Cuti Cuti

High in the Peruvian Andes, in the cracks of sun-blasted rock where almost nothing else consents to live, grows a small silver-backed fern the Quechua call cuti-cuti. Its Czech name, slezinik — spleenwort — points to the old use: for generations the healers of the altiplano reached for it to steady the blood and support the spleen, the organ their tradition held to govern what runs in the veins, and they prized it above all for keeping the body's sugars in even measure and returning strength to those left tired and thin-blooded by the thin air. It keeps an honoured place in Andean folk tradition to this day — a plant gathered on foot, at altitude, from the hard places, and valued for the fern's own hardiness, the strength of what survives where nothing else will. Our tincture captures this fern of the high passes in full spagyric form: frond, salt and spirit of a survivor. Hermetically it stands under Saturn, and rarely is a signature so legible — the solitude of the mountain, the discipline of thin air and cold nights, endurance as a form of wisdom. A Saturnian elixir with the mineral salt returned to the vessel.