Lemon Balm

Melissa is Greek for the honeybee, and the plant has belonged to the bees since antiquity — beekeepers rubbed the hives with her leaves so the swarm would know its home and never leave it. Paracelsus, the father of spagyria itself, held melissa in extraordinary esteem and prepared from her his primum ens melissae, an elixir he tied to the renewal of youth; the Carmelite nuns of seventeenth-century Paris distilled her into their famous Carmelite water, sold across Europe for two hundred years. Through all that history she has been the gentle gladdener of the heart: used to calm a scattered mind, loosen tension and unease, quiet the anxious hour and invite an easy sleep — calm, the old texts held, that need not cost wakefulness. Hermetically she stands under Jupiter, the greater benefic — planet of wisdom, expansion and generosity — and her signature is gladness without noise. Enriched with the plant's alchemical mineral salt, a Jovian elixir for the contemplative shelf.