Faunalia

Held on December 5th, this is the festival of the Horned God of the Forest, one of the di indigetes of Rome, god of cattle, fertility, wild, untamed nature, and prophecy through dreams. The scent of a thick, starlit, unspoiled forest, with a burst of wild musk, opobalsamum, black bryony, mandragora, and hemlock.

Opiate Southern Gardens of Orchids

This scent is part of the 2013 series Misketonic Valley Yuletide: The Festival and just so I still have this text when the series is no longer available I shall copy it and paste it below.

The nethermost caverns are not for the fathoming of eyes that see; for their marvels are strange and terrific. Cursed the ground where dead thoughts live new and oddly bodied, and evil the mind that is held by no head. Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.

Buried in the echoes of time immemorial is the Miskatonic Valley rite of the Festival. While the origins are lost in space and time, our holiday customs have been memorialized through oral tradition and the eons-long observation of our rituals, year after year.

So, don your holiday ritual robes, grab your discordant flutes, hop on your limply-flopping demon mounts, take a swig of goat milk cocoa, and head down to the Stygian grotto to join the villagers of Kingsport as they observe the time-worn traditions of the Festival. Celebrate the season the Miskatonic Valley way!

Refreshments provided by Arkham’s own Mother Shub and Zadok Allen Vineyard.

Happy Yule, Kingsport!

If you would like to read H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Festival" you can find it here.

I ordered only one decant from this series and I don't really remember why I ordered it. I do know that I had forgotten that most Miskatonic Valley scents are, for obvious reasons, aquatics. And aquatics and I are not the best friends, so had I remembered I might not even have ordered this one. And missed an aquatic scent that I do like. The flavour text is the following:

"Mine were an old people, and were old even when this land was settled three hundred years before. And they were strange, because they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers. And now they were scattered, and shared only the rituals of mysteries that none living could understand. I was the only one who came back that night to the old fishing town as legend bade, for only the poor and the lonely remember."

The scent is described as: "Memories of alien gardens that crawl with wide swaths of vivid, soporific blossoms: gargantuan orchids, blood-purple poppies, and monstrous black peonies."

I can't say that I smell orchids, or poppies, or even peonies which I should be able to recognize from other BPAL scents that I have. I'll have to wear it more often, and I even considered buying a bottle, until I saw how many bottles I already have. What I could smell today was an aquatic floral scent that I much enjoyed.

 

El Día de los Reyes 2013

"The Day of Kings, the Celebration of the Magi. In Mexico, on January 6th, children place their shoes by their windows. If they have been good during the previous year, the Wise Men tuck gifts into their shoes during the night.”

This is much like our Dutch celebration of Sinterklaas at December 5th. One generation before me children placed their shoes at the chimney and if they had been good Sinterklaas would fill the shoes with gifts. But when homes had less and less working chimneys this changed into the gifts appearing in a different way on the evening of the 5th of December.

Scentwise, El Día de los Reyes is a Black Phoenis Alchemy Lab scent that appears for the third time in the Yule release.  I did not have a chance to try the 2007 or 2009 version, but I did get a decant of El Día de los Reyes 2013. Although the notes in the description remained the same, Hot cocoa with cinnamon, coffee, and brown sugar, it seems to be different from previous years. Most reviews of those years speak of a hot chocolate scent. This year's version does indeed has a lush chocolate smell from the decant and wet on the skin, but when it dried the first time I tried it I got nothing but brown sugar. Until I realized I had put on very little, as chocolate scents often go to plastic on me. I reapplied and got another waft of delicious chocolate which soon disappeared to leave the stage for coffee and sugar with perhaps a bit of cinnamon. I had more or less contented myself with the thought that apparently my skin liked the cocoa so much it ate it all as soon as possible, when I reapplied a third time because I had lost much of the scent dishwashing. It can't be coincidence, three kings, three applications, the third time the cocoa note stayed on me, not very strong but after three hours it's still there. Thank you, Kings, for this wonderful gift. I must have been good in the past year!

Purple Spotted Swallowtail

I haven't written in this blog for over a year. Too busy studying music, I suppose. But today I searched for the picture I had used in my entry about Purple Spotted-Swallowtail and I discovered that on that day I was happy when the butterfly had faded and wore Pannychis instead. By now my taste has changed so much that I sold my pretty cobalt bottle of Pannychis because I didn't wear it any more. And I am waiting for a bottle of Purple Spotted Swallowtail to arrive, because I have been almost finishing the decant last summer. I admit that almost is not quite and I did set myself a rule to only buy a bottle when I finish the imp or decant in a short time, but this bottle was sold in the same eBay auction as a partial bottle of The Sound of Insects, another scent I wore a lot last summer. The Sound of Insects was one of this year's Lupercalia which means that I did not write about it andf also that even if I had been able to find the picture, it would not have been safe to post it. (I WILL try to find it, of course. Or photograph the bottle when it arrives.)

Squirting Cucumber

I have not been writing much lately, but this discovery screamed to be documented. This was one of those days of experimenting. I started out with Fae because I am wearing green, but Fae definitely goes off the list of favorites. She smells of anise. Then I wore Bayou over Fae and I liked Bayou more than the first time I wore it. But after I washed the henna out of my hair and all the previous scents from my skin in the process I searched for something else to wear. Still in the experimental mood I picked up the box with scents I still have to try or wish to retry and there I found some old ones from the box of very first scents. I had forgotten that I put them there when I went through all my boxes in search of scents my son might like. On top were The Caterpillar and Squirting Cucumber. I sniffed first one, then the other and the cucumber decided to live up to its name and squirted itself over my fingers. And I can tell you this is quite an achievement from an almost empty imp! So it is Squirting Cucumber today.

Now I thought that this was just a silly name Black Phoenix had come up with. But I googled for pictures like I always do when I post a scent's name on facebook. And guess what? There is a plant that is called Squirting Cucumber! It is from the cucumber family and it's called Ecballium elaterium. The name squirting cucumber it got from the fact that ripe fruits squirt a stream of mucilaginous liquid contaning the seeds. Don't try to eat the gooey fruits, they are poisonous, even more than the rest of the plant is. In the ancient world they were considered to induce abortion. Although the caterpillars of a small moth seem to be able to live on it, but they otherwise eat white bryony which is also quite poisonous.

The fact that there was a plant called squirting cucumber wasn't the only exciting thing I discovered. I also discovered that I had actually seen the plant and discovered that its fruits squirted goo when I was in Andalusia in 2005. The plants grew in abundance on an area at the end of the camping in Vejer where we stayed, a wonderful camping by the way, where I also saw my first pomegranate trees. Also lemon trees and orange trees but they weren't quite as exciting as the pomegranates. The squirting cucumber plants that I saw there looked exactly like this picture:

Apatouros

In Greek vase paintings depicting the Gigantomakhia, Aphrodite is sometimes depicted driving the chariot of Ares into battle.Strabo, Geography 11. 2. 10 (trans. Jones) (Greek geographer C1st B.C. to C1st A.D.) : "In Phanagoreia [in Mysia] there is a notable temple of Aphrodite Apatouros (Deceiver). Critics derive the etymology of the epithet of the goddess by adducing a certain myth, according to which the Gigantes attacked the goddess there; but she called upon Herakles for help and hid him in a cave, and then, admitting the Gigantes one by one, gave them over to Herakles to be murdered through ‘treachery’ (apate)."

In 2011 Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab had a Lupercalia theme "Ode to Aphrodite". Apatouros was the name of one of the scents in that theme and I now understand that the names must all have been names under which Aphrodite is also known. I did not buy new releases at the time, this scent was sent to me by a very kind and generous woman from the Dutch Lush forum which has a BPAL thread. She sent me some scents for my son to try and some for me too. Apatourus happens to be one I like a lot. BPAL gives her the title Deceptive One.

Black fig, green tea, opoponax, ciste absolute, myrrh, carnation, nutmeg, and Brazilian vetiver.

And deceptive she is, for I do not smell nutmeg or myrrh or vetiver which I would expect to easily pick out as they are all strong scents. I get mostly green tea and ciste, I am not sure about the opoponax, I must sniff my opoponax oil again to remember its smell better. I don't know what black fig smells like, so I don't know if I smell that. I don't really smell carnation, but I do smell something floral that is not ciste. However, no matter what I do or don't smell, the Deceptive One has a very nice scent that I am sure I shall not hand over to my son. (He is already getting Odin, which is perhaps an even nicer scent, but at least in name more masculine.)

  

The Chicken Legged Hut

I have always loved the image of the chicken legged hut of Baba Yaga. So I was delighted when someone sent me the BPAL scent with that name. This time I am not going to write about it. I found the story of Vasilissa who meets Baba Yaga and her hut on another site and I am going to share a link: Vasilissa.