Last Saturday I attended a perfume workshop at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki taught by Samantha Copland of Perfume Playground
I’ve been using scent on and off in a my work to create an immersive environment, speaking to the kinds of all-encompassing environments creating in Ceremonial magick ritual practice. I find the effect of scent on our mood and memory to be fascinating. For myself – and I believe for many others – scent has a stronger memory link than that of sight, sound and touch combined. For example there is a smell of cooking that I first experienced on the street in Hong Kong at 8 years old that, if I happen to smell it on the street, will jolt me right back to that time and place even 36 years later. The smell of jasmine at night instantly transports me to my first few weeks in NZ when we were staying in a strange old dilapidated house in Remuera. I don’t think I’d ever smelled jasmine flowers before and this house had a huge rambling vine right outside the window that perfumed the whole house at night.
We were all working with a middle-note scent of cinnamon which meant we needed to choose a base-note scent and a top-note scent. I wanted to make something different to what I would usually choose and not pick my obvious favourite scents. I was trying to find scents that would work with the cinnamon to enhance it, but what I got in the end is most and reacts to my skin in a very strange way.
Firstly I should note that there is no alcohol or other solvents in the mix. I used
Top-notes:
Blood orange 1/28
Long Pepper 2/28
Middle-note:
Cinnamon 20/28
Bottom-note:
Tobacco Absolute 5/28
So it is very heavy on the cinnamon, which is what I wanted. Away from the skin it is VERY strong smelling and almost alcoholic. I even find it a bit unpleasant. But once it’s applied to my skin and it settles down and all the harsh aspects completely disappear and it becomes spicy and sweet.
The earlier versions I mixed with less cinnamon and more of the tobacco and pepper smelled very strange in the mixing containers, but when applied to my skin the whole fragrance just vanished!
I’ve been delving into the fragrance I chose to get some insight into their use and their symbolism:
Cinnamon is very much a solar fragrance in western esotericism and is a main component of ‘Oil of Abramelin’, a ceremonial oil blend with it’s roots the anointing oil described in the Hebrew Tanakh. It’s associations are with orange/red/gold, with Apollo and Ra, with Tiphereth, with Resh (the conscious mind/the front of the head), the sun and with Iron.
Cinnamon was highly prized in the ancient world, along with incenses such as frankincense and myrrh which are also derived from trees, but the sap rather than the bark. The Ancient Egyptians used cinnamon as part of the embalming process and the Romans would use it on the funeral pyres of the very wealthy.
Tobacco is attributed to Horus and Mars. It is also associated with orange and red colours, with iron, sulphur and ruby, with the element of fire and also, strangely, with gold. These are strong, martial attributes for a strong fragrance.
Indigenous American peoples extensively saw tobacco as a ceremonial plant for use in negotiations, treaties and as a means to carry ones prayers to the Creator. It is part of the nightshade family and originated in South America before spreading around the globe.
Pepper is another fiery red fragrance associated with Horus, Mars and Ares. It is also associated with Pe (the mouth) and the tarot trump ‘The Tower’. Long Pepper (also known as Pipli or Pippali) is a hotter variant of pepper than that used for culinary black/white/green pepper. It’s medicinal uses are described in Ayurvedic texts and was also used medicinally by the Greek ands Romans as early as the 5th or 6th Centuries BCE.
Blood Orange isn’t listed anywhere in western esoteric correspondences that I can find. Obviously, as it’s name would suggest, the flesh is a distinctive orangey red and it is apparently a natural mutation of the orange caused by anthocyanins. The fragrance is sweet and heady as the name implies.
Overall, looking at my findings, it seems clear that I have chosen a whole set of fiery, strong, orange/red fragrances without consciously intending to. The videos I currently have in the works are based on the alchemical ‘Rubedo’ process and will be shot entirely in red – it seems that this perfume I’ve created could work well as an accompaniment to the next show!
Now I have to finish putting together my fragrance for the Nigredo show in 1.5 weeks….
Dissecting symbolism and intention in my latest works
Often when I’m exploring new work I come up against questions that I struggle to answer. In the current series of photos and videos I have been creating I started wondering about some of the symbolism I was drawn to and also the intention behind the desire I have to use women as the protagonists in this particular set. I’m very lucky to have a wealth of thoughtful advice to draw upon in the form of my art peers who don’t mind sitting down with me and having a ponder. In this case I called upon the brains of my friends Justine and Anita to think through with me some of these questions.
Mary MacGregor-Reid, 2018, Still from video “In the ash that lies at the bottom of the grave, there lies the king’s diadem…”
I have found myself fascinated with the act of pouring. In previous videos I have used the pouring of beeswax, of honey, of carbon and I still have a desire to work with this action. I discussed the symbolism of pouring with Jus and Anita who had some similar thoughts to my own and also expanded upon them with some ideas I hadn’t come to on my own – highlighting the importance of having other thinkers to talk with!
Jus related the act of pouring to having tea with friends, of pouring out a cup for a guest as an act of friendship, of bonding and of interpersonal ritual. She also related it to the act of her mother washing her hair in the bath as a child. I relate to both of these actions as I am an avid tea-drinker and my mum also used to rinse my hair in the bath by pouring water over my head in a sort of bath-time baptism. There is a connotation of caring to these acts and we both mentioned the release of scent and the experience of the sound of water rushing into water. They also seem to be quite feminine acts, things that are often done between women and in the act of caring for others.
The act of pouring can be a sort of gift, as the substance leaves one vessel to then be contained in another, as in the pouring of tea.
It can also signify blending as 2 or more elements are brought together to create a new substance, as when cooking or in chemistry.
There is the cleansing or consecration aspect, as in baptism or ritual anointing.
There is also an idea of a substance transforming, which I think is particularly experienced in the release of scent through the movement of the substance from one place to the next. When pouring non-liquid substances like ash or carbon there is an explosion of dust that comes with the action.
I talked to Anita extensively about my use of women as the protagonists in these new works and why I felt that it was important to the work, but could be a problem. This work is not specifically about gender, it isn’t a political statement, but at the same time I felt that my use of female characters could be interpreted in that way, bringing in content that I didn’t really want to be there. This took us around to the symbolism of pouring again and whether in classical art this is seen as a female gesture. Outside neoclassical concrete garden sculptures, we weren’t really sure if this was true, but we were reminded of the fact that the cup is very definitely a symbol of the female.
Both water and the cup or chalice are recognisable as symbols of the feminine. This gives me a bit more insight into where the pouring symbolism along with female protagonists is coming together in this work. Now that I’ve unpicked my unconscious decision-making a bit it has made me very interested to go back and reshoot all the scenes with male protagonists once I’ve finished shooting with women to see how that would affect the work and the viewer’s experience of it. I’ve also started thinking about the sound and scent aspects of the action of pouring and how this could work within the context of these or future pieces. I’ve worked with both sound and scent previously so it seems quite natural to think about how these experiential elements could integrate.
Caput Mortum: Dead Head – hematite iron oxide, a deep purple pigment produced by the Nigredo process and used for painting the robes of religious figures.
Alchemical Symbolism and the Language of Dreams
I’ve been reading about alchemy again and it’s started creeping into my dreams with some pretty fantastical symbolism. There have been 2 dreams in a row featuring talking animals; the first a conversational peahen and the second a white fox who said “Goodbye”. Nice dreams when you can get them eh?
The alchemical symbolism of animals tends to be a little different and rather more interesting than your standard dream interpretation. Ask the internet about foxes and peacocks and you’ll get the usual hodgepodge of ‘foxes are crafty’ and ‘peacocks are proud’
The peacock’s tail appears in alchemy near the completion of the ‘work’ whether by an oily residue on the surface of the final liquid (the ‘wet path’) or as a colourful oxidation on metals (the ‘dry path’). The peacock itself denotes nobility, glory and holiness – a path to attaining the Great Work.
Foxes are always closely aligned with the trickster archetype. Alchemically they are linked to the sun along with lions, although I’m not sure what white foxes would relate to? Maybe an alchemical transformation related to the moon or maybe the albedo process. They were also believed that they are the keepers of Elixir of Life and that they assume human form at night to visit the sick.
My main research lately has been around the symbolism associated with the Nigredo process, that of burning, putrefaction, death and resurrection. The symbolism of the Black Madonna is associated with nigedo, the Prima Materia, the black earth (Kemi) and also with Isis, and she is another character that has popped up briefly in my sleep. The photo above is one I took of the Virgin of Montserrat “La Moreneta”. She is housed in the Benedictine Montserrat Abbey in the hills above Barcelona. She has become a site of pilgrimage for Catholics and the pilgrim is able to obtain her blessing by touching her exposed hand which is holding a globe representing the universe. She sit’s in a pose known as the Throne of Wisdom with the baby Christ making a traditional sign of benediction.
When I had the chance to visit the Abbey the weather was bad and the whole mountain was covered in mist. There was no view either up or down the mountains which meant that the tourist numbers were very low – lucky for me! I wasn’t fussed about the views and was most interested in seeing the monastery. The mist was so dense that it was impossible to see more than 50m ahead and the grottoes filled with votive candles flickered all around. Going into the buildings meant that the mist swirled with you into the dark interiors and getting photos was very hard. La Moreneta usually has a long queue of pilgrims waiting to see her and if that had been the case I would have kept away and let them have their time with her. But there was no one else there! I was able to walk up to her and touch her hand, which was incredibly smooth and seemed to have a static charge from the thousands of hands before me.
“Rosa d’abril, Morena de la serra…” (April rose, dark-skinned lady of the mountain…)
– el Virolai, Hymn to the Virgin of Montserrat
I enjoy my research popping up in my dreams as sometimes it will make certain aspects that I can use for future work stand out more clearly. I hadn’t thought about La Moreneta for a while and I can’t think of the last time I even considered white foxes!
An Alchemical Explosion
(Image:Artist’s illustration of two merging neutron stars. The rippling spacetime grid represents gravitational waves traveling out from the collision, while the narrow beams show bursts of gamma rays expelled just seconds after the gravitational waves. Ejected clouds of glowing, neutron-rich material swirl around the merging stars. Credit: NSF/LIGO/Sonoma State University/A. Simonnet)
Scientists at LIGO have detected, for the first time, spacetime ripples known as gravitational waves from the collision of two neutron stars. This phenomenon was predicted by Einstein but had not been observed until August 17 2017. All of the previously detected gravitational waves came from merging pairs of black holes which are so dense that light cannot escape their grasp, making such mergers essentially invisible to normal telescopes. While neutron stars appear to create less extreme gravitational force than that generated by black holes, these super-dense stars created by the collapse of supernova, have gravitational fields strong enough to squeeze and break down an entire sun into a ball of neutrons the size of a small city. Unlike a black hole, a neutron star’s gravity is too weak to trap light, meaning the huge burst made from two of them slamming together can be bright enough to be observed from Earth.
The collision of these two neutron stars likely produced a black hole, allowing the observation of the birth of one of these phenomena. It also provides evidence that it is neutron star collisions that forge the universe’s heavy elements including uranium, platinum and gold. The bulk of the universe’s hydrogen and helium was produced in the first moments after the big bang, and most of the lighter elements—oxygen, carbon, nitrogen etc—were formed from nuclear fusion in stars, but scientists were unsure as to the origin of the heavier elements. This new cosmic observation provides evidence that the collision of the universe’s densest stars is the true alchemical forge.
“If you think about it, the universe is sort of a cosmic particle collider, with neutron stars as the particles,” O’Shaughnessy says. “It throws them together, and we now have the opportunity to see what comes out…. This event is a Rosetta stone, giving us real data to connect disparate threads of astrophysics that previously only existed in the mind of theorists or as bits in a supercomputer simulation. It allows us to understand the cosmic abundance of heavy elements. It allows us to probe the squishiness of nuclear matter at extreme densities. It allows us to measure the expansion of the universe…. We are now reaping the reward, a mountain of gold 10 or a hundred times the mass of the Earth, that the universe just gave us.”