Witch Tip Wednesday 12.19.18
Perfume Magic, the Scent of Witchcraft
I received this ask, and it’s something that I figured could open up some witchy possibilities:
“hi! I've been thinking about this for a while now and I'd love to have your opinion. What do you think is the magical potency of perfumes? I've listed the components of perfumes I wear and noticed that the most used ingredients were ylang-ylang/vanilla/mandarin&jasmine. On a similar note,do you think breaking down the ingredients of a perfume and looking at the magical properties of each of them can give a hint for the magical use for a it? sex/love/divination seemed most common in my experiment”
Hi there! So you’ve touched on something that is deeply twined with witchcraft. Let’s start with the basics, perfumes are usually a form of a tincture, though I mean that in the sense of botanicals infused into an alcohol base, not necessarily a potable (drinkable) one.
Perfume is magic. It can entice, repulse, spark a memory, or even create one. Not just that, but it has deep ties to witches through an odd other use which happens to be a connection near and dear to me...Poison.
“Something with poison in it I think. With poison in it. But attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell. Poppies. Poppies. Poppies will put them to sleep. Sleep. Now they'll sleep.”- Wicked Witch of the West
You see, perfume based in alcohol is a very old concept. In the case above, there’s a very obvious correlation to that simple fact. Opium is what’s made when you mix poppy sap with alcohol, and it in turn changes into something that changes what it interacts with. It’s a poison. Herbs, resins, rare spices and even animal based parts like ambergris and musk are molded together to create a pleasing scent. It’s how medicine was made, but with a different intent. Healers, alchemists, witches all knew the process, but it was made into a mundane art and luxury. Perfume though had multiple uses and connotation: hiding bad hygiene in some eras, but also to enhance beauty.
Beauty being fabricated is a form of witchcraft, and at is base is glamour magic. Altering how you are represented through the senses. Having these connotations of beauty, harkens back to the side of people accused of witchcraft for embracing sexuality. It has developed of course, and changed, but there has also been a history of perfumes being used for poison, having poisonous ingredients, or poisons disguised as perfumes which always comes back to Saturn to me. Most Saturnian herbs have a different allegiance that isn’t talked about in depth that often, and that’s the association with Venus.
Venus you see, is where we get the word Venom from. Venom and poison are a modern concept for being negative, where as originally, venom meant something more along the lines of “change”. Venoms were made by doctors and witches, and medicine was magic because it was an infusion of herbs that changed something. Whether changing their scent, or changing them from sick to healthy, or alive to dead. This concept fits squarely in what witches strive to do, changing things for better or worse through means which aren’t fully understood to those on the outside.
What I’m saying is you can, and should use your perfumes for magic. I’ve been doing it for years and it (fragrance) is a very important part of my craft.
What you’ve done (focusing on the individual aspects of the perfume) is an awesome way to incorporate fragrance into your craft, but it does bring up another topic: substitutions.
Many fragrance companies use fake botanicals or chemicals to create the scents, keeping that in mind there’s only so much magical oomph you can pack into your workings with them. It’s easier the simpler the fragrance profile, and some colognes and perfumes do use the real stuff. To put in perspective, what would you rather use in a spell (ignoring allergies) real lavender or fake lavender. Both may be able to get the job done, but one will get it done better, or faster, or with less work.
Fragrance used for specific workings can get a bit convoluted and you have to treat it as a spell. You can’t really look at the individual ingredients so much as the whole. There may be contradictory uses for the plants, so the easiest way to use them is like a Venn Diagram. What associations do they have in common? The more they have in common, the more multipurpose. If there are too many contradictions, then it’s easier to look at it as a whole. What does the combination feel like to you?
It can be difficult sussing through the actual ingredients (example, violet fragrances very rarely have any violets in them. Usually it’s orris root), so treating it as a whole may be easier.
If you really want to dig in, I’d try making your own. Fragrance can be a powerful tool if used correctly, but if you aren’t willing to give it as much thought and attention as you would any other spell, then don’t rely on it as your only tool.
Also, my go to for fragrance enhancements are handmade or Jo Malone: Leather & Artemisia, Dark Amber & Ginger Lilly, Lime Basil & Mandarin, are all in my daily rotations and I’m messing around with Red Current & English Oak. There are others I enjoy too like Wood Sage & Sea Salt and Myrhh & Tonka, but it’s pricey and sometimes a tester is all I have to work with.
I could go on and on, but I’m already way pst my usual posting time but it’s still the 19th! Hopefully this helped open some ideas, or at the least showed you aren’t alone in wanting to use your scents for magic.
Ways to support the blog!
Original content of this blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attributution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license
