by Mandy Aftel
We were still out of sight of the crest of their plateau and separated from them by a dense jungle, when we heard a clamor of festive cries. “They have smelt us coming. They have smelt our odor,” the guide explained to us. We were still more than one hundred yards of jungle away from them. Moreover, a loud waterfall nearby would have made it impossible for them to have heard us. The realization on various occasions that these primitive people had olfactory capacities as sharp as those given to original man, as acutely sensitive as that of many animals, never ceased to amaze and surprise us.
Umeda hunters7 in New Guinea were reported to sleep with bundles of herbs under their pillows in order to inspire dreams of a successful hunt that they could follow, like a map, when they awoke the next day. The Berbers of Morocco8 were known to inhale the fragrant smoke of pennyroyal, thyme, rosemary, and laurel as a cure for headaches and fever. They believed that smelling a narcissus flower could protect them from syphilis, and that malicious spirits could be forced from the body by the scent of burning benzoin mixed with rue, and consumed in the aromatic fires.
People deprived of other senses often have an extraordinary olfactory awareness. Helen Keller, Classen notes, “could recognize an old country house9 by its ‘several layers of odors,’ discern the work people engaged in by the scent of their clothes, and remember a woman she’d met only once by the scent of her kiss. So important a role did smell play in her life that, when Keller lost her sense of smell and taste for a short period and was obliged … to rely wholly on her sense of touch, she felt she finally understood what it must be like for a sighted person to go blind.”
A part from allowing us to detect a gas leak or a carton of spoiled milk, however, to most of us smell is most “useful” for the immediacy with which it connects us to internal states of consciousness, emotion, and fantasy. Odor elicits strong reactions from us, unmediated by oughts and shoulds. For this reason, the sense of smell has long been celebrated in literature, from Charles Baudelaire’s scent-laced Les Fleurs du Mal to the aromatic aesthetic of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À Rebours to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Colette defined herself as an “olfactory novelist,” a title Marcel Proust could have claimed as well. Italo Calvino’s story “The Name, the Nose” is devoted to the sense of smell, and Roald Dahl’s Switch Bitch concerns a gifted perfumer who creates a formula for a perfume that “would have the same electrifying effect upon man as the scent of a bitch in heat.” The ultimate olfactory novel is Patrick Suskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, wherein Grenouille, the protagonist, is endowed with a prodigious sense of smell: “He would often10 just stand there, leaning against the wall or crouching in a dark corner, his eyes closed, his mouth half-open and nostrils flaring wide, quiet as a feeding pike in a great, dark, slowly moving current. And when at last a puff of air would toss a delicate thread of scent his way, he would lunge at it and not let it go. Then he would smell at just this one odor, holding it tight, pulling it into himself and preserving it for all time. The odor might be an old acquaintance, or a variation on one; it would be a brand-new one as well, with hardly any similarity to anything he had ever smelled, let alone seen, till that moment: the odor of pressed silk, for example, the odor of wild-thyme tea, the odor of brocade embroidered with silver thread.”
Olfactory impressions are intermediate between the vagueness of touch or taste and the richness and variety of sight and hearing. Odors are, by nature, diffusive, their molecular mass spreading into the atmosphere so pervasively that it can be difficult to credit that odor, at all times, necessarily implies materiality. It is no accident that odors are called essences or spirits. They straddle a line between the physical and metaphysical worlds. This gives them a uniquely powerful role with respect to the psyche. As Havelock Ellis puts it:
Our olfactory experiences11 thus institute a more or less continuous series of by-sensations accompanying us through life, of no great practical significance, but of considerable emotional significance from their variety, their intimacy, their associational facility, their remote ancestral reverberations, through our brains … It is the existence of these characteristics—at once so vague and so specific, so useless and so intimate—which led various writers to describe the sense of smell as, above all others, the sense of imagination. No sense has so strong a power of suggestion, the power of calling up ancient memories with a wider and deeper emotional reverberation, while at the same time no sense furnishes impressions which so easily change emotional color and tone, in harmony with the recipient’s general attitude. Odors are thus specially apt both to control the emotional life and to become its slaves.
If scent is uniquely powerful, it can also be uniquely comforting, instantly erasing the passage of time. “A scent may drown years12 in the odor it recalls,” observes Walter Benjamin. At the same time, both the scent and the memories associated with it remain partly out of focus and out of view. “When it is said13 that an object occupies a large space in the soul or even that it fills it entirely, we ought to understand by this simply that its image has altered the shade of a thousand perceptions or memories, and that in this sense it pervades them, although it does not itself come into view,” notes the philosopher Henri Bergson. A remembered smell spills into consciousness baskets full of inchoate memories and the feelings entwined with them, permeating the emotional aura of the memories with a richness that is both exquisite and vague.
These memories14, messengers from the unconscious, remind us of what we are dragging behind us unawares. But, even though we may have no distinct idea of it, we feel vaguely that our past remains present to us … Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will, and act. Our past, then, as a whole, is made manifest to us in its impulse; it is felt in the form of tendency, although a small part of it only is known in the form of idea.
Scent pervades memory but remains invisible, as if emanating from its interior, the way it seems to emanate from the interior of objects. Its nature makes it an apt metaphor for spiritual concepts, for it “can readily be understood15 as conveying inner truth and intrinsic worth,” observes Classen. “The common association of odor with the breath and with the life-force makes smell a source of elemental power, and therefore an appropriate symbol and medium for divine life and power. Odors can strongly attract or repel, rendering them forceful metaphors for good and evil. Odors are also ethereal, they cannot be grasped or retained; in their elusiveness they convey a sense of both the mysterious presence and the mysterious absence of God. Finally, odors are ineffable, they transcend our ability to define them through language, as religious experience is said to do.”
The Origin of Perfumes, seventeenth-century engraving
Perfume, as a kind of scent, is all of these things. It is also, paradoxically, a product that is essentially worthless, its only function to provide pleasure. In this sense, too, it straddles the line between the tangible and the intangible, the earthly and the ethereal, the real and the magical. The transcendental properties of fragrance were recognized as far back in our history as we can trace. Indeed, the earliest perfumers we know of were Egyptian priests, who blended the juices expressed from succulent flowers and plants, the pulp of fruits, spices, resins and gums from trees, meal made from oleaginous seeds, wine, honey, and oils to make incense and unguents.
When Moses returned from exile in Egypt, the Lord commanded him to compound a holy oil from olive oil and fragrant spices. The Jews brought back with them as well the Egyptian practice of applying fragrant oils and unguents to the body. In the basement of a house in Jerusalem that dates from the first century B.C., archaeologists have uncovered evidence—ovens, cooking pots, and mortars—of a perfume workshop for the nearby temple. Wall carvings and paintings from the period document the process of perfume-making in detail.
From Egyptian times, however, fragrant blends were used for bodily adornment and curative purposes as well as in religious ceremoni
es. “This will be the way of the king … and he will take your daughters to be perfumers,” says the Bible (I Sam. 8:11–13). The Jerusalem wall paintings reveal that the perfumers were indeed women, and that they were as likely to serve the court as the temple. Moreover, aromatic substances, being rare, precious, and easily transported by caravan, were used for barter—costus, sandalwood, cardamom, cloves, cinnamon, and, most especially, frankincense and myrrh. These ingredients were so important and so difficult to obtain that the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut sent a fleet of ships to Punt (Somalia) to bring back myrrh seedlings to plant in her temple.
The aesthetic use of scent reached its moment of greatest excess during the heyday of the Roman Empire16. Wealthy Romans used scented doves to perfume the air at feasts, rubbed dogs and horses with unguents, brushed walls with aromatics, and sprinkled floors with flower petals. The emperor Nero is reported to have had Lake Lucina covered in rose petals when he threw a feast there, and he was said to sleep on a bed of petals. (Supposedly, he suffered insomnia if even one of them happened to be curled.)
But perfume as we know it could not have taken shape without alchemy, the ancient art that undertook to convert raw matter, through a series of transformations, into a perfect and purified form. Often referred to as the “divine” or “sacred” art, alchemy has complex and deep roots that reach back to ancient China, India, and Egypt, but it came into its own in medieval Europe and flourished well into the seventeenth century.
The ways of the alchemists were shrouded in secrecy. They tended to be solo practitioners who maintained their own laboratories and rarely took pupils or associated in societies, even secret ones. They did leave records, however, and they quote one another extensively, for the most part in evident agreement. Agreement as to what is another question. On the one hand, their work, or opus, was practical, resembling a series of chemistry experiments. And indeed the alchemists deserve credit for refining the process of distillation, which was of enormous importance to the evolution of perfumery, not to mention wine-making, chemistry, and other branches of industry and science. Yet it is difficult to discern from their writings almost anything definite about their processes. “In my opinion it is quite hopeless to try to establish any kind of order in the infinite chaos of substances,” fumed Carl Jung17, who was fascinated by alchemy and wrote about it extensively. “Seldom do we get even an approximate idea of how the work was done, what materials were used, and what results were achieved. The reader usually finds himself in the most impenetrable darkness when it comes to the names of substances—they could mean almost anything.” The alchemists themselves had difficulty understanding one another’s symbols and diagrams, and sometimes they seem confounded even as to the meaning of their own.
Loading myrrh trees on a ship, after fifteenth-century B.C. relief
There was a reason for this obscurity, Jung explains:
Although the alchemist was interested in the chemical part of the work he also used it to devise a nomenclature for the psychic transformations that really fascinated him. Every original alchemist built himself, as it were, a more or less individual edifice of ideas, consisting of the dicta of the philosophers and of miscellaneous analogies to the fundamental concepts of alchemy. Generally these analogies are taken from all over the place. Treatises were even written for the purpose of supplying the artist with analogy-making material. The method of alchemy, psychologically speaking, is one of boundless amplification. The amplificatio is always appropriate when dealing with some obscure experience which is so vaguely adumbrated that it must be enlarged and expanded by being set in a psychological context in order to be understood at all.
At bottom, the alchemists believed that their work was divinely inspired and could be brought to fruition only with divine assistance. Theirs was not a “profession” in the usual sense; it was a calling. Those who were called to it would comprehend its metaphors and express them, in turn, in their own.
The philosophy of alchemy expressed the conviction that the spark of divinity—the quinta essentia18—could be discovered in matter. In the words of Paracelsus, the enormously influential sixteenth-century doctor and alchemist, “The quinta essentia is that which is extracted from a substance—from all plants and from everything which has life—then freed of all impurities and perishable parts, refined into highest purity and separated from all elements … The inherency of a thing, its nature, power, virtue, and curative efficacy, without any … foreign admixture … that is the quinta essentia. It is a spirit like the life spirit, but with this difference, that the spiritus vitea, the life spirit, is imperishable … The quinta essentia being the life spirit of things, it can be extracted only from the perceptible, that is to say material, parts.” The ultimate goal was to reunite matter and spirit in a transformed state, a miraculous entity known as the Elixir of Life (sometimes called the Philosopher’s Stone). Some believed that those who imbibed it would prolong their lives to a thousand years, others that it yielded not only perpetual youth but an increase of knowledge and wisdom.
As Jung perceived, alchemical processes were “so loaded with unconscious19 contents that a state of participation mystique or unconscious identity” arose between the alchemist and the substances with which he worked. The analogy, if unconscious, was nevertheless pervasive. “The combination of two bodies20 he saw as a marriage,” F. Sherwood Taylor observes in The Alchemists. “The loss of their characteristic activity as death, the production of something new as a birth, the rising up of vapors, as a spirit leaving the corpse, the formation of a volatile solid, as the making of a spiritual body. These conceptions influenced his idea of what should occur, and he therefore decided that the final end of the substances operated on should be analogous to the final end of man—a new soul in a new, glorious body, with the qualities of clarity, subtlety and agility.”
Following the dictum solve et coagula (dissolve and combine), the alchemist worked to transform body into spirit and spirit into body; to volatilize that which is fixed, and to fix that which is volatile. But the “base material” he worked upon and the “gold” he produced may also be understood as man himself, in his quest to perfect his own nature.
A repeating axiom in the literature of alchemy is: “What is above is as that which is below, and what is below is as that which is above.” Alchemists believed in an essential unity of the cosmos; that there is a correspondence between things physical and spiritual, and that the same laws operate in both realms. “The Sages have been taught of God that this natural world is only an image and material copy of a heavenly and spiritual pattern,” wrote the seventeenth-century Moravian alchemist Michael Sendivogius; “that the real existence in this world is based upon the reality of the celestial archetype; and that God had created it in imitation of the spiritual and invisible universe.”
Alchemical work, from Michelspacher’s Cabala, Augsburg, 1616
In their preoccupations, alchemists can be said to have much in common with priests (albeit heretical ones), but it is more to the point to say that the distinctions between religion, medicine, science, art, and psychology were not nearly so absolute in their time as they are now. Nor was the boundary between matter and spirit so firm. As Titus Burckhardt observes:
For the people of earlier ages21, what we today call matter was not the same as for people of today, either as regards the concept or the experience. This is not to say the so-called primitive peoples of the world only saw through a veil of “magical and compulsive imaginings” as certain ethnologists have supposed, or that their thinking was “alogical” or “pre-logical.” Stones were just as hard as today, fire was just as hot, and natural laws just as inexorable …
According to Descartes, spirit and matter are completely separate realities, which thanks to divine ordination come together only at one point: the human brain. Thus the material world, known as “matter,” is automatically deprived of any spiritual content, while the spirit, for its part, becomes the abstract counterpart of the same pure
ly material reality, for what it is in itself, above and beyond this, remains unspecified.
As science and reason gained ground, alchemy went into eclipse (although some important scientists, most notably Isaac Newton, practiced it). The practical legacy of the alchemists passed to the chemists, who put it in service of the effort to dissect and analyze the elements of the natural world. The spiritual legacy of the alchemists can be seen as having passed to the psychologists, who strive like alchemists to reconcile dualities. “All alchemical thinking22 is concerned with opposites, states we know in our psychological being as mind and body, love and hate, good and evil, conscious and unconscious, spirit and matter,” writes Nathan Schwartz-Salant in The Mystery of Human Relationship.
Only the perfumers inherited both strands of the alchemical tradition. And for a long time, they retained many of the alchemists’ ways as well. Perfumery remained chiefly the domain of private solo practitioners—apothecaries, ladies who mixed their own blends at home, and other anonymous souls. It retained traces of its mystical origins in such recipes as a formula for “How to make a woman beautiful forever,” from the 1555 Les Secrets de Maistre Alexys, the earliest French perfumery book known: “Take a young raven from the nest; feed it on hard eggs for forty days, kill it, and then distill it with myrtle leaves, talc, and almond oil.”
But gradually something resembling a perfume business began to take shape. At first it was an outgrowth of the glove industry, owing to the popularity of perfumed gloves in France from the sixteenth century on. They were worn to keep the skin soft; some people even wore them to bed. Catherine de Medici’s perfumer, René23, made gloves—and more. When Catherine wished to get rid of her enemies, she turned to him for sorcery, with effective results. Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV of France, was poisoned after she donned a pair of perfumed gloves presented to her by Catherine.