Essence and Alchemy by Mandy Aftel Read Free Book Online

women, however, were interested only in perfume from France, so Cairo’s Perfume King made his killing off American and European tourists, to whom he marketed perfumes with appropriately exotic names: Flower of the Sahara, Omar Khayyam, Secret of the Desert, Queen of Egypt, Harem. The centerpiece of his shop was an ornate statue of the pharaoh Ramses that poured perfume from its mouth by virtue of a mechanism which had to be wound up every half hour.
    Although the perfume business was booming, the direction it had taken had cut it off from its creative wellsprings. Reliance on synthetics eventually led to a shift in perfume structure and its interplay of ingredients. Most contemporary perfumes are “linear” fragrances designed to produce a strong and instantaneous effect, striking the senses all at once and quickly dissipating. They are static; they do not mix with the wearer’s body chemistry, nor do they evolve on the skin. What you smell is what you get.
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    T he decline of natural perfumery was not only a material loss but also a spiritual one. Natural perfumes evolve on the skin, changing over time and uniquely in response to body chemistry. At the most basic level, they interact with us, making who we are—and who we are in the process of becoming—part of the story. They are about our relationship to ourselves, and only secondarily about our relationship to others. “The more we penetrate 35 odors,” the great twentieth-century perfumer and philosopher Edmond Roudnitska observed, “the more they end up possessing us. They live within us, becoming an integral part of us, participating in a new function within us.”

    Natural perfumes cannot ultimately be reduced to a formula, because the very essences of which they are composed contain traces of other elements that cannot themselves be captured by formulas. Like the rich histories of their symbolism and use, this essential mysteriousness makes them magical to work with, in the sense that Paracelsus meant when he wrote, “Magic has power 36 to experience and fathom things which are inaccessible to human reason. For magic is a great secret wisdom, just as reason is a great public folly.”
    Like alchemy, working to transform natural essences into perfume is a process that appeals to our intuition and imagination rather than to our intellect. This is not to say there is no logic to it, but it is a logic of a different order. Like other creative endeavors, it is intensely solitary. The perfumer’s atelier is the counterpart to the alchemist’s laboratory, which was itself a mirror of the hermetically sealed flask in which the transformation of matter into spirit was to take place— hermes meaning “secret” or “sealed,” and thus referring to a sacred space sealed off from outside influences.

    The hermeticism of the alchemical process consists of not just the solitary nature of the work but also its interiority. That is, it can be comprehended only by being inside it, just as we can understand love only by being in love. As Henri Bergson notes, “Philosophers agree 37 in making a deep distinction between two ways of knowing a thing. The first implies going all around it, the second entering into it. The first depends on the viewpoint chosen and the symbols employed, while the second is taken from no viewpoint and rests on no symbol. Of the first kind of knowledge we shall say that it stops at the relative; of the second that, wherever possible, it attains the absolute.”

    In alchemy, attaining the absolute meant creating the Elixir, that magical potion to defeat the ravages of time. But the process depended on the marriage of elements the alchemist could not perceive. These were the “subtle bodies 38 ” that “must be beyond space and time. Every real body fills space because it consists of matter, while the subtle body is said not to consist of matter, or it is