# Vine ash

**Cenere di vite**

**Known today as.** Ash of burnt vine wood.

Kind: Mineral

## What did Canale use it for?

In the oil for hexes (ch. 9).

## What does modern science say?

Alkaline ash; its role in the distillation was mechanical. Wood ash is mostly potassium carbonate and lime, strongly alkaline; in Canale’s still it would have held the oils and resins in the mash, and in the ointment it was a mild caustic.

## Pharmacognosy and toxicology

- **potassium carbonate**: 
- **calcium carbonate**: 
- **phosphates**: 

**Mechanism.** The ash of vine prunings is a potash like any wood ash, alkaline and mildly caustic; in an oil it is an inert grit that makes the oil alkaline and a mild abrasive. The vine lent the ash its name and nothing of its nature.

**Dose.** Inert at the amounts in an oil.

**Standing.** A sympathetic ingredient.

## What lore surrounds it?

The alchemists called the ash left after calcining the *caput mortuum*, the dead head, and the salt leached from it the body’s fixed part; vine ash, from the plant of Dionysus and of the Eucharist, was ash of a sacred wood.

## What did the older authorities say?

**Dioscorides.** Gives the ash of vine twigs, with vinegar, for swellings and the bite of serpents, and the lye of it for warts and the hair.

**The dyers and soap-boilers.** Vine ash and other wood ashes were the alkali of every trade before soda: the lye leached from them cleaned wool, made soap with oil, and whitened linen.

## Sources

- Dioscorides, *De materia medica* V.
- Canale, F. (1622). *Discerning and Healing the Bewitched*, ch. 9.

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*Vine ash.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/vine-ash

Historical description, not medical advice.