Authors: Mandy Aftel

Essence and Alchemy (7 page)

BOOK: Essence and Alchemy

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To the perfumer, then, the Elixir is a metaphor for the wholeness that can be experienced in working with the essences. Sensually compelling in themselves, they come trailing their dramatic histories and so transform the perfumer as she dissolves and combines themâ
solve et coagula
âin the hope of creating something entirely new. If, as Henri Bergson says, “the object of art
⁴¹is to put to sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our personality, and thus bring us into a
state of perfect responsiveness,” working with scent offers an unusually direct way of arriving there. It allows us to experience life afresh, sets the imagination flowing. But as with any art, we must seek it out and welcome the transformations it allows. As Paracelsus exhorts, “It is our task
⁴²to seek art, for without seeking it we shall never learn the secrets of the world. Who can boast that roast squab flies into his mouth? Or that a grapevine runs after him? You must go to it yourself.”

Prima Materia Perfume Basics

Paul [Bowles] was â¦ a great collector of aromatic oils, which he had gathered from his travelsâpatchouli from Penang, vetiver from Indian root grass, sandalwood from Bangkok, perfumes from Paris circa 1940, Berlin after-shave from the thirties. He would dip a stick of bland-scented incense into the neck of a bottle of oil, light itâthe scent exploding from the heatâand then we'd discuss the book or piece of music he'd give me before I took my leave each evening. Paul was a man indifferent to the world at large but addicted to its sensory details.

â
Daniel Halpern, “The Last Existentialist”

⁴³T
AKE AN ORANGE in your hands. Press the rind with your thumbnail. You are in the presence of an essential oilâone of the forms in which the scented essence of a plant manifests itself. The odors of plants reside in different parts of them: sometimes in the rind of the fruit, as with blood orange and pink grapefruit; sometimes in the roots, as with the iris and the grass
Vetiveria zizanoides
, known as vetiver; sometimes in the woody stem, as with cedarwood or sandalwood; sometimes in the bark, as with cinnamon; sometimes in the leaves, as in mint, patchouli, and thyme; sometimes in the seeds, as with tonka bean and ambrette; and sometimes in the flower, as with rose and carnation. And a few scented essences used in perfumery are derived not from plants at all but from the glandular secretions of animalsâthe civet cat, the beaver, or the musk deer.

Natural essences are the atoms of perfumery, the building blocks with which complex and evocative scents are created. They are, in a sense, substances in their most concentrated but least material form, containing the whole nature and perfection of the substances themselves. They possess a compressed vitality, a bioactive power that cannot be measured by chemical analysis but which manifests itself in their potent effect on our emotions and states of consciousness.

Kirlian photography, discovered by the Russian electrical technician Semyon Kirlian in 1939, is a technique of taking pictures by means of electricity. An object is placed directly on photographic paper or film laid atop a metal plate to which a high-voltage current is applied. This records the energy field that surrounds living organisms, which appears as bright colors or halos surrounding the objects. A photograph of a freshly cut leaf reveals a colorful aura that diminishes over time until the leaf dies. A strong energy field that radiates outward is also visible when pure essential oils are photographed on a blotter strip. The energy field takes distinctive shapes that correspond to people's descriptions of the scentsâheavy, soft, sharp, bright, and so on. The field, which is lacking altogether in photographs of synthetic essences, corresponds to Henri Bergson's concept of the elan vitalâthe life force. It is also kin to the quinta essentia, the spark of divinity at the heart of living things that the alchemist, in his never-ending quest, toiled to extract.

According to
A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery
, “In alchemy the prima materia
⁴⁴or first matter from which the universe was created is identical with the substance which constitutes the soul in its original pure state.” In alchemy, each essence is of two kinds: sap (or juice) and mystery. The sap is the physical aspect, the scented material itself. The mystery, the perfect part of every composite substance, is informed with its virtue, nature, and essential quality.

Natural perfumery materials possess both sap and mystery. They are the concentrated essence of the materials from which they are derived,
but they are not reducible to one thing; by their very nature, they are formed from minute traces of various materials, which is why Moroccan rose smells different from Bulgarian rose or Egyptian rose, or, for that matter, why Moroccan rose itself varies discernibly from season to season. In some highly complex essences, such as jasmine, numerous chemical substances, sometimes many hundreds, have been isolated, and still there are many more elements that have not been identified. Synthetics can approximate the dominant qualities of the natural essences, but because of this irreducible complexity, they cannot capture the subtlety or softness of their odors. With all the chemical analysis available, natural substances cannot be pinned down to a formula and replicated in a laboratory. Only nature can create the smell of jasmine at nightfall.

“Why natural oils?”
⁴⁵asks Robert Tisserand in
The Art of Aromatherapy.
“Why not anything that smells nice, whether it is natural or synthetic? The answer is simply that synthetic or inorganic substances do not contain any âlife force'; they are not dynamic. Everything is made of chemicals, but organic substances like essential oils have a structure which only Mother Nature can put together. They have a life force, an additional impulse which can only be found in living things.”

This perception of the power inherent in natural materials is an old one. Marsilio Ficino, the Florentine who, at the request of Cosimo di Medici, founded an academy based on the writings of Plato and alchemical texts, was a great believer in the uplifting and restorative powers of aromas. In his 1489
Book of Life
, which sets forth his theory of emotional, physical, and spiritual health, he proposes, “If you have taken
⁴⁶the flavors from things no longer living, the odors from dry aromatics, things with no life left in them, and you thought these were very useful to life, why should you hesitate to take the odors from plants with their roots still growing on them, still living, things that have wonderfully accumulated powers for life?”

The power of natural essences derives from their complex histories as well as from their ineluctable earthiness. Holding a vial of essential oil to the light and admiring its jewel-like color, inhaling its complicated fragrance, one imagines the people and places who have known and used it, the history and rituals in which it has played a part. And perfumers, who not only experience the essences but experiment with them, participate in ancient traditions of sorcery, medicine, and alchemy. Working with the distillates of some of the most evocative of nature's creationsâspirits in every sense of the wordâis a powerful way of transcending the everyday.

E
xpression
, in which fruits with skins rich in essential oils, such as the citrusesâlemon, lime, orange, grapefruit, and bergamotâare pressed to render the oil, is the oldest and simplest method of deriving natural essences from plants. Originally this was done by hand, and the oil was collected in a sponge. Now it is done by machines that wash the rind and separate it from the fruit and inner white pith. The peel is squeezed through giant rollers, and the oils produced are separated from the juices, waxes, and other substances by whirling the mixture at high speed in a centrifuge.

Expression, detail from Egyptian tomb painting

Alchemists practiced the art of
distillation
and developed it to a fairly sophisticated level. Typically, they placed the
prima materia
, a raw botanical mass, in water at the bottom of a still. When the fire under the still brought the water to a boil, vapor rose into a cooler chamber above, where it condensed into a liquid essence. One can imagine how this process heightened the early alchemists' sense of mystery and power when they saw the great reduction of the botanical material to its essence: a metric ton of leaves yields approximately twenty pounds of essential oil.

Press for rendering essential oils

Distillation made possible two major innovations in perfumery. First, it allowed the extraction of high-quality essential oils from a much wider variety of plants. (Steam distillation does not, however, yield high-quality oils from citrus-fruit rinds, because heat has a deleterious effect on their delicate oils. Nor does it successfully extract the fragrance of flowers other than roses.) Distillation also allowed the manufacture of alcohol of higher concentration than could be obtained by fermentation alone. This highly concentrated alcohol remains the perfumer's all-purpose diluent and fragrance carrier. To this day, it is used to extract the odoriferous elements from fragrant natural materials and to preserve them, in a true and fresh state, in the form of tinctures and infusions that can be blended to make perfume.

Distillation with water is the method most widely employed for obtaining essential oils today. The method depends on the fact that
many substances whose boiling points are far higher than that of water are volatilized if their vapors are mixed with steam. The volatile substance must also be insoluble in water, so that on cooling, it separates from the watery distillate and can be preserved in a relatively pure condition.

In direct distillation, the plant material is in contact with the boiling water. Steam distillation is the more common and gentle method for the extraction of essential oils. Steam is generated in the still (sometimes it is supplied by a separate boiler) and blown through a pipe in the bottom of the still, where the plant material rests on a stack of trays for quick removal after exhaustion.

Distillation does have its limitations. Some of the components that make up the natural perfume of flowers are, chemically speaking, so fragile that they are decomposed by the heat of the operation and spoiled. As the distinguished French scientist Dr. Eugene Charabot, a pioneer in the extraction of fragrance materials, observed, the task of capturing a flower's perfume is like “capturing the soul of the flower. The flower is something of a coquette, upon whom we have only to bring tribulation when her beauty disappears. She cannot tolerate any harshness, and often the least trouble that affects her, deprives her of her charms.”

Steam distillation