Eastern approaches such as Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), Unani, Tibetan medicine, etc. are completely legitimate and serve very well as an alternative to the current mechanistic system established by allopathic medicine. But the question arises, don't we in the West have something of our own? Let us immediately remember our rich herbal tradition, in which we can find pieces of an ancient civilization. Don't we have anything that could be placed alongside Asian philosophical systems? Our Western tradition has a rich history, which Paracelsus called Spagyry. Knowing the postulates of spagyry is especially relevant today, when we are faced with the danger of exploiting herbs for explicitly commercial and industrial purposes.

We have countless organic, eco-friendly plant products on the market, which sometimes only serve the sellers. Under the pretext of ecology and health care, certain interests can be hidden in the background. In this light, it is important to learn about the relationship our ancestors had with nature, how they viewed the world and the relationships between different entities in nature. This knowledge comes from Egypt, from inscriptions on various pillars, papyri, walls, tombs, from legends described in temples, it is written between the lines of selected books... Spagyry is a word that we can hear in the circles of alchemists, hermeticists, or perhaps just in old books from previous centuries.

Spagyry is booming again today, but first it is necessary to explain what spagyry is. The word spagyry is said to have been coined by the charismatic Theophrastus Aureolus Bombast von Hehenheim or as he is known to us under the name Paracelsus (Einsiedeln 1493- Salzburg 1541). The word comes from Greek; it is composed of two Greek terms: spao and agheiro, which can also be translated with the Latin terms solve et coagula. The word therefore describes the Art that separates (or eliminates) the pure from the impure and foreign and reunites them into one. This one (sometimes also called quintessence) has the ability to return to a person that lost harmony (health), which we need to continue walking on our spiritual path. Alchemy is a word that is often found in history, but in this case I would mention that the word directly speaks of the Egyptian land. "Al" is an article in Arabic, and "Kemi" is the name given to Egypt.

The spagyrist wants to process or treat a natural entity (plant, mushroom or mineral), to extract divine gifts from it, just as the Egyptian priests did. It is clear that he wants to extract what Van Helmont (Flemish physician, chemist and physiologist, 1577-1644) calls “archeus”, that is, not “active ingredients”, but the soul of the plant, its vital force or archetype. We could say that the action of alchemy and spagyry focuses on what is invisible in the visible, in the non-physical world, in the psychic world (according to Jung’s definition), in the realm of archetypes, gods, those whom the Egyptians called “nether”. In practice, we can say that spagyry is an alchemical operational technique.