About Muddle and Mend
Hi — I’m Kyle Bamboo, and this is where I write about plant alchemy, spagyrics, and the hermetic tradition of herbalism. Not the Instagram version. The actual tradition, with its history, its vocabulary, its internal logic, and its genuine strangeness.
Muddle and Mend takes its name from the alchemical maxim solve et coagula — dissolve and combine. To muddle an herb is to break open what was closed, to release what the plant held in reserve. To mend is the other half: the recombination, the medicine, the repair. The whole blog lives in that movement.
What This Site Covers
- Spagyrics — the art of separating and recombining a plant’s Salt, Sulfur, and Mercury. Paracelsus’s tria prima, applied.
- Planetary herbalism — the doctrine of correspondences. Which plants answer to which planets, which body systems they govern, and why the system is internally coherent.
- Hermetic philosophy — the Emerald Tablet, the doctrine of signatures, the logic of “as above, so below” that holds the whole framework together.
- Practical preparation — tinctures, infusions, decoctions, and spagyric extracts. The actual work, not just the theory.
The Approach
This is not a wellness blog. I take the tradition seriously — which means engaging with what Paracelsus, Culpeper, and the Islamic alchemists actually wrote, not a softened modern gloss. It also means being honest about what the tradition can and cannot claim. The correspondences are a coherent heuristic framework with two thousand years of refinement behind them. They are not a law of physics. Both things are true.
If you’ve spent time with herbs and wanted to go deeper than “lavender is calming” — this site is for you. Start with the manifesto, or go straight to the tria prima.