The distilled vegetables will only be possible to obtain by the means of distillation, with the spirit of wine of the plants that contains essential oil.
At that suitable season, choose a plant and pick the blossom summits that contain the essential oil. Next, cut them in pieces and with them fill a 6-litre cucurbit that you will use to distil the essential oil.
Pour in 500 ml of spirit of wine well rectified at 60º or other without so much amounts of water.
Let to digest one or two hours to the temperature of 40º C. First, distil with soft heat, and later, with a stronger one, without surpassing the 80º C, so that it distils the whole spirit of wine that was introduced.
The spirit of wine will drag with itself some water along with the essential oil of the plant, which will be inseparably dissolved in the spirit of wine.
After everything is distilled, turn off the oven and let it to cool. Remove the helm. Now, with a hook of thick wire, remove from the cucúrbita the whole plant and dry it in the sun. After it is dry, incinerate it on a suitable iron foil or porringer.
Calcinate them in an iron frying pan or in a mud porringer, on a gas stove, with a very strong fire and extract the salt as the Art demands (to see Extraction of the Salt of the Plants).
Pour the distilled liquids in a circulation or incubation vase. Following take the salt well calcinated and still hot and pour it in the distilled liquids; place the upper vase and shake circularly, in order to better dissolve it.
Let to circulate for 10 days. The water contained in the spirit of wine will dissolve the salt. If it is not dissolved completely, the remaining salt will be crystallised in the bottom of the vase.
This process is similar to the distillation of the essential oils because the oil inseparably meets and dissolves in the spirit of wine, but spagyricaly, it is more complete for having the plant salt in dissolution. Just as the essential oil, this distillate can be taken in simple drops or in homeopathic doses.
There are some artists that make the spagyrical vegetable distillate, by fermenting the chosen plant in water with sugar, giving like this, origin to an alcohol that dissolves the essential oil of the chosen plant. We never used this process because we consider that in the fermentation process, it looses a part of the plant’s essential oil. Besides, for our process, it is the spirit of wine (mercury of the wine) that makes the essential oil extraction.
Rubellus Petrinus