A Natural History of the Senses

by Diane Ackerman

  In ancient times, when perfumes were almost as mystical as they were precious, explorers set out in search of their healing or aphrodisiac qualities. Our sense of smell has contributed to the spread of language, which evolved at the crossroads of ancient trade routes. Yearning for spices, perfumes, medicinal herbs, and exotic talismans, people set sail across continents and seas, and when they arrived they had to be able to haggle and, eventually, keep records. I don’t recall anyone celebrating the senses of smell or taste during our bicentennial in 1976. But Columbus’s quest, we tend to forget, was sensuous as well as capitalistic, adventuresome, and ego-driven. It was partly the obsessive demand for exotic spices and perfumes that prompted him to set sail in the first place.

  Perfume began in Mesopotamia as incense offered to the gods to sweeten the smell of animal flesh burned as offerings, and it was used in exorcisms, to heal the sick, and after sexual intercourse. The word’s Latin etymology tells us how it worked: per = through + fumar to smoke. Tossed onto a fire, incense would fill the sky with a smoke otherworldly and magical, which stung the nostrils as if clamorous spirits were clawing their way into the body. Perfumed smoke began with the things of this earth but climbed quickly into the realm of the gods. Atop the famous ziggurat-shaped Tower of Babel, which stretched closer to the gods than mortals could reach, priests lit pyres of incense. Given the general hand-me-down history of fashion and luxury, perfumes were probably reserved for the gods at first, then priests were allowed them, then godlike leaders, then leaders, then aides, all the way down the social totem pole. Prehistoric people applied perfumes to their bodies, as primitive (and more sophisticated) peoples do today. An anthropologist friend who works with Indian tribes in the Amazon tells of one tribe in which the women wrap a kind of skirt made of sage around their waists and the men rub a fragrant root under their arms as deodorant. The first civilization to go on record as using perfume regularly, extravagantly, and with nuance was Egypt. Their elaborate burial and embalming practices required spices and unguents. They burned tons of incense in elaborate worship rituals. Scent became a national obsession during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut, of the New Kingdom (1558–1085 B.C.), who planted large botanical gardens and burned incense on the terraces leading to her temples. The Egyptians used lavish quantities of perfume and incense in their religious cults, eventually coming to enjoy them for personal daily use as well, especially during Egypt’s Golden Age. They anointed their bodies with perfumes to ward off magical hexes, for medicinal purposes, and as beauty lotions, because they prized the feel of silky, scented skin. Egyptians discovered enfleurage (pressing aromatics into fatty oils) and created beautiful glass vessels to hold their potions, including the millefiori and other styles Venetian glassmakers were to use centuries later; they indulged in elaborate beauty rituals and had an almost modern fascination with makeup. If we were to observe a woman of ancient Egypt fixing her face and hair before a dinner party, we would find her seated at her makeup table, which would hold a variety of elegant, imaginatively designed perfume spoons, receptacles for unguents, vases, flacons, and boxes of eye shadow. She might well have a tattoo of a scarab or flower on her shoulder—Egyptian women were fond of tattoos. (When an Egyptian tomb was opened in the 1920s and a mummy discovered to be delicately tattooed, Lady Randolph Churchill and other socialites decided to get scarab tattoos themselves.) An ancient Egyptian socialite attending a party would wear a wax cone of unguent on the top of her head; it would melt slowly, covering her face and shoulders with a trickle of perfumed syrup. It probably felt as if small beetles were crawling all over her, pushing balls of fragrance. The Egyptians were a clean, ingeniously sybaritic people obsessed with hygiene; they invented the sumptuous art of the bath—an art that might be restorative, sensuous, religious, or calming, depending on one’s mood. This they would usually follow with a massage of aromatic oils to soothe the muscles and calm the nerves—aromatherapy, a technique first used in the embalming of mummies. Researchers at Yale’s Psychophysiology Center are studying how smell can decrease stress and increase alertness. They claim that the smell of spiced apples can reduce blood pressure in people under stress and avert a panic attack, and that lavender can wake up one’s metabolism and make one more alert. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that related tests at the University of Cincinnati have shown how fragrances added to the atmosphere of a room can increase typing speed and work efficiency in general.

  At the Sonesta Beach Spa in Bermuda, I stretch out on a table in front of a window, through which I can see and hear the crash and caterwaul of the sea. A pretty young woman with large blue eyes enters the small room, wearing a white belted cosmetician’s dress. Fresh from Yorkshire, she hasn’t been on the island long enough to develop a tan on the twelve weekends she’s had free. Her boyfriend is in the marine division of the Bermuda police, and yesterday she went to the Cricket Cup Match with him. She has bunions on her feet, inherited from her father’s side of the family, along with the small symmetrical nose she thinks is too large, and the straight blond hair she thinks is too thin. Today she has me lie on my back and then discreetly covers me with blue terry-cloth towels, which she will rearrange as the hour progresses. In the past few days, she has seen my body enough to know its flaws and graces. Only a lover could touch it more often, or better. Now we are as relaxed about my nakedness as old spouses. She explains the next treatment: aromatherapy. This ancient Egyptian technique fell out of favor for many hundreds of years, reemerging in the eighteenth century, when aromatics and herbals returned to fashion. Because what I seek is relaxation more than mummification, my masseuse will blend lavender, neroli, and sandalwood in a sweet almond-oil base and massage my body from head to toe in windblown patterns that concentrate on the lymph system. I am not to shower afterwards, because the oils massaged into circulation need time to penetrate and soothe. Starting at the calves, she massages in fan shapes, rolling, circular, roaming, always returning to the point of origin, then veering off again in symmetrical arcs or ripples. The fragrance—musky, heavy, Mideastern—seems to roll up my body. After the legs, she does the rump; then the back, pausing to apply pressure at certain stations down each side of the spine. She skates across the shoulder blades, probing, then smoothing. The treatment’s effect comes in part, she quietly explains, from the “energy flow” created between the two bodies. A veil of scent rises around my neck, collars me in pungent mist; her hands keep revolving, heating the oils. Unexpectedly, my mind begins to drift to when I was a child and my father drove us to Florida all the way from Illinois for a brief summer vacation. The journey from outside Chicago to Florida was long, and my mother packed a cold chest of sandwiches and Hawaiian Fruit Punch, a wicker basket of our favorite toys and some new comic and activity books. I picture the trip in such surprising detail: the “yup-yup leaves” that fairies in one of the comics harvested, the Spanish moss on the trees we passed, my mother, who loved to sing in the car, sitting in a gray dress patterned with large, mauve, cabbagey roses. She wore her straight brown hair Ava Gardner style. Sometimes, when she was silent, her left index finger would move sharply in a way that intrigued me. I was too young to understand that she was probably talking to herself. Why have I remembered that time? I was eight. My mother had me when she was thirty. I am now the age she was then, and she had two children. This vivid memory stays with me and fills me with a thick, warm lager. Then the masseuse swaddles me in a pale-blue blanket. The light-blue walls of the room have a small woodblock print: thousands of brown chevrons. Above each one floats a pair of gray quotation marks angled like those at the end of an utterance.

  CLEOPATRA’S HEIRS

  Masters of aromatics, the Egyptians had many uses for cedarwood: in mummification, as incense, and to protect papyruses from the assaults of insects. Cleopatra’s cedarwood ship, on which she received Antony, had perfumed sails; incense burners ringed her throne, and she herself was scented from head to toe. I return to her now because she was the quintessential devotee of pe
rfume. She anointed her hands with kyphi, which contained oil of roses, crocus, and violets; she scented her feet with aegyptium, a lotion of almond oil, honey, cinnamon, orange blossoms, and henna. The walls were an aviary of roses secured by nets, and her regally perfumed presence arrived before her, like a kind of calling card in the scent-drenched wind. As Shakespeare imagines the scene: “From the barge/ A strange invisible perfume hits the sense/ Of the adjacent wharfs.” Romans became famous for their spa-like grandeur, but they actually borrowed the bath from the sybaritic Egyptians.

  In the ancient world, royal architecture itself was often aromatic. Potentates built whole palaces of cedarwood, in part because of its sweet, resiny scent, and in part because it was a natural insect repellent. In the Nanmu Hall at the imperial summer palace of the Manchu emperors at Ch’eng-te, the beams and paneling, all of cedarwood, were lacquerless and paintless, so that the fragrance of the wood could influence the air. Builders of mosques used to mix rose water and musk into mortar; the noon sun would heat it and bring out the perfumes. The doors of Sargon II’s eighth-century B.C. palace in what is now Khorsabad were so scented that they would waft perfume when visitors entered or left. Pharaonic barges and coffins were made of cedarwood. The temple of Diana at Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, which had columns almost sixty feet high, survived for two hundred years, then burned down in 356 B.C., aromatically aflame. Legend says that, in shame or as an offering, it burned when Alexander the Great was born.

  Ancient he-men were heavily perfumed. In a way, strong scents widened their presence, extended their territory. In the pre-Greek culture of Crete, athletes anointed themselves with specific aromatic oils before the games. Greek writers of around 400 B.C. recommended mint for the arms, thyme for the knees, cinnamon, rose, or palm oil for the jaws and chest, almond oil for the hands and feet, and marjoram for the hair and eyebrows. Egyptian men, attending a dinner party, would receive garlands of flowers and their choice of perfumes at the door. Flower petals would be scattered underfoot, so they could make a fragrant stir when guests trod on them. Statues at these banquets often spurted scented water from their several orifices. Before retiring, a man would crush solid perfume until it was an oily powder and scatter it onto his bed so that he could absorb its scent while he slept. Homer describes the obligatory courtesy of offering visitors a bath and aromatic oils. Alexander the Great was a lavish user of both perfumes and incense, and was fond enough of saffron to have his tunics soaked in its essence. Babylonian and Syrian men wore heavy makeup and jewelry, as well as laboriously arranged coiffures of tiny ringlets set with perfumed lotions. In ancient Rome, the passion reached such heights that both men and women took baths in perfume, soaked their clothes in it, and perfumed their horses and household pets. The gladiators applied scented lotions all over—a different scent for each area of the body—before they fought. And, like other Roman men and women, they used pigeon dung to bleach their hair. In their equivalent of a locker room, before a gory contest with a lion, crocodile, or man, they might have been talking rough, but their hands were applying sweet scents. Roman women applied scents to different parts of their bodies, just as Roman men did, and I imagine they spent some time deciding whether sandalwood feet and jasmine breasts went well with a neroli neck and lavender thighs. With Christianity came a Spartan devotion to restraint, a fear of seeming self-indulgent, and so men stopped wearing scents for a while. (Even so, a religious symbolism attached to favorite flowers and their scents. For example, the carnation was in favor because its smell resembles that of cloves, and cloves themselves resemble the nails that were driven into Christ’s cross.) As John Trueman puts it in The Romantic Story of Scent: “The men of the ancient world were clean and scented. European men of the Dark Ages were dirty and unscented. Those of medieval times, and of modern times up to about the end of the 17th century, were dirty and scented.… Nineteenth-century men were clean and unscented.” But men seldom wandered far afield from desirable scents. The crusaders returned from their travails wearing rose water. Louis XIV kept a stable of servants just to perfume his rooms with rose water and marjoram, to wash his shirts and other apparel in a stew of cloves, nutmeg, aloe, jasmine, orange water, and musk; he insisted that a new perfume be invented for him every day. At “The Perfumed Court” of Louis XV, servants used to drench doves in different scents and release them at dinner parties, to weave a tapestry of aromas as they flew around the guests. The Puritans did away with scents, but soon enough men took them up again.

  An eighteenth-century woman’s dressing called for elaborate preparations and a discerning nose: She wore sweet-smelling hair powder and scented makeup; her perfumed clothes were kept in an aromatic clothespress; she lavishly perfumed her body, and then soaked cotton pomanders in cologne to tuck into her bodice. Potpourris sat on her tables, scenting the room from their Chinese porcelain containers (“porcelain” is a word with a fascinating history, which leads back, through cowry shells, to the genitals of a female pig, which is obviously what its silky texture reminded them of). At midday, she changed into a fresh array of aromas equally overwhelming. And then again at evening. Napoleon’s passion for luxury included his favorite cologne water, made of neroli and other ingredients, 162 bottles of which he ordered from his perfumer, Chardin, in 1810. After he washed, he liked to pour cologne over his neck, chest, and shoulders. Even on his most arduous campaigns, in his elaborately decorated tent he took time to choose rose- or violet-scented lotions, gloves, and other finery. During the Napoleonic Wars, British sea captains sent on to the Empress Josephine roses destined for her garden at Malmaison (where she had 250 varieties); couriers with new varieties of roses had immunity passing between England and France. Elizabeth I adored gloves scented with ambergris; she not only wore perfumed cloaks, she required that her courtiers be heavily scented, too, so that they might surround her sweetly when they moved. A patron of the arts, Elizabeth was single-handedly responsible for the glory of the Elizabethan theater and the well-being of many writers, Shakespeare included, and she relished her position at the center of sensory and artistic life. She was particularly fond of Sir Walter Raleigh, and so, it may be assumed, of the strawberry cologne he liked to wear. Elizabeth kept her pets doused in scent, and she wore a pomander (an apple rolled in cinnamon and dressed in cloves) to ward off the plague.

  This scent obsession started long before. The first gift to the Christ Child was incense and, in the eleventh century, Edward the Confessor presented Westminster Abbey with a sacred and surprisingly imperishable relic—some of the original frankincense carried by the Magi. In India, the art of abhyanga, a musky rubdown of female elephants to increase their sexual attraction to male elephants, still exists. In the ancient courts of Japan, clocks burned a different incense every fifteen minutes, and geishas were paid by the number of scent sticks consumed. Perfumes have obsessed every culture and religion, but the ultimate promise is probably in the Koran: Those religious enough to go to heaven will find there voluptuous companions called houris (from the Arabic haurā’, dark-eyed woman), who will attend to every whim and invent new cravings, which they will then quench. The ultimate font of delights, they are not merely perfumed—according to the Koran, they are made entirely of sandalwood. They are pure smell, pure pleasure. How fitting. In a sense, the houris return us to that time, before thought, before sight, when smell was all we had to guide us down the dimly lit corridors of evolution.

  *Aldehydes are a broad generic class of organic molecules, most of which are naturally occurring; rum and wine are flavored by wood aldehydes, which seep in from the keg.

  *The authors of a paper in Science a few years ago discovered that some black men appear to have larger penises than white men—that is, the penis appears larger when in repose, because the gene that carries sickle-cell anemia tends to make the penis semi-erect when it’s flaccid I was told that the authors of the study had hesitated for some time before publishing their findings, and then did so anxiously and w
ith misgivings.