In XUFU Original it is one hundred milligrams of Turnera diffusa. Ease and desire. The leaf, not the root.
A Maya name, then a saint's
Jesuit missionaries in Baja California wrote it down in the seventeenth century. Juan Maria de Salvatierra, 1699: the people of the north made a sweetened extract and drank it as a love potion. The Spanish named it damiana, for St Damian, patron of pharmacists, or so the etymology likes to say. The Maya name is older and more practical. Mis kok, the broom that sweeps illness from the chest. Tea, smoke, a dry-country shrub from Texas to the Caribbean.
Mexico kept it as tea, as liqueur, as a plant you can still find on arid ground. Los Cabos still pours a damiana margarita. Folklore likes to claim it was in the original. Folklore would.
What the catalogues sold
Europe and America bought the reputation in the 1870s. Patent tonics. The US National Formulary listed it from 1888. Pemberton put it in French Wine Coca, then left the leaf out of the non-alcoholic drink that followed. The Latin sometimes printed was Turnera aphrodisiaca, which is a salesman's binomial. We use diffusa.
Passifloraceae now, with passionflower. The leaf is aromatic, slightly bitter, resinous. We keep it next to muira puama for one reason: a plant with a people and a climate behind it, not a Victorian cure-all.
Why it sits in every formula
Part of the shared base. A small dose, carried through all five. Muira puama brings drive. Damiana brings ease. Whatever the lead plant is asked to do, it is asked to do it with this beside it.
This journal will keep one plate at a time. History first. The formula second. Claims last, and only the ones we can stand behind.
End of plate III.