Manayupa

A creeping legume of the Peruvian highlands whose Quechua name is said to declare that 'its uses are countless' — and the healers of the Andes took the name at its word, reaching for manayupa across generations as one of the great cleansing herbs of their tradition. They used it above all to purify: to cleanse the liver and the blood of what the body no longer needed, to move and strengthen the digestion and the waterways, and to cool inflammation. In the Andean way of seeing, purification was never only of the body — the curanderos worked with manayupa where old anger and stored fury had settled, for in that cosmology the cleansing of the organism and the cleansing of the emotions were one and the same Work. Hermetically she stands under Venus — and it is a telling assignment: not the harsh scouring of Mars but the gentle purification of the loving hand, the rinsing of the vessel so that something finer may be poured in. With the plant's alchemical mineral salt returned to the tincture, in the Venusian register.