Guarana

The eye of the forest. When the ripe fruit of the guarana liana splits open, a black seed stares out of a white aril inside a red husk — an eye, unmistakably, gazing back from the vine. The Sateré-Mawé people of the Amazon, guarana's first cultivators, tell that the plant sprang from the buried eye of a beloved child slain by jealous gods, planted by his mother so that his gaze might remain among the living and watch over the people. The peoples of the Amazon have used the seed for as long as memory to banish weariness and sharpen the watch: to wake the body and quicken the blood, rouse the metabolism, and carry the hunter through the long day when lethargy and exhaustion would pull him down. Its whole signature is vigilance — the open eye, the unsleeping watch, the alertness of the sentry at his post — and hermetically it answers to Mars, wakeful and ready. Our tincture captures the watching fruit of Amazonia in spagyric form — the emblem of the vigilant, for those who keep their own long watch.