The process of boiling a fluid and then cooling the resulting gas, resulting in a purified liquid. In alchemy, the gas produced during the distillation was considered the spirit of the substance being distilled, and the purification through heat is also a form of spiritual purification of the substance being distilled.
Readers, please enjoy this guest blog post by Alice Markham-Cantor, author of the new Once & Future Witch Hunt.
My 9x-great-grandmother, Martha Carrier, was hanged in the Salem witch trials. She wasn't a witch. She wasn't an herbalist or a...