Gathering Wild Mushrooms

I am way behind again and rather than trying to write about all the stories I missed I limit myself to today's. The picture above is about half of the original shunga, if you would like to see the complete picture, click here. Gathering Wild Mushrooms was one of this year's Lupercalia and one that disappointed me when tried it last spring. Today I tried it again and now it is all I hoped for then. Did it need time or did my perception change?

Wild mushrooms, hay absolute, ginger root, hiba wood, and ginseng.

Perhaps I was disappointed because I didn't smell the ginger, I don't smell it now. But the mushroom note, hay absolute, hiba wood and ginseng make an amazingly different and autumnish scent. Indeed this is more an autumn scent than a spring one. If I go through this decant quickly, I'll try to find someone selling their bottle.

I posted the complete picture on facebook and some people wondered what the text would mean. It may be a description of one of the sexual acts the crown prince had to carry out as an expression of yin yang (source). Or perhaps it is just a naughty poem. 

The Zoom

Ghosts

It is that time of the year in which BPAL addicts think, talk and dream about weenies, more precisely the newly released Halloween themed scents. Some know exactly what they want and order bottles as soon as they new release is available, others are more cautious or less wealthy, or perhaps both, and order decants in one or more of the decant circles that sprout up in numbers unknown for any other release. This year just about all decant circles are delayed because one of the new scents is on back order. Knowing that I shall have to wait several more weeks before the precieous will arrive, I started to try again some season themed scents. 

The first one was a General Catalogue scent, The Ghost. I remembered I liked it a lot when I first got it (a gift from my generous friend Voodoocat if I remember well). It is one of the scents that come with a poem:

Softly as brown-eyed Angels rove
I will return to thy alcove, 
And glide upon the night to thee, 
Treading the shadows silently.

And I will give to thee, my own, 
Kisses as icy as the moon, 
And the caresses of a snake 
Cold gliding in the thorny brake.

And when returns the livid morn 
Thou shalt find all my place forlorn 
And chilly, till the falling night.

Others would rule by tenderness 
Over thy life and youthfulness, 
But I would conquer thee by fright!

This, I found, is one of the many translations of a poem by Baudelaire, Le Revenant. Which is all the more interesting as among last year's weenies there was a scent named Le Revenant, based on the same poem bit in a different translation! This is the original:

Le Revenant

Comme les anges à l'oeil fauve,
Je reviendrai dans ton alcôve
Et vers toi glisserai sans bruit
Avec les ombres de la nuit;

Et je te donnerai, ma brune,
Des baisers froids comme la lune
Et des caresses de serpent
Autour d'une fosse rampant.

Quand viendra le matin livide,
Tu trouveras ma place vide,
Où jusqu'au soir il fera froid.

Comme d'autres par la tendresse,
Sur ta vie et sur ta jeunesse,
Moi, je veux régner par l'effroi.

— Charles Baudelaire

The Ghost has a scent description that is different from Le Revenant. I can not compare the wto as I only have tried The Ghost, but I expect them to be indeed different as Le Revenant had a gardenia note. This is how The Ghost is described:

A thin, sinuous, creeping chill, the scent of glee-filled undeath: white iris, osmanthus, Calla lily, tomb-crawling ivy and a coffin spray of gladiolus, lisianthus and delphinium.

I like lily scents and I like osmanthus, but somehow this scent is too much of a white floral to me and although I used to like these a lot, my taste seems to have changed. However, last year I still liked them and I did choose another white floral from last year's weenies: Ghosts in Love:

GHOSTS IN LOVE
"Tell me, where do GHOSTS in love 
Find their bridal veils?"

"If you and I were GHOSTS in love
We'd climb the cliffs of Mystery, 
Above the sea of Wails. 
I'd trim your gray and streaming hair
With veils of Fantasy 
From the tree of Memory. 
'Tis there the GHOSTS that fall in love
Find their bridal veils."

- Vachel Lindsay

It is easy for me to remember why I chose this scent to try. It must have been the oudh note: 

White sandalwood, tobacco flower, lily of the valley, white carnation, and magnolia blossom with tea rose, labdanum, and oudh.

This scent too I tried again and obviously it is another white floral. However, although it isn't mentioned there seems to be a musk note in it, or if not it must be a combination of the other notes that gives it a slight muskiness. This gives Ghosts in Love a little more body, so to speak. Although that would be a strange thing for a ghost. 

Fenris Wolf

Last night I dreamed about a large black dog that somehow shone a green light from inside. One place where the light came out was its mouth and I knew that at some point I would place my hand in that mouth. The large black dog (its head was as almost high as my own) did not frighten me, he felt in a way as a friend. But I knew I would be taking a risk placing my hand it its mouth. When I woke up of course I saw how this hand-in-mouth part came from the tale of Tyr and the wolf Fenrir. I am not an expert in Norse mythology, but I shall try to tell the tale as well as I can here. If there are any grave mistakes in it, please do not hesitate to tell me how the story really goes.

The wolf Fenrir or Fenrisúlfr (Old Norse: "Fenris wolf"), also know as Hróðvitnir (Old Norse: "fame-wolf"), or Vánagandr (Old Norse: "the monster of the river Ván") is the son of Loki and the jötunn (giantess) Angrboða. Their other children are the serpent Jormungandr (who could wrap itself around the world and is therefore also called Worldserpent. If he ever lets go, the world will end) and Hel who presides over Hel and receives a portion of the dead there. Of Fenrir it is said that at Ragnarök he will kill Odin, but then will in turn be killed by Odin's son Viðar. The story about Fenrir and Tyr is from the Prose Edda (as opposed to the Poetic Edda).

The Æsir (the gods) expected to get a lot of trouble from Loki's offspring, so they threw Jormungandr into 'that deep sea that lies around all land' and Hel into Hel where they gave her a job to do, but Fenrir theytook home and fed. Only Tyr was brave enough to go close enough to Fenrir to feed him. But Fenrir grew rapidly and the gods, expecting nothing but troubles from the wolf, made three fetters to bind him. The first was called Leyding and Fenrir snapped it at the first try. The second fetter the gods made twice as strong and they called it Dromi. The gods told Fenrir that if he could break Dromi that would make himvery famous and Fenrir, who saw that Dromi was very strong but who also knew he had grown since Leyding, took the risk so he would become famous. He had to work hard, but he managed to break Dromi too. Then the gods sent a messenger to Swartálfaheimr (world of the black elves, but black elves seem to be synonymous with dwarfs). They created Gleipnir (open one) which was not made of metal but of the sound of a cat's footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spottle of a bird. It looked like a silken ribbon, but it was stronger than anything.

The gods took Fenrir to the far away and empty island Lyngvi and asked him to try and tear the ribbon. Of course Fenrir doesn't trust them and won't allow them to bind him with Gleipnir. After much talking Fenrir tells them that rather than have them question his courage, while they bind him one of the gods must put a hand in his mouth as a pledge that this is all done in good faith. This places the Æsir in a dilemma. None of them wants to put a hand in the monster's mouth, as of course they are not doing this in good faith but to bind the monster. In the end it is Tyr who puts his hand in Fenrir's mouth. And when Fenrir kicked, Gleipnir only closed tighter and Tyr lost his hand. The Æsir secured Fenrir's fetter to the ground and when the wolf tried to bite te gods they threw a sword in his mouth. He howled horribly and his saliva made the river Ván. Fenrir will lie there until Ragnarök.

Black Phoenix has a scent named Fenris Wolf, which they describe as:

The raw, untamable power of chaos. Rosewood, amber, red musk and a dribble of red sandalwood.

I smell dragon's blood and not only that but the oil is as red as any scent with dragon's blood. Having learned that dragon's blood can only enter an oil when the resin is dissolved in an essential oil, I assume that dragon's blood has been dissolved in the sandalwood or the musk to make them red. What I do not smell is the power of chaos. I don't smell any chaos, I smell a rather friendly and well blended scent. Perhaps this is what age does to the raw untamable power of chaos, as my imp is quite old. But the scent Fenris Wolf is more like the friendly black dog in my dream than like the monster in the myth.

Unfortunately, the day after I wore Fenris Wolf the dreaded itchy bumps showed up. Time and experience have learned that some BPAL scents that carry sandalwood (and/or other woods) cause a skin irritation on me. This rarely happens soon after applying the scent,  usually it is the day after. A small indi perfumer told me that it is not so much the oil itself as well as the solvent that was used to get the oil out of the wood. 

Mme Moriarty, Misfortune Teller

I really planned for another scent today. I was going to wear Atlas. But before I was completely dressed I had Mme Moriarty in my nose. This might have been from the minute particles of it that were still in the sleeves of my shirt (which I was not yeat wearing then, but it was close to me). But it might just as well have been only in my mind. It happens: I wake up and I smell a scent that is not there. That is the scent I wear that day. How could I ignore such a clearodorance? (Yes, I made up that word. It might not be the best word in English. I have a perfectly good Dutch word for it, but since I made up that one too, translation machines do not recognize it.)

So I am wearing Mme M today. The day before yesterday I was shocked to find that I didn't enjoy her as much as I did before. But today she is as good as she was before.

http://scentwise.blogspot.com/2012/03/mme-moriarty-misfortune-teller.html

http://scentwise.blogspot.com/2012/04/mme-moriarty-misfortune-teller-i-knew.html

http://scentwise.blogspot.com/2012/05/mme-moriarty-misfortune-teller-i-am-day.html

Supervillainess

Looking back at the scents I wore yesterday it was an interesting trinity: Lilith, Queen and to finish it off Supervillainess. This one is not a BPAL scent, but one from the soap-maker Villainess. Villainess has the GC scent Villainess, but for their anniversary they offered the LE Supervillainess. Villainess scents do not always agree with me. I am not sure if this is in the essential oils used or in the carrier oil. But I rather liked Villainess, although its leather note is sharper than BPAL's leather note, and Supervillainess added coffee and chocolate to that. Now BPAL's chocolate is a horror of plastic fake on me, but I had tried Dulces en Fuego (I don't think I wrote about that one) and it smelled like real chocolate. Although the chocolate part faded too quickly on me, I wasn't afraid to try Supervillainess. And she did not diappoint me: Supervillainess is leather and coffee and chocolate (though not strong on the chocolate), tough and sweet at the same time. 

The only problem is that she doesn't want to be stopped, literally: the rubber stopper refuses to go back into the tiny 2ml bottle and is launched when I try. I have to maneuvre a toothpick between the stopper and the glass while I push in the stopper, carefully allowing some air to leave the bottle, and then retract the toothpick without allowing the stopper to come along with it. I am sure this will only be a problem until the space for trapped air will be large enough, but with a 2ml bottle this might not be before it is finished. But it's worth the struggle.

Queen

Because I washed and hennaed my hair I could test more than one scent yesterday. Queen was another one that had been waiting for me to try it. It was hard to find a picture that would express what the scent is about. Queen is one of the group of scents of Black Phoenix that are inspired by authentic New Orleans Voodoo recipes.

For use only by women. An extremely potent passion blend, used to great effect when you're converting feminine sexual energy into power. 

The first thing this scent shows is power: this is without a doubt a very powerful scent. It smelled warm and woody and musky. I went to read some reviews about it and to my surprise on the first page hardly anyone had the same scent experience. Some smelled honey, someone smelled curry(!), someone else flowers and pepper, I read about sage and chocolate, cherry and coconut, patchouli, fir and even mothballs! It wasn't until the second page of reviews when I finally found another reviewer describing the scent as woodsy and musky. It must be a true voodoo scent, if it smells so different to different users. I did wonder if it would have something to do with the hormonal balance. It would be interesting to try this scent in different phases of the hormonal cycle.

Lilith

I chose this image for Lilith because it seems to come closest to BPAL's description:

Mother of Demons, Vengeful Fury, Darkest Seductress, Queen of the Djinn, Goddess of the Gate. 

However, there is hardly a creature with more varied descriptions than Lilith. She is in Christianity the first wife of Adam, she is a Jewish  demoness and in modern paganism she is thought to be a Sumerian goddess. 

A prominent translator decided she was mentioned in the Gilgamesh epos, in which she has built herself a house in the huluppah tree from which Inanna wants to make herself a holy throne and a holy bed. I am in no way trained in ancient  Mesopotamian languages, but when I found the original text I was surprised by this conclusion. The original text in our letters (I do not read cuneiform script) is:

sab-ba-bi-a ki-sikil-lil-la-ke e im-ma-ni-ib-du

This is translated as: In its midst Lilith had built for herself a house. 'It' is the tree and in the lines before this we could read how the Zu-bird had made a nest for its young in the crown and how a snake had made her nest at the base. It looks like an interesting trinity and they seem to fit nicely a well-known image in stone:

This image shows the woman with the wings of the bird and with some imagination one could see the coils of the snake in her hands. It is often seen as a depiction of Lilith, the bird feet would be a sign of her being an ancient goddess but for others a sing that she is a demoness.  But just as often it is seen as thin image of the goddess Inanna. The hat is typical for a god(dess) or priest(ess) and ancient goddesses often had bird feet. Of course if Lilith were a goddess she too might have had the hat of a goddess.
But is she? And was she in Inanna's tree? In spite of my lack of knowledge I have my doubts about that. Lets look at the text again: sab-ba-bi-a ki-sikil-lil-la-ke e im-ma-ni-ib-du. I suppose that the Lilith part is where it says 'ki-sikil-lil-la-ke'. But that looks just as much like the word Lilith as it looks like the word lilitu. And lilitu as well as ardat-lili were female demons, part of a family of demons together with the male demon lilu.

Of course, the next question would be: how much difference does that make? What is the difference between gods in a pantheon and demons? Is the only difference that the gods are the good guys and the demons are the bad guys? In that case they would be just opposite sides of the same coin. So perhaps I should leave it at this, as I can not answer my own questions, nor have I found anyone else providing me with an answer that seemed to me to be correct.

So what does Lilith smell like? 

Red wine, myrrh, black musk, and attar of rose.

In its first moments this scent has an overwhelmingly sharp wine-note over myrrh, which shocked me as I thought: "This should smell good, why doesn't it?" But then I remembered a wine note had done that before to me: starting out very sharp, but softening with time. This wine acted the same: after some time the sharpness disappeared and the whole scent became more musky with a warm wine note and the slightest hint of roses. I didn't get much myrrh in that phase, I think it blended in with the musk or the wine. 
Which makes the scent as difficult to place as Lilith herself: it has the sharpness of a demon, but also the enveloping warmth of a protecting goddess.

Djinn

BPAL's Djinn was among the very first imps that a friend sent me to try and I didn't like it much then. I thought I should give it another chance and I find that now I like it enough to wear it two days one after the other. 

An ancient, free-willed race created from the essence of Fire, much as man was created from Earth. They prowled the land at night, vanishing with the first rays of dawn. Myths surrounding the Djinn paint them as many things: benevolent champions of mankind and slaves to mad sorcerers, malicious incubi / succubi and energy vampires, or malevolent harbingers of madness and disease. The Djinn are ruled by Iblis, the Prince of Darkness, who bears unspeakable contempt for man. 

This is what BPAL says about the Djinn. In the tales I read djinn's are often connected with a brass oil lamp (in Aladin's tale for instance) or they are captured in a bottle from which they very much want to escape. These are djinns, plural. 
There is also the idea of Djinn, the King of the fire elementals or salamanders. This Djinn is not a race of creatures but only one and he has above him the Archangel of the element fire, Michael. The tales about djinns were so deeply rooted in me that I always found it hard to accept Djinn as this Elemental King. 

Djinns do not only make their appearance in old tales. In one of the books by Carrie Vaughn about the midnight radio show hostess and werewolf Kitty, "Kitty Raises Hell", a djinn plays an important part. This djinn is a fire creature.

In the card game Magic The Gathering I found cards with djinns of different elements (or as it is in MTG: colours).

 

This last one is the strangest: The picture shows it as a fire creature, yet it has water as its colour. I have not been able to find one that has air as its colour, which seems strange too. But it may be that I simply have not searched well.

Back to the BPAL scent. It is described as:

The scent of black smoke, of crackling flames, and smoldering ashes.

This is an amazingly accurate descrition. I don't know how Beth made it like this, but it does smell like a blazing fire and very hot material. Which is probably why I didn't like it at first. This is hardly how one expects a perfume to smell.

Smoky Moon

The weather changed. Summer seems to have ended, although we still had some sun today after the rainstorms. After all, it is September. And we did have a summer even when it started a bit late. Last year spring went into autumn without the slightest suggestion of a summer in between. So I am grateful for this year's weeks of summer weather. But today was a day for a scent that would warm me rather than go well with warm weather. So it was my other favorite of this summer, Smoky Moon, the full moon of the end of June. Today I found a picture that looks like the scent smells, or perhaps I should say that the sky in the photo does. To me this is a warm and brownish scent with an orange glow. To others it might well be a Hippie scent, reminiscent of champaca incense. Of course it is both.

The only reason why there are not a lot of posts about Smoky Moon is that (like Passion Butterfly) I wore it most often during the months that I didn't post. 

http://scentwise.blogspot.nl/2012/06/smoky-moon.html

http://scentwise.blogspot.nl/2012/08/smoky-moon-before-i-wore-nothing-but.html

Passion Butterfly

I should have continued with Hairy Toad Lily, but the wonderful sunny weather brought me back to my passion for this butterfly. On first sniff it seems like a rather simple citrus scent, but like Tiger Lily this is a scent that makes me happy. And it goes perfectly with the sunny summer weather we have been having. For me this summer is the summer of Passion Butterfly, Venice and the yellow skirt I have been wearing for weeks. Although I did not wear Passion Butterfly in Venice. At the time I had only a decant and I didn't want to risk losing the precious.

Tiger Lily

When I wore Tiger Lily the day after her Imperious relative the difference was obvious: Imperious Tiger Lily is a very nice scent, but Tiger Lily makes me happy. It has take me quite some time to discover that there are scents that actually do that: some scents make me happy. This is a irrational thing: there may be hardly a difference between that scent and another one and yet only one of them has the effect of making me happy. Tiger Lily is such a scent.

A feisty bouquet of golden, warm, gently honeyed lilies.

It sounds more different from the Imperious than it smells, but one thing is very true: Tiger Lily is much more gentle than the Imperious One. The Imperious Tiger Lily is snappy, it has the bite of the ginger. Tiger Lily is gentle. There isn't an obvious honey note, which is a good thing for me because I am not overly fond of honey notes. But Tiger Lily certainly has gentleness.

I had read in reviews that Al-Araaf was much like Tiger Lily, so the day after Tiger Lily I started to wear Al-Araaf. But the first sniff from the bottle already told me it was not at all like Tiger Lily. How could I have agreed with those reviews? Al-Araaf is a very nice scent, but I must have forgotten how Tiger Lily really smelled when I thought Al-Araaf could replace it. http://scentwise.blogspot.com/2012/03/al-araaf.html

Imperious Tiger Lily

After Voodoo Lily and Black Lily I thought I should continue with the other lilies I have. Today it is the Imperious Tiger Lily, the Tiger Lily Alice met in the Garden of Live Flowers. Originally BPAL had a tiger lily that was plainly called Tiger Lily, but it was discontinued long before I discovered BPAL. The scent that replaced it was Imperious Tiger Lily. However, in the boxes with (partial) imps that were my first introduction to the scents of Black Phoenix there was an imp of the original Tiger Lily. Not knowing how rare it was even then I took it with me on vacation as one of the four scents I carried with me. I ended up wearing hardly any of the others and returned with a near empty imp and a fierce love for Tiger Lily. It would have been my first bottle, had it still been available. But because I loved it so much, I never could appreciate its impperious successor. Which was not fair at all, because one of the differences between the two is in the ginger that the imperious has and I happen to love ginger scents (although perhaps not then, my taste develops).

Tiger-lily, ginger root, neroli, purple fruits, and frankincense.

The picture above shows the lily as a tiger face with tiger stripes. Which is what one would expect with the name, but in fact the tiger lily has dots rather than stripes. What would have been the reason to call it a tiger lily? The colour, which is usually orange? Was 'tiger' an easier name than 'panther' or 'leopard'? Leopard Lily doesn't sound bad at all, I would say. Or did the name-giver not know that tigers have stripes, not dots?

Black Lily

Black Calla Lily

When I wrote about the Voodoo Lily yesterday, I found that the Dracunculus vulgaris is not only called Voodoo Lily but also Black Lily (as well as many other names). I remembered I also have an imp of the BPAL scent Black Lily, so I decided to wear that today. Fortunately I had gathered all my scents with Lily in their name in one box, for it would have been quite a search if I hadn't. 

BPAL does not mention in the description which lily inspired the scent, but I think it wasn't Dracunculus but the Black Calla Lily. I might be wrong, but I do like the picture of the Calla Lily and it seems to fit the description:

Breathtaking darkness, a vision of grace in shadow.

Black Lily is a surprisingly soft and powdery lily scent. I think I may like it even more than Voodoo Lily. But it will have to pass the itches test first. I liked Black Lotus but had very itchy wrists the next day and it took a few days before that came to a rest. It may not have been in the 'Black' at all, but I am cautious now.

The Black Arum Lily below (I think) is the Dracunculus. It looks much like yesterday's picture and Dracunculus is an arum lily. It's not very black in this picture, but it has the same shape.

Black Arum Lily

Voodoo Lily

Sauromatum venosum

The name Voodoo Lily has been given to a number of different plants. I like the one above, the Sauromatum venosum but it is not the one that was the inspiration for BPAL scent with that name. The Sauromatum venosum, also known as Typhonium venosum, is sometimes called Voodoo bulb because the flower can grow from the tuber by placing it on a window sill. The flower smells of wet dog or rotting flesh and thus attracts the flies it needs for pollination. This plant is native in tropical Africa and Asia.

Another Voodoo Lily is the Dracunculus vulgaris, but this plant has many names: Dragon Arum, Black Arum, Voodoo Lily, Snake Lily, Stink Lily, Black Lily, Black Dragon, Dragonwort and Ragons. It is native to the Balkans extending as far as Greece. 

Black Phoenix mentions in the scent description yet another plant family, Amorphophallus (which means shapeless penis). This is a family of 170 Arum species some of which are quite huge:

Amophophallus wilhelma

All of the Voodoo Lilies have one thing in common: they all have a bad smell. Fortunately BPAL's Voodoo Lily smells a lot better:

Amorphallus, indeed. A breathtakingly exotic, wild, and grossly erotic spicy gold, purple-black, and burgundy lily.

To me it is a lily scent with an earthy undertone, a rather dark and spicy lily scent. 

Cheshire Cat

I would have sworn I wrote about Cheshire Cat before, but I can't find it so apparently I did not. I wrote about Two, Five and Seven and mentioned the cat there, perhaps that is why I think I wrote about the unstable but ever grinning feline.

As you can read in the post about Two, Five and Seven I did not like the Cheshire Cat when I was young. I thought he had a rather scary grin and perhaps, knowing my imagination, it was too easy for me to imagine its grin somewhere in the bushes, a grin without a cat. These days I would love to see that grin, with or without the cat. 

Looking at the picture again it may have been the eyes rather than the grin that I feared when I was young. Have a look at those eyes, they are certainly not cat's eyes. And I knew what cat's eyes looked like, I grew up with  a cat, the black cat Flipje. That is a Dutch name as I am Dutch, it might be easier for English speaking people to call the cat Flippie which was probably what I tried to say when I was three or four, because photographs showing me and the cat together come with a text calling the cat Hippie. I don't know what happened to Hippie, he probably disappeared, either through a traffic accident or because our house got too crowded with little children. 

I would have to pick up Alice in Wonderland again to know if the Cheshire Cat was described as a marmelade cat. It is how I always imagined him: a big orange cat with a wide grin. His BPAL scent is odd, but I find myself liking it much more than I expected. And of course, odd is quite right for a Cheshire cat.

Grapefruit, red currant, dark musk, Roman chamomile, delphinium, and lavender.

I usually don't like lavender or chamomile in my scents, but in the Cheshire Cat they give something powdery yet fresh to the grapefruit and red currant. Those two were a surprise for me when I read the notes, before that I thought I was smelling orange. This summer I am very fond of citrus scents and Cheshire Cat might reach my list of most favorite scents.