☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The Conqueror of Mountains, the black gold of the mountains: the resin born of rock over the centuries, from Shiva to the herders of the Altai, and the pure paste we offer.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
Ayurveda's rasayana, with its hut of three enclosures and its rasayana of conduct; the adaptogen of Lazarev and Brekhman, born in Soviet laboratories. Two histories told side by side, with their dates.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The small round leaf of the rice paddies where, legend says, the injured tiger comes to roll: its names in India, Sri Lanka, China and Korea, the morning kola kenda, and our leaf powder.
☥Sacred masculine
In 1947, in Leningrad, Nikolai Lazarev coined the word adaptogen. Brekhman, Vladivostok, eleuthero, the cosmonauts: the dated, named history of a word, without its promise.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The devil's bush of the taiga, the ci wu jia of the Chinese herbals, which in the 1960s became the root of the Vladivostok pharmacologists and then of the cosmonauts. Its story, and our root as a decoction.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The devil's bush of the taiga, the ci wu jia of the Chinese herbals, which in the 1960s became the root of the Vladivostok pharmacologists and then of the cosmonauts. Its story, and our root as a decoction.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The golden root, a plant of all extremes: from Dioscorides to the Vikings, from the Golden Mountains of the Altai to our morning decoction, the story of Rhodiola rosea and the way we drink it at the House.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
Hot water dissolves beta-glucans, alcohol dissolves triterpenes. Dual extraction combines both: how it is done, and why we use it for reishi and chaga, and not for lion's mane or cordyceps.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
Houtou of the Chinese imperial court, yamabushitake of Japan: the tradition of lion's mane, and what we offer, as a powder or an 8:1 hot-water fruiting-body extract.
☥The Way of Adaptogens & Mushrooms
The lingzhi of the Taoists, the mannentake of Japan: the tradition of reishi, from Magu to the edict of 1004, and what we offer, as wild Siberian slices or a 15:1 extract.
☥The Witch Plants
The herbcraft of Europe's knowing women still lives in plants you can hold — Mugwort, Wild Poppy, Lavender. Belladonna, who bears the name of Atropos, the Fate who cuts the thread, will never be among them: three berries kill a child. INFUSE tells you why — sources and memory.
☥Ancient civilizations
Tussilago farfara pierces the still-frozen earth at the start of spring — yellow flower on bare ground, before any leaf. Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny prescribed it for cough. In the Middle Ages, its flower was the sign of apothecaries. Here is coltsfoot, the plant of the lungs and of the tired courageous.
☥Ancestral history
Twelfth-century Rhineland. A Benedictine abbess receives visions and translates them into a living pharmacopoeia: the Physica, 230 plants classified by their temperament. At the center of it all, viriditas — vital greenness, the green force that binds body, soul and cosmos.
☥The Witch Plants
Mandragora officinarum is one of the most anciently attested plants of the Western pharmacopoeia. From the Bible to Hildegard, a surgical anaesthetic for 1,500 years. Today reduced to a prop in a children's novel. INFUSE refuses that, and restores her depth.
☥Ancient civilizations
Chamaemelum nobile is the plant that responds to pressure by giving more — trampled, it releases more fragrance. From the Ebers Papyrus to Beatrix Potter, 3500 years of teaching the body to set down without resistance.
☥Alchemy & spagyric
Sixteenth century, Basel. Paracelsus burns the works of Galen before his students and declares: nature is the only book. He invents spagyrics — the alchemical extraction of Salt, Sulphur and Mercury — and lays the foundations of a medicine of signatures. A forerunner of modern pharmacology and of systems thinking, he remains one of the most misunderstood figures in the history of plants.
☥The Witch Plants
Christopher Alexander spent his life searching for why some places are alive and others dead. Silvia Federici spent hers understanding why modernity burned the women who knew how to inhabit them. Lewis Hyde showed that the gift circulates differently from the commodity. Set at the same table, the three write a manual of dwelling — addressed first of all to those whom history has stripped of the tools.
☥Alchemy & spagyric
From the Arab alembic of Al-Kindi in the 9th century to the copper stills of today's distilleries, distillation is one of the most universal techniques for transforming plants. It concentrates the volatile spirit — what the alchemists called Mercury — while preserving the plant's olfactory signature and its potency.
☥The Witch Plants
Lewis Hyde showed that authentic creativity works like a gift in circulation — not like a property to be hoarded. What the figure of the trickst...