Tribulus

The caltrop vine. Tribulus is Latin for the caltrop — the four-spiked iron burr that armies from Rome to the medieval world scattered before cavalry charges — and the plant earned the name honestly: its seed is a woody burr of the same design, and it thrives where the soil is hardest and the sun most fierce, on ground that defeats nearly everything else. In Ayurveda it is called Gokshura, 'the cow's hoof', and the classical texts counted it among the plants of vigour and generative fire; the folk healers of the old world reached for it whenever strength, drive and stamina had run dry. It was used to rekindle the body's fire and endurance — to restore vigour and muscle tone to the tired, to strengthen the reproductive powers and the loins and kidneys where Mars sits enthroned, and to move the water and the blood of the lower body; among athletes it long bore the name 'permitted doping', the plant that returns strength to a spent body without robbing it of clarity. Hermetically the assignment could not be plainer: Mars, the armoured planet, in his most literal emblem — the weapon that grows out of the ground. The tincture of the burr and the badlands, in spagyric form.