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.

Calico Jack * Jolly Roger

Did you that there is not one pirate flag, but that in the time that the pirate flag got the name Jolly Roger each pirate has his own flag? The one above is Jack Rackham's flag and Jack Rackham was known as Calico Jack. So with one picture I now cover two BPAL scents that were sent to me to give to my son.

Calico Jack 

Jack Rackham was a pirate operating in the Bahamas in the early 18th century.  He got the name Calico Jack from the clothes he wore which were made from calico, a plain-woven textile made from unbleached, often not fully processed cotton. The raw fabric was dyed and printed in bright hues and patterns. Calico Jack was known for two things: the design of his Jolly Roger flag which contributed to the popularization of the design and the fact that he had two female crew members, Anne Bonny who was his lover and Mary Read. Both Anne Bonny and Mary Read got their own scents at BPAL, by the way. I won't go into detail about Calico Jack's colourful life which involved a lot of ships that were taken over. In October 1720 the pirate hunter Jonathan Barnet caught Rackham and his crew while they were at anchor and drunk (there is a story that only the women were fit enough to fight, but they couldn't defend the ship by just the two of them). All the pirates were hung except Anne Bonny and Mary read who claimed to be pregnant. Mary Read later died of fever supposedly connected with childbirth, Anne Bonny simply disappeared from history. Read more about Calico Jack here.

The scent that was made inspired by Calico Jack has a description almost as romantic as his life:

Sea air, driftwood, waterlogged kelp, and the memory of plundered spices sprayed over worn leathers, rough musk, and the salty wooden floorboards of the Revenge.

Unfortunately I fail to smell driftwood, spices, musk or even worn leathers. I mostly smell something like a man's cologne, which may be what happens when an aquatic scent hits my skin. As a result, I did not like much the way Calico Jack smells.

Jolly Roger

Jolly Roger, the flag, got its own scent. Its description is simpler, which seems right as a man is more complicated than his flag, usually.

Sea spray with an undercurrent of leather, Bay Rum, and salty, dry woods.

It is interesting that Jolly Roger seems much nicer to me. There still is the reaction of my skin to aquatic scents, but Jolly Roger seems to have more wood than the man who made such a popular design of it. And there is the booze note. Yohoho and a hint of rum!

The Jolly Roger of Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard

Odin

Oden som Vandringsman, Georg von Rosen, 1886

I like this image of Odin asa wanderer, because it is how he appears in Runemarks by Joanne Harris (yes, the author of Chocolat, but this is a different kind of candy). I have never been much interested in any of the Norse gods, except perhaps Tyr who fascinated me because of his connection with the wolf Fenrir (read more about the wolf and the god here). But Odin showed up in two books I enjoyed reading during the past year. First in American Gods by Neil Gaiman and then in Runemarks. So when I was sent his scent, even when only to pass it on to my son, I had to try it. And I am afraid I like it so much that I do hope my son will not like it at all and return it to me. Otherwise I think I need to get myself some more.

Black Phoenix gives a long description for Odin:

Odin is highest and eldest of the Æsir: he rules all things, and mighty as are the other gods, they all serve him as children obey a father. The All-Father, Lord of Wisdom and War. Odin’s name itself translates to "fury", "excitation" and "poetry"and that is the core of His essence. He is the God of Victory, and holds sway over hunting, verse, war-lust and berserkers, magic, illumination, foresight, death, plots and machinations, and He dispenses the Mead of Inspiration to poets from his sacred vessel, Óð-rœri. He gifted mankind with runes, both sacred and mundane, and the ability to use them for both communication and magical work. He grants glory and madness, inspiration and courage, power and wisdom. He commands the einheriar of his Hall, Valhalla, and the Valkyries that claim the souls of valiant warriors. LordOdin’s favored weapon is the spear Gugnir, which he uses to claim those chosen to die in battle. He is accompanied by his ravens, Hugin and Munin [thought and memory], and his wolves, Geri and Freki [the Greedy], and rides an eight-legged horse, Sleipner, that is, in itself, symbolic of death. His scent is dry elm bark, amaranth, warrior’s musk, and Odin’s Nine Herbs of Power.

The scent smelled like a field of heather on a mountain to me the first time I tried it. Then I tried it again one more time before I would pass it on to my son and this time it struck me as having a powdery quality I would not expect of a god of war. But perhaps it fits the wanderer. And of course we mus never underestimate Odin, even when he tries to fool us with a powdery scent!

    

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.