Spagyric Tincture (Why the Spent Plant Gets Burned and Put Back)

Make a standard tincture and the soaked plant goes in the bin once the liquid is pressed out. A spagyric tincture keeps it. That spent plant is dried and burned to a pale grey ash, and the mineral salts in the ash are cleaned and stirred back into the liquid. The extra step is what the word on the label means, and it is how Mara makes its Pine Pollen.

Spagyric meaning

The word is built from two Greek verbs. Spao means to draw out or separate. Ageiro means to gather or bring together. Paracelsus, the Swiss physician and alchemist who died in 1541, is credited with coining it, and his followers carried spagyric medicine across Europe through the second half of the 16th century and well into the 17th.

Paracelsus taught that every substance holds three principles, which he called the tria prima: sulphur, mercury and salt. Spagyric makers working with plants read sulphur as the plant's essential oil, mercury as the alcohol, and salt as the minerals that stay in the dried plant body. You separate them, purify each one, then join them again. Five hundred years later, a lab making a spagyric tincture follows the same order.

The spagyric method, step by step

1. Soak. The plant sits in alcohol for weeks while the alcohol draws out what it can dissolve.
2. Press and filter. The liquid is drained off and set aside. A standard tincture is finished at this point.
3. Burn the spent plant. The leftover material is dried and burned down to ash.
4. Calcine. The ash is heated again until it turns pale grey, close to white. John Reid, in his course on practical alchemy, calcines plant salts at 600°C for a week and repeats the cycle.
5. Leach the salts. Water dissolves the soluble minerals out of the ash. The water is filtered and dried off, leaving clean white salts.
6. Recombine. The purified salts go back into the tincture, and the liquid rests while they settle in.

Some makers add fermentation and distillation, the way Reid's longer recipes do. Every spagyric tincture shares steps 3 to 6, the part where the burned plant comes back into the bottle.

How spagyric tinctures differ from a standard tincture

A standard tincture is an alcohol extract. Plant in, alcohol in, strain, bottle. Mineral salts dissolve poorly in strong alcohol, so most of them leave with the marc, the wet pulp left after pressing, and end up on a compost heap.

Spagyric tinctures take that pulp and return its mineral part to the liquid. Hold the two bottles side by side and one carries what alcohol pulled from the plant, while the other carries that plus the ash salts of the same plant. Herbalists call the second a whole plant extract. A Paracelsian would have said all three principles were back together.

The method adds days of work and a kiln to the job, so the word spagyric on a label tells you something specific about what happened to the plant after the alcohol was poured off.

Why men want their pine pollen spagyric

Pine pollen's reputation with men goes back to 1971, when M. Šaden-Krehula and colleagues isolated testosterone, epitestosterone and androstenedione from Scots pine pollen. It was the first plant in which those androgens had been found. Long before that, China recorded pine pollen as song hua fen in herbal texts from the Tang dynasty on, and it is listed in the 2020 Chinese Pharmacopoeia. Korean cooks press it into songhwa dasik tea cakes.

What two pilot studies in men found

In 2024 Neil Wolkodoff and colleagues published a pilot study in Annals of Clinical and Medical Case Reports. Ten men aged 47 to 78 took a pine pollen tincture under the tongue, morning and evening, for 8 weeks. Their average total testosterone rose from 362.5 to 448.4 ng/dL. Their qADAM scores, a questionnaire on sex drive, erections, energy and mood in ageing men, went from 23.9 to 31.7.

The 2025 follow-up by Gerald Haase, Wolkodoff, Stacy Beal and Robert Mordkin put 11 men aged 25 to 50 on the same routine. Free testosterone went from 10.48 to 11.72 ng/dL. SHBG, the protein that binds testosterone in the blood, fell from 29.1 to 27.4 nmol/L.

Both studies used a tincture. Men who take pine pollen most often report stronger morning wood and more drive, in bed and in the gym. Our pine pollen guide, from the male cones to the Korean tea cakes, covers the plant and its history in full.

Mara's spagyric Pine Pollen

Mara starts with wild-harvested Pinus radiata pollen, cracked-cell, so the hard outer wall of each grain is broken open before extraction. The pollen is extracted in alcohol, then the minerals left behind are returned to the liquid. The whole plant ends up in the bottle.

It tastes soft and lightly earthy, with a faint sweetness behind the alcohol. Fill the dropper, hold it under your tongue for 20 to 30 seconds and swallow, or stir it into water, tea, juice or a smoothie. Take 1 to 2 droppers a day. A 50 ml bottle lasts 30 to 50 days, and a dropper before your first coffee takes about ten seconds.

Then there's the glass. Light breaks plant extracts down over time, and a bottle beside the bathroom mirror gets a lot of it. Dark amber glass is a step in the right direction. Dark Miron glass is the gold standard, and Mara bottles Pine Pollen in it, so the last dropper comes out as well kept as the first.

Simple ingredients: premium quality extract. The bottle fits in a jacket pocket or the side pocket of a gym bag.

What to check on a spagyric tincture label

• The species. "Pine pollen" alone could come from any of more than 100 pines. Mara names Pinus radiata.
• The word spagyric, with a line saying the minerals or salts are returned to the liquid.
• Cracked-cell, if it's pollen.
• Wild-harvested or farmed.
• The glass. Dark Miron glass keeps light off the extract better than dark amber.

Pine Pollen considerations

Contains alcohol. If you're pregnant, nursing or taking medication, ask your doctor before using it.

Questions people ask about spagyric tinctures

What does spagyric mean?

It comes from the Greek spao, to separate, and ageiro, to gather. Paracelsus is credited with the term in the 16th century, for a method that splits a plant into its parts and joins them again.

What is the difference between a spagyric tincture and a regular tincture?

A regular tincture holds what alcohol draws out of the plant. A spagyric tincture adds the spent plant's mineral salts, which are burned to ash, purified and returned to the liquid.

Does a spagyric tincture contain alcohol?

Yes. The extraction is done in alcohol, and Mara's Pine Pollen contains alcohol.

How do men take spagyric pine pollen?

One to two droppers a day, held under the tongue for 20 to 30 seconds or stirred into a drink. The men in the 2024 study took theirs morning and evening.