Preparation of a Golden Spirit of Wine, a medicinal potion, is a recipe from the writings of Dutch-German alchemist Johann Glauber. He's famous for Glauber's salt, sodium sulfate (Na₂SO₄), and discovering the rich secret of the purple flame of fulminating gold.
In alchemy the Spirit of Wine is distilled wine, or in liquor-making a brandy distilled several times. The spirit is the essence of the wine traveling as vapor to the top of the distilling vessel, there to condense and run down the spout or condensing tube.
Distillation is considered to bring out the pure essence, spirit or quintessence of a substance. This is highly significant to alchemists who work to purify or transform their subjects with this method.
The Recipe for Golden Spirit of Wine as Explained by Herr Glauber:
"Take white or red tartar, dissolve it in water, and separate all its gross sulfur by a certain precipitating matter (process of lixiviation). The impurity, thus abiding in the water, is to be separated from the precipitated tartar by pouring out the water."
The tartars are tartaric acid or potassium bitartrate. It forms as crystals or residue of wine. In ancient times it's sourced from empty wine barrels. Potassium bitartrate is processed into cream of tartar.
Potassium bitartrate is naturally whitish. Red or unpurified potassium bitartrate retains the color of the grape juice from which it's separated.
Glauber continues:
"The tartar remaining at the bottom like a snow sand, is to be well purged by repeated washings with water until the power itself puts on a snowy whiteness. This process of precipitation must be repeated until the addition of fresh lixivium to the clear solution no longer gives rise to any more black feces.
"Dissolve some pounds of this pure and acceptable tartar in cold water, so as to make it sufficiently acid. Put this solution in some warm place, or in horse-dung, or in a warm balneum [bain Marie], that the tartar may begin to putrefy, may lose acidity, and acquire a sort of sweetness, for which, before it come to be, there is required the time of some months."
"After it has lost its acidity, all the water present is to be evaporated per balneum, until it become a thick and black juice, like honey. This being set in a glass in the sand, and being urged with a stronger heat than was made in balneo, will yield a fiery spirit, such an one as will mix with gold dissolved in spirit of salt [hydrochloric acid], will separate the pure parts of digestion, attract them to itself from the more gross parts, and so will perform its office in medicine even to the most high admiration."
In reality, gold doesn't dissolve in hydrochloric acid, but does so with the addition of nitric acid (known as the queen of acids) to the mix, making aqua regia. But that's not really the point.
Putrefaction is the alchemical process of breaking down a substance to its base nature, decay or blackening (nigredo). Ideally it leads to a stage of purification.
Setting the glass in the sand refers to a sand bath, in which the vessel is placed in sand instead of water, and heated. Slow steady heating of vessel contents this way, sometimes for many days, is the alchemical process of digestion.
In digestion, horse dung is commonly used to heat the vessel due to its natural properties of decomposition. It's the alchemical equivalent of a slow cooker.
Non-Fiction Books:
Fiction Books:
READ: Lora Ley Adventures - Germanic Mythology Fiction Series
READ: Reiker For Hire - Victorian Detective Murder Mysteries