is a very interesting and I almost want to say enlightening because you will feel richer after having spent some time with him.

So, Owen, let me bring you onto the stage. Welcome. Hey Andy. Thank you. That was one of the kindest introductions I’ve ever received. Thank you. Well, let’s prove to the audience that it’s well characterized and deserved by, by having a little chat. So Owen, why don’t you kind of give us a little bit of your personal journey and how you came into this kind of space and you know what, maybe what were the influences or experiences that led you on the path? Absolutely, yeah. So yeah, my name’s Owen. I’m a practicing operational alchemist based out of northern Utah.

I run business in a spiritual practice called Zep Tepe Solutions focused on spagyric and alchemical medicine. And yeah, my main path with this, I guess began with Egypt. About nine years ago I spent a month in Egypt as part of a larger six month backpacking abroad trip that I did. And that had quite, quite a substantial effect on me. I went to a lot of off the beaten path sites in Egypt like Hermopolis, Magna and Akhadaten. And I even had the Middle Pyramid, the Khafre Pyramid to myself for 45 minutes, which probably One of the few people in history that has had one of the three great pyramids to themselves for a specific period of time.

But, yeah, that started a process in me of researching alchemy more in depth. So, Owen, are you saying that, first of all, on your trip, you were alone? Like, there was no one else inside the pyramid, but you forgot nearly an hour? Yep. I was entirely long. Wow, that’s. That’s quite fascinating. And I imagine this kind of was a random occurrence. You didn’t rent out the pyramid? No, not at all. I bought a basic tourist ticket. I showed up, and the guy who has the key to the pyramid. This isn’t the Great Pyramid. This is the second pyramid next to the Great Pyramid.

And, yeah, the guy came up with the key. He was speaking broken English, so I didn’t understand if he was saying three years or three months, but he said it was the first day, and I heard three years that it was being opened after renovations, and I was the first person there. I got there early. Wow. And, yeah, he opened it up, and I was the only person inside. I can send you pictures or videos later on if you’d like to see them. And, yeah, I laid down in the sarcophagus at the center of the pyramid, and I just felt the desire to start singing and chanting, and it was.

It was incredible. Like, I. The whole pyramid was reverberating with my voice. Wow, that’s quite fascinating. Are you. Are you familiar with John Stuart Weed and his studies on the pyramid? The name sounds familiar. Is he, like, with John Anthony west and. No. No. Well, I’m not sure about those other people, but he’s the gentleman who was kind of a pioneer of. Now I’m blanking on the name of what it’s called, but you know when you have a sound tone and it makes a pattern, like in particles. Say that one more time. Cymatics. Is that. Yeah, cymatics.

Right. So he actually invented the cymoscope, which is a way to demonstrate cymatic patterns in water rather than using, you know, sand or particulate material. But he. He started off that he’s an acoustical engineer, and he was doing sound research in the pyramid and in the sarcophagus. And so it’s. It’s interesting that you guys both had kind of a similar experience. I think it’d be of interest to you to hear that story. It’s on one of my past webinars that featured him, so we’ll have to make sure that you watch that afterwards. But I’m curious because Even, you know, your story begins, right, with kind of a Indiana Jones type of adventure.

But we’re in an era where most young people don’t go off backpacking for six months like they once did. Maybe still some Europeans and Australians do that, but certainly it’s not common in the United States. So, you know, how did you become even interested in those or know of those places in Egypt and, you know, what led you to such a sojourn? Yeah, that’s a great question. Yeah. And it’s unfortunate. I think travel is one of the most valuable experiences a human being can have on this planet. And yeah, I mean, that desire to see the world, I’ve always had that since I was young.

I did some international volunteering with the organization here in Utah. When I was younger, I went to Madagascar and Guatemala with them. And that’s, you know, going to especially a place like Madagascar, which is one of the poorest countries in the world, and giving them vocational and educational lessons, building a school there, giving them supplies, allowing them to take out small business loans from us as well. And yeah, then from there I, I went to college. I didn’t like college. I, I felt that I could get more education out in the world. So I did that.

Went on several different international trips. But yeah, as far as the spiritual and the esoteric goes, I’ve also always just been immersed in that. Mainly the New Age when I was younger is what I was more into. My mom owned and operated a yoga studio here in Park City for a long time. So from a young age I was very immersed in all the New Age philosophies and ideas and then took it deeper without me and spagyrics and that. And I, after Egypt, I went on to. Well, oh, and I’m curious, like, I’m glad certainly that you took it deeper, but do you have an opinion on the New Age movement presently? Yeah, I’m personally not too impressed with it.

I think it is good at introducing people to concepts and ideas if they then choose to find something they like and then take it deeper. I find that it has a very surface level view of a lot of things, but in that respect, it’s also great at introducing things to people as an alternative to what exists as a gateway. Yeah, well, that’s, you know, certainly reasonable and, you know, it. It definitely has some questionable origins for anyone wanting to, you know, look into that further. But, you know, you could similarly describe some platforms like Alex Jones, for example.

Right. As a way that when people are first starting to realize, you know, some of the lies that we face in day to day life, that they seek and may find a path that’s not really exactly the right path, but it helps them get to the right path. So. And it sounds like it had that effect on you as well. Yeah, absolutely, I agree with that. So when did you first start to explore, you know, the alchemical traditions and philosophies? Yeah, I would say I began that process about nine years ago, just kind of practicing on my own.

I had a very small laboratory at the time in my apartment and. And was this related to your, to your trip to Egypt or studying of, you know, Egyptology? Yeah, it was. I, I mainly I trace alchemical thought and theory back to Egypt, to the temple and priestly practices of Egypt. So that’s where I kind of began with it. And then I kind of saw that this philosophy of Egyptian spirituality, religion was taken into Greece and then into the Arabic countries and then into medieval Europe and expounded upon. And that’s kind of what the lineage of alchemy is.

Yeah, absolutely. And it was. Do you think that during the time when it was in the Arab world but not in Europe? Because there were, I believe, several centuries that that occurred during. Do you think that there were documents or texts that were in Europe but purposely kept hidden from the populations there? Absolutely. And I. There were probably Arabic alchemical texts that were kept from the Europeans too, because I think the, the Islamic alchemists had a more direct lineage to the Egyptian material, especially because Egypt was an Islamic caliphate for a long time. Yeah. And even in Europe I’m sure there were.

It’s a secretive practice, it always has been. Nowadays it’s definitely making resurgence and being more publicly available. So what can you tell us, you know, exactly what alchemy is and how it’s, you know, distinct from the common perception. Sure thing. And yeah, just before that, because that’s definitely a good trajectory. I just would like to add if there are any credentials that one can have in this realm. I studied with Robert Allen Bartlett in Washington through his three in person courses is prima secundia and tertia courses. Those are all in person intensives. And then I was the laboratory manager for Phoenix Aurelius for two years.

And he and I still have a very strong friendship. I consider him a great friend. And during that time I made hundreds and hundreds of spagyric items of medicine and also worked individually with hundreds and hundreds of different herbs. Yeah, and you know, I originally we met through Phoenix, who’s also a friend of mine, and he is the one that convinced me that you really knew what you were doing. And obviously, if you were managing his laboratory, that’s definitely, you know, he’s extremely particular for you folks who may not know him. So if he trusts someone with that level of responsibility, that definitely says a lot.

And, you know, my experience with you has validated that as well, Owen. So clearly you have a lot of experience and practice at, you know, working with materials through the process of alchemical transformation into, you know, medicinal substances. Right. And that’s what you’re doing now, and we’re definitely going to talk about that. But let’s, you know, explore a little bit of the background of where that comes from, because it’s a lot different than how pharmaceutical companies make their concoctions. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And so there is alchemy and there is spagyrics, and they’re both two sides of the same coin.

First, we could talk about alchemy. It’s an inherently murky thing to try to pin down with one definition sentence. But if I were to try to, I would say alchemy is a more holistic approach to mankind’s relationship to nature and material reality. It’s kind of a path of self initiation into nature, by nature and through nature, and taking those natural principles into the hands of human ingenuity in the laboratory and testing things out and experimenting on these natural principles with the goal of bringing things to a higher state of perfection and as well in the individual practitioner as well, because human beings are in a very unique position to be able to do this on this planet.

And, yeah, it’s. And compared to modern allopathic practices, you know, it still is very much attached to. It hasn’t thrown out the spiritual nature of reality, you know, the macrocosm and the microcosm. So I think that is a, you know, a pretty good description here. Let me add a few things and, you know, know, kind of punctuate some of the things that you said. So one is that it’s not a materialist science, Right. So that it acknowledges that there is more than just the matter of the earth, in which, you know, is really a lot more consistent with our observations.

And that’s really another thing about alchemy. And you could say it’s also a way of just conceptualizing everything in nature or really everything in the world. But it relies only on our ability to observe through the five senses. It doesn’t require technology necessarily. Right. We don’t have to use microscopes or molecular assays or magnetic resonance or any of Those fancy technologies, everything we can observe. And the alchemical process of transformation or transmutation, which is usually referred to as, as changing lead or a base metal into gold or a precious metal, is that’s really a way to turn people off to the subject, so to speak, to say, oh, it’s just some, you know, fake magic or whatnot.

But in actuality, I mean, we observe things change all the time. And a very simple example that, you know, Steve Young often uses, just making a cup of tea. You can start with just the dried tea leaves or you could even start with the tea plant, right? That first you have to grow that. And there has to be things in nature, right, that change the seed into the plant. Then you take the leaves fresh off the plant and then you put them through a drying process, right, which is probably calcination process of some kind with the sun.

Then you have the dry, then you pulverize them, Then you mix them with the water or the steam, right? Then you separate them out and then you mix in the sugar and the cream. So you’re combining and changing these things from one thing into the other. And eventually you end up with a cup of tea. But you started with, you know, a seed soil, the sunlight, right? Maybe a tea ball, a tea baller, like a steel thing just to keep the tea leaves separate, you know, things like that. But you come out with something totally different in the end.

So it’s not nothing magic. I mean, it is magical in a sense, right? Because if you break it down step by step, it’s. It’s pretty incredible, but it’s real. And things we, you know, we observe this every day, right? We put food into our body and it changes into our body parts or, or part of it changes into feces or urine, right? And that’s not what we didn’t put those things in. But yet our body, you know, mechanized this transformation. And we can use alchemy not only to describe that, but. But we can use it to make our own creations.

Absolutely, man. Yeah. And alchemy, that would be an extraction of the philosophical principles of that plant. Like in spagyrics, I’m sure I know you’re familiar with the salt, sulfur and mercury, the three essentials that Paracelsus created. And yeah, in something like brewing tea, you are. It’s a water based extraction of the sulfur, the soul principle of that plant. And when that plant’s growing, you know, it’s in. The alchemical theory is everything comes from one thing, everything is descended from oneness. And out of Chaos, this multiplicity of reality arises. It’s very mystical in that sense. And yeah, so when something grows out of the ground like that, it contains the macrocosm of everything, the environment it’s growing in.

I know a lot of people think it’s woo, but the stars are incorporated in that as well. And when you philosophically extract things, you are incorporating all of these things and making them into a more humanized form that then you can partake in. Right? That’s right. Because if we started chewing tea leaves right off the plant, it would probably irritate your gums and not taste good. Like nettle. You try to eat a bunch of nettle? No, I haven’t. They have competitions for that in England. They have a nettle eating competitions. Real. To see who is the toughest.

Yeah, just like with, you know, hot peppers, per se. But let me, let me actually just take the woo woo out of what you’re talking about with respect to the stars because, you know, a way to look at the, the night sky or the stars, right. Is. And it’s been described this way as a sort of a sky clock because we know that all the stars rotate around the North Star, right. In the annual solar cycle one time. And we also know that plants have a season that they grow and when you harvest them. And it’s correlated to a certain time of the year, which can be seen by observing the position of the stars.

So the position of the stars with respect to the plant is extremely important as part of this natural cycle for it to grow. And if you don’t plant it when the stars are in the right place, then you’re not going to have the same result at the end. So we don’t have to go into astrology or, you know, anything that people might consider woo woo to, to actually make this observation. And in fact, in my community, like during COVID we started having campfires and people who, you know, were not completely buying into the operation would come.

And of course, a lot of these folks were farmers. Because if you’re out there on the land and you’re observing what’s happening in nature, you would be less likely to be fooled by, you know, the report of something fake going on in nature. Right. Like, like a pandemic. So one of the topics that came up was related to this, you know, had to do with the celestial bodies and the lunar cycles, that it’s something that the farmers were not really paying attention to. Like they knew, you know, they would plant a certain time of year. They might consult the Farmer’s Almanac, but they weren’t observing the stars and the lunar cycles in their planting.

And some of them started to experiment with this. And I don’t think they read, you know, all kinds of alchemical texts to do this. It was mostly just by, you know, a few knowledgeable people with some knowledge, but they started to notice different things about how the plants grew that they actually responded to. Being in tune with these natural cycles. Has that also been your experience? Yeah, that has. I don’t do as much farming. My girlfriend is an organic farmer. But yeah, I mean, things like the Farmer’s Almanac and all of these folk traditions, I mean, they’re not based on frivolous things.

These are based on collective centuries of human experience. And yeah, these people found that when the moon is in certain signs, definitely the lunar cycle is very pertinent to the plants. I mean, that’s very provable. And especially when it’s in certain signs that are more applicable to certain parts of the plant, like the flower, the fruit, the root. There are different seasons for that. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s becoming something. I mean, I don’t know if it can be measured scientifically, but to me it makes a lot of sense because, I mean, even the planets in our solar system, those are absorbing electromagnetic radiation and putting it off, and we are receiving that at all times, even just gravitational influence from other planets.

Like there’s whole aspects of nature that can’t be measured and observed scientifically that throughout human history have just been fact for a lot of people. And I don’t think that’s something to throw out. That’s right. And you know, we can actually, if you study it, you can see that there’s quite a lot of validity to many of these cycles. I mean, even in basic astrology, right. So many things ring out and we can observe them. But you’re right, it’s not necessarily through what might be considered scientific observation, but we can certainly tell about people’s tendencies and such and how they could be related to the changing of the celestial bodies when the solar and the lunar signs and such.

And I’ve always been impressed when I’ve seen this done in real life, you know, with skilled, knowledgeable people and, you know, with, with a little bit of honesty from whoever is being, you know, looked at. So when you seek out to make, you know, spagyric medicines, how do you account for these natural cycles in your production? Yeah, so you can get very complicated with it, or you can take a More streamlined approach. I choose a more streamlined approach. I use a system that’s called, you can find it. It’s called Vedic astrology or sidereal astrology. Tropical astrology is what most people are probably familiar with, like in the newspaper, the sun signs and stuff.

And that’s valuable for a lot of people. I’m not going to talk shade on it, but it’s not based on nature. Tropical astrology takes a 360 degree circle and divides it evenly by all the 12 constellations. And when you look up at the night sky, that’s just not how it plays out. Constellations are bigger than others and so sidereal. And there’s a guy on YouTube, Athen Comenti, who I highly recommend people checking out, he calls it true sidereal astrology. And yeah, it’s based on the actual size and placement of the constellations in the night sky based on your geographic location.

And the way I use that mainly for spagyric practice. An example would be if the moon is ascending or descending and the elemental personality of the astrological sign it’s in. If it is in an earth sign, that would be a time to work with roots. And if it’s in a fire or air sign, that would be a time to work with the flower or the fruit of plants. It also has relation to different operations that you might perform alchemically, like distillations, calcinations, fermentations, extractions, filtrations, things like that. And all those processes you just mentioned, are those part of the alchemical steps of transformation? Yes, yeah, they are steps towards transformation.

You’ll see them referenced a lot in texts, specifically talking about the creation of, you know, the philosopher’s stone. But they are also basic everyday laboratory operations that you can perform on a number of different materials. Right. So these are things like if you, you know, we’re working in a chemistry lab or a biology lab, you would be doing many of these processes as well. But they originally come from alchemy. Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, modern day chemistry is the child of alchemy. They just removed a couple letters from the word, you know, and a lot of people that we attribute to the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, Isaac Newton considered himself an alchemist.

All these people, all these natural philosophers descended from this tradition and they were working with spatricks and alchemy. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about actually the difference between alchemy and chemistry. Because, you know, of course when I, I studied chemistry fairly extensively and did work in some chemistry labs in my Undergraduate years. And when I started learning al alchemy, I was a little bit struck about, you know, how similar certain things are. But here is what is definitely distinct is that atomism and, you know, modern theories of physics which play into chemistry, create this, you know, symbolic understanding of what’s going on.

When you try to mix substances together or make new substances in a chemistry way, you’re always going back to those atoms and the molecular arrangements. Now, alchemy has a very different way of understanding the elements, right? So they’re the way they exist in nature and not necessarily the way we think of them. Although most of the way we think of things is more of an extraction or separation of things in their natural form, but they’re distinct. And also we have things like, you know, with metals, for example, in metallurgy, we have alloys, right, where we take pure metals and mix them together to make something different.

But in alchemy, some of the metals that we think of as pure metals actually are looked at as combinations of certain base metals. So can you speak to kind of this different way that this symbolic underpinning of the basic unit of material is different in alchemy versus chemistry? Absolutely. That’s a great. That’s a great question. And I. I’m not chemically trained. I’m not a chemist. I don’t consider myself one, but I’m familiar with the basic concepts. And yeah, chemistry is more concerned with isolating things and creating extractions and purifying things to, like, the basic atomic molecules.

And alchemy is more. And spagyrics, especially, is more of a holistic structure where they, you know, view substances as containing different admixtures of the four elements. And the way that we can access those and manipulate the elements is through the three essentials, or the tria prima, as Paracelsus called them. Sulfur, mercury, and salt. And a lot of alchemical operations are different manipulations of these three principles in different proportions, purifying them in different ways. And sulfur would be considered the, like, the soul or the consciousness portion, individuality portion. Like what gives something its medicinal value. It’s for a human to be like its personality, your hair color, your skin color.

And in the vegetable realm, we find these as an oil that we can extract from. From plants and the. The mercury subs. And these are philosophic concepts. They’re not talking about actual metallic mercury or sulfur, but mercury would be the spirit or the vital force of a substance, the animating principle. And that in the vegetable kingdom is extracted as a liquor or an Alcohol. And then there is the salt. Right. So that’s through fermentation and distillation. Yes, exactly. Yeah. You would ferment a plant and the mercury for a realm is going to be the same across that realm, like in the vegetable kingdom, that will manifest as a liquor that we can ferment out and then distill and rectify.

Right. And this. So this is just for, you know, the audience. When you look at a bottle of liquor at the liquor store, right. It’ll say spirits or distilled spirits. Right. And that is actually the alchemical category. That is because the spirit and the mercury are interchangeable words. And, you know, we’re talking about, like, think about mercury, you know, the God rather than mercury, the metal, when we’re talking about that, although we’re not referring directly to the God, but there’s a correlation there. Absolutely, yeah. Mercury, the planet, the God and its correlation to Hermes, who was combined with the Egyptian tote, all come from that, you know, the, the connection between realms, the messenger of the gods, you know, or in this case, it’s a spirit.

But yeah. And then there is the physical body structure that you can deal with, the salt, which is the matrix that something exists in and in plants that exists as. After calcination and purification, that exists as a potassium carbonate alkaline salt. Right. And that. When you say calcination, you’re talking about applying heat to the material. Yeah, you’re basically burning a material so you can find what exists in it that is resistant to fire, what cannot be burned away, what is the most pure in it. And are you burning the body, I mean, the, the sulfur away, the residual sulfur, or you would usually extract that out first.

But there are operations. There is a. There’s a volatile sulfur and there’s a fixed sulfur. And to get out of the. The fixed sulfur, the salt you would burn and calcine, the fixed sulfur as well. There are different preparations where you can use the fixed sulfur as is for remedial value. All right, so, you know, I’m. We may be getting into a little bit of complexity here, but. But the idea is that there isn’t just one way to do this, Right. It. It allows a lot of individual expression and intuition in the process. Yeah, it’s an art and a science.

So in other words, I think what you’re saying is that the goal, at least with medicines is to, for example, take a plant or an herb, Right. That we know has medicinal properties of some sort, and then you’re going to separate out the different aspects of it. Right. Which in alchemy we call philosophies. And you’re going to process those in a certain way. Right. Or to a certain purity, that there’s variability depending on the individual, and then you’re going to recombine them in ways that there is a lot of individual variability. And all along the way, you know, the goal might be to try and bring out or magnify the desirable properties.

Right. That you want from that plant, including palatability. Like we talked about before with if, you know, you try chewing on nettle versus making tea from it, one is going to be a lot more pleasant and compatible with our bodies than the other. Absolutely, that’s exactly correct. I mean, even the word spagyric itself is a combination of two Greek words, spagheo and a heros, that means to separate and recombine. Where there’s the Latin alchemical axiom, solve coagula, which is to separate and recombine. Yeah. And that’s, that’s the main procedure. And in that, in between that there is purification.

So you separate out something into its base components, then you purify those substances and perfect them, bring them into a higher state of perfection, and then you recombine them in various ways to see, seeing fit what medicine or what item you’re trying to create, what effect you’re trying to have. So then, in summary, we can say that it also differs from chemistry in the sense that chemistry may separate things and purify them, but it doesn’t ever recombine them into something new. Right. It looks at the reductionist approach. Right. The. The smallest attainable unit is what is considered the valuable medicine in alchemy.

It’s really the whole plant. Right. Or the whole material back together but now transformed to elevate it to a higher level. Absolutely. That would definitely be a good way of putting it. And I think that you can make all kinds of cultural analogies based on that that help us understand better the world we currently live in. It’s applicable to many different things. The more you look into alchemy and this type of philosophy, it’s very holographic and fractal in the sense that you start looking around and you’ll see correlations in everything, like cultures, the way. Yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s interesting.

It’s interesting. So, Owen, you have recently started production of a new tincture. And this is a somewhat of a collaboration between us, because when I began researching about, you know, illness related to heavy metal poisoning, I came across an amazing Herb cilantro, which has been shown in a lot of clinical studies to be extremely beneficial. So tell us a little bit about cilantro or coriander is the other name for it and what type of product you’re making with this. Absolutely, yeah. So I have created a cilantro spagyric tincture utilizing fresh plant material. And what makes a spagyric tincture better in, in a lot of ways is that when you recombine those aspects that we were just talking about, especially the alkaline plant salts, it catalyzes a reaction which creates these molecules called ethyl esters.

It’s an esterification process. And what this does is it takes the medicinal value of the plant itself and it makes it more bioavailable, lasts longer in the body, penetrates deeper, it can cross cell membranes more easily, and the dose for them is significantly lower than traditional over the counter herbal remedies. Whereas most of those, the dosage is in tablespoons or dropper full. Most spagyric wet path liquid remedies are going to be in the dose of drops instead of dropper fulls. And so yeah, I, I took that approach and I created a spagyric fresh cilantro tincture. Because the main reason that heavy metals are removed from the body with the help of cilantro is due to its sulfur principle or its volatile essential oils and terpenes.

And those are most present in the fresh plant material. And these are. Cilantro is an incredible substance. The, the, the terpenes are what’s called lipophilic, which means that they can penetrate fatty tissue cell walls and they can also cross the blood brain barrier and get into the nervous system where they can chelate and bind to heavy metals and extract them. You know, things like lead, aluminum, cadmium and mercury. And this is very, you know, similar that we, to what we see with something like turpentine that’s also highly lipophilic and also has some ability to help remove heavy metals.

But you know, cilantro has been looked at in several animal studies with really impressive results because what we see there is not only like they basically, you know, poison animals with lead. For example, there are a couple of studies using lead and they have control animals and some that they give cilantro tinctures to. And not only does it remove most of the lead, it, it also reverses or prevents organ damage like it’s been shown to do both. So, you know, because we know lead will do, will do organ damage. So, you know, that’s why I think, you know, we both were interested in this material, but what you said is very interesting.

So if we step back and say, you know, well, a regular tincture is made pretty simply by usually people will get some moonshine or Everclear, right, Some green grain based alcohol or corn based alcohol at whatever strength is available, you know, at the store and soak fresh cilantro in there for maybe a week or two, then filter out the cilantro fibrous material and boom, they have the tincture. And that’s, you know, only the, you know, one step. And this of course is not done the way that you would do it, Owen, but it’s only one, you know, step in the spagyric process which would, you know, do a lot more.

And I want you to describe that in just a moment. But there’s another really important consideration because cilantro, in my opinion, has this property also in the soil that it’s grown in. So if it grows in contaminated soil, it will help remove the, those metals from the soil. So, you know, you have to be careful what cilantro you use to do this process, right? Yeah, absolutely, yeah. The cilantro that I use is wholly organically grown. It’s very high quality. I sourced it very well with that in mind. And yeah, as compared to what you might find at like an herbal apothecary, most of those places, if they, they don’t even really consider to use a higher proof alcohol, sometimes they use vodka.

So there’s a significant amount of water content which drastically reduces the shelf life. Subajiric tinctures, as I was taught to make them, have virtually no shelf life and they only get better with age. And a preparation like that would only be containing two of the principles, the sulfur and the mercury principle and the salt. The body aspect, like the incarnate biologically active part of it in this physical reality is entirely missing. Yeah. And with my preparation, you know, all the ingredients I use and everything I make are either organic or wild harvested. For this process, I use an organic cane spirit and organic cilantro, everything is as the highest quality.

So the cane spirit, we’re talking about fermented and distilled sugar cane here to make the, the spirit and then do you redistill it and if so, how many times, generally speaking? So the, the source that I get it from is very pure and very good. I’ve been working with them for a long time, even since back when I worked for Phoenix. I occasionally will make and incorporate spirit of wine into some Products. The, that’s a little cost prohibitive, but that will be distilled a number of times until it’s pure. Oh, so you’re saying the, the starting material you get has already been distilled more than one time to increase the.

It’s at 95% concentration. So they have, they have distilled it to multiple times or very efficiently. And what. And whereas vodka would be something like 60% or 80%, sometimes. 40. 40, right, 40. Sorry. I’m thinking of the proof. Right. So it’s usually 80 proof. So it’ll be 40% alcohol versus what you’re talking about, 95% alcohol to start. So you think about the alcohol as like a solvent for the sulfur of the cilantro. So if you have more water in there, it’s going to change the solvent properties because water is more polar than alcohol. So you’re going to extract slightly different things from the plant.

Absolutely. And most commercial preparations use dried cilantro. So there’s very little sulfur principle even left in their starting material. Right. Because it’s all been volatilized or evaporated out. Yeah, it’s, it’s a very sensitive sulfur. I’ve, I’ve worked with it freeze dried as well. And even in like the freeze dried supplement that comes out, I don’t know if you’ve ever have used a freeze dryer before, but you know, when you turn it off and drain out the liquid that’s sublimated out of a substance when you work with cilantro, that supplement smells heavily like cilantro. So in my mind there is, even with the freeze drying process, there is still a lot lost in terms of volatile oils.

Right. So my mind you could probably do an alcohol extraction with that liquid. Yeah. When I, when I was working for Phoenix, we did a number of experiments on that and we, it was kind of shelved because we didn’t really get anywhere. It’s a, it’s a strange, it’s a strange substance to work with. It’s mainly like the plant vegetable juices mixed with some of the volatiles. Yeah, it’s an interesting, there’s definitely more work to be done there. Well, you bypass that work by using the fresh material though, don’t you? So you can know that whatever comes out in the spirit.

Right. Is the whole sulfur component. Absolutely. The maximum amount of the medicinal quality that we’re looking for. And then once you’ve incubated the cilantro in the spirit to extract out the sulfur, what’s the next step? Yeah. So Then there are filtration steps. I use vacuum filtration, which is a beautiful technology. I think if a lot of the old alchemists saw the laboratory apparatus that we have access to thanks to modern chemistry, they would be pretty jealous. Right, because without the vacuum it would take a little bit longer. Yeah, that vacuum filtration with Buchner funnels allows you to use really good filters that if you normally pour something into it, it would take forever to filter through because it’s such a good filter.

But you apply vacuum to pull it through so you can affect it much more quickly. And that, I mean filtration and separation is its own alchemical operation and this achieves a near perfect version of that. So you know, when you’re filtering out the biomass from the tincture itself, from the combination of the mercury and sulfur, that is a perfect separation of the, the body, the extracted body from it. The biomass or the mark as herbalists call it, is then incinerated to a black ash. Now do you have to, you have to dry it first before you incinerate it or is it because it’s still probably wet on a filter? Right.

It helps to have it still wet. And as soon as you. The sooner the better because it’s still soaked in that high proof alcohol. So you just touch a, a match or a candle to it. Oh, I see that the liquid is alcohol. So. So it’s flammable. Yeah, it’s, it’s a fun process. Definitely perform outdoors and away from your neighbors because it produces a lot of smoke. How I usually do it, I ignite it in a, in a dish, a flame proof dish over a camp stove and I let it burn down to a black ash.

And then usually by that point all the alcohol is burned off. So there’s not going to be any actual fire anymore. Some operators will pour more alcohol on. But when making spagyric remedies as opposed to alchemical ones, efficiency is also important. And so I use a, like a camp stove underneath to then calcine it. I turn that black ash into a white ash or as close as I can, and then that goes into my kiln, I grind that in between. There are steps of grinding to make sure that it’s like in a mortar and pestle. Yep, yep, I have several, I have a collection of mortar and pestles and they’re my friends.

And yeah, then I goes into my kiln, I get it to as white ash as possible. And then that ash, most, most stuff you might find online. This is the final step, people then just Add the ash back into the preparation, which I. No, that’s not correct. Yeah, I advise caution with that because that can introduce carcinogens into the medicine. There’s still some carbonaceous material from the combustion. Yeah, you’re burning something extremely high temperatures. It’s carbonizing, but yeah. Then that ash is extracted with either water and then vinegar sometimes, and then that extract is then filtered again.

It’s evaporated and you get a crude salt. At that point, you get crude potassium carbonate with still some. No. So it basically crystallizes as it’s drying out, right? Yeah, it. Sometimes when it gets to pure states, it will form beautiful crystalline structures. And then, you know, like the, like the axiom solvate, coagula. The salt work, as this is called. It’s really just about dissolving it and then recombining it over and over again and doing. Repeating this process many times until you get like a 99.9% pure salt of salt to the vegetable kingdom. And then that is the pure material that you use to then combine back with your tincture.

So about how many times would you have to repeat the calcination and then dissolve it in water and dry it out, process? It depends on how. I mean, just, just kind of ballparking what the range is to. Because I want to convey the degree of labor intensity involved. Sometimes it can take up to five or six times. And then there’s a final crystallization to ensure purest property, where you dissolve the final salt in water and then slowly evaporate that out. And as the volume decreases, it crashes out of solution and crystallizes on top of the water.

And when something crystallizes, it can only do that if it is that pure substance. They’ll crystallize as pure gas and carbonate. And you can scoop that off and use that. And then you’re going to add that back to the alcohol tincture. Right, I get that. You, you heat that up to at least 500 degrees Fahrenheit. Because heat is important in this esterification reaction when you put it back in. And then that reaction takes about two weeks. I’ll put that back in an incubator to circulate over gentle heat and continue the reaction. So you, you heat up the salt or you heat up the liquid.

The salt. Okay. And then you add it to the liquid and then you keep heat and keep stirring that or recirculating it. Yeah. If you have it in a sealed vessel with a gentle heat, you can build an incubator. It’ll very gently Distill it over a long period of time. It’ll just distill and then condense. So it’s like a recirculating apparatus. Yeah, absolutely. We used to have that in, in one of the chemistry labs I worked at. We had that for thf even reflux. Like moderate chemical reflux. Yeah, yeah. But it, it just kept re. Because that just sucks water out of the air.

So it’s to keep it anhydrous as much as possible. Yeah, yeah. There are many correlations. I, I think, I think it’d be interesting for chemists, like modern day chemists to look into this stuff and just be like, oh, that’s where this comes from. I do this every day. Well, even if you see just some of the artwork from the alchemists showing them in their laboratory, you can pick out the glassware. Right. I mean, even you’re describing a Buchner funnel. That’s something I used in a chemistry lab. I’m sure you have various other glassware that is the same, you know, whether in fact, you may even buy it from Fisher Scientific.

Right. Because. But we can trace that back, you know, before modern chemistry, that it’s the same, many of the same processes that were a lot of modern, modern distillation apparatus the alchemists invented first. You know, things like alembic heads and retorts and condenser columns and stuff like that. That’s right. Well, very, very, very fascinating. So now tell us a little bit about the final product that you have and where it’s available. Yeah, so this product is available on my website, zeptepysolutions.com right. And we’ll, and we’ll put the link in the show notes, of course. Sure, sure.

Yeah. And on that website, my main bread and butter are more spagyric formulations which are going to be what you might find as a compound medicine, which are different herbs that I take to address a certain issue or health concern from different aspects that these herbs can do and combine together in a compound medicine. And I have several different things available on my website. I only make things that I want to take myself. That’s kind of how the creative process on how I come up with a lot of these things. I just, there’s something that I have that I would like to take or maybe a health concern that I would like to address and I create something for myself and you know, it’s, it’s something that I can then share with the world as a medicine for the body and the soul.

Owen, when you’re working with, you know, different types of plants. Do you like get a feeling from the material like, like that’s different from, you know, species to species? Oh yes, yeah. Particularly if you work with one kind of plant over and over again. For me, that’s been yarrow. I’ve, I’m working currently for my personal alchemical, spiritual practice. I’m working on a plant stone with yarrow and that involves distilling essential oil, steam distillation on loads of yarrow that I go out and wild harvest, fermenting the leftover hydrococcion from that to create alcohol. Just like constantly working with it.

And yeah, you’ll develop a, a friendship in a sense and a relationship with the, the consciousness and the, the soul of these plants that exist wherever they’re found. You know, they all share the, the blueprint that they came from, to grow from. And yeah, I’ve worked with a bunch of herbs and so yeah, they all, I can definitely feel different intelligences from them. Well, this is very fascinating stuff and I think we could probably wax on and on about that, you know, because it is so fascinating. But Owen, it’s really been an interesting journey hearing, you know, about your background, covering some of the basics and you know, even a little bit more philosophical aspects of alchemy and then getting into, you know, your creative, artistic and scientific process of making these substances.

So thank you so much for coming on and having this discussion with me. Thank you, Andy. It’s always a pleasure hanging out with you, man. All right folks, we’ll see you next time. Even if you’re doing your best to live clean, you’re still being exposed from off gassing furniture and plastics in your food, to synthetic fibers, personal care products and even medical imaging procedures, especially fat soluble chemicals. These toxins don’t respond to your average detox. They settle deep in your tissues and you need the right tools to clear them out. That’s why I created the ultimate detox protocol.

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