Experiments in Aromatherapy

This time of year has that 'ungh' type of feeling.... Hot and
overbearing, humid and sticky..   Making us start to look
forward to the autumn and the cool evenings of sleep and
relaxation.  Myself, I live on top of a sagebrush steppes type
of desert environment.  So the mornings are cool, with an
undertone of sagebrush and fresh juniper scent. Then it is
rather merciless in its daytime heat, but punctuated by late
day thunderclouds and an occasional rain storm. But, for
all of that, a rather glorious evening. I live on top of a plateau,
so the morning and evening contain what is most beloved
to me- sunrises and sunsets that remind me that creation is
the most treasured of the many gifts of the universe. Working in the herb garden and preparing for a winter of distillations
that promise wild and beauty inspiring scents. Who could
ask for more? and a quiet and solitude that gives rise to the
required open minded creativity and serenity needed to
compose scents of my spirit. In these types of times, it reminds
me of my purpose here on earth.

So, along these lines of thought, a simple scent combination that
is readily and easily made by oneself, in your own place of
serenity, one, that helps to sharpen the mind and spirit as well and invigorating or relaxing, depending on your predisposed
mood, can be composed of:


                       Lavendar oil distilled with Elecampagne, 3 parts
                       Rosemary oil, 1 parts (optional)
                       Petitgrain oil, 3 parts
                       Spearmint, 1/2 part (optional)
                       Rose or Jasmine Attar, 1 part
                       Ensans (Frankincense) 1-2 parts

This is a recipe that can be played with, joggled around, to
come to the scent that seems to work right for your own self.
This can be a crisp and refreshing scent, or a relaxing one, depending on your choice of herbals versus florals. Start with just mere drops of each, until you come to a combination that
suits your own sensibilities'. As with all aromatic materials, always 'patch test' the blend before full usage, to make sure of no allergic reaction.

Pachabels Canon in D, classical Guitar


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXC9tuumjiA&feature=player_detailpage

 

QETZAL PARFUM

This crisp and refreshing, yet heady scent is named after the South American bird of the same moniker. Wafts of jungle scented humidity rich with Orange Blossoms, three kinds of citrus and a harmony of florals, flavored herb...s and woods to bring a strong body to the core of the scent (Lavender, Sage, Palo Santo). Traces of resinous bushes (Ciste, Ensans), roots and nearly fugitive spices are secreting themselves just under the effluviant nimbus of lively thought and creative conversations of the osmological, ontological omniverse (?!). This scent comes flying swiftly to you on the wings of the four winds. This parfum was patiently waiting its birth into this garden of mine for nearly ten years. Its parent of Inspiration is the olde antique scent known to some as the eau de toilette/cologne known as Agua de Florida- Florida Water.

Welcome to Qetzal

Rejoice in the Flight of Your Soul. Most especially for your personal enjoyment. Happily Scented. Made for a Blessing.

So Qetzal is our thought of what Florida Water would be one day. The Agua Nueva- The New Water, if you will. As if Florida Water took but one more step and allowed a more lavish presentation of citrus and a stronger floral note- a little more satisfaction, and the floral mystery ensconced in an effluviant cloud (pepper, cardamom, ginger) with a strong fixity and staying power for citral concoctions. Fragrant grasses compliment the upper and mid notes of this composition. The past and future coming together in one fragrant - NOW. This blend may be used both as a light citrus accent used sparingly for wide crowds and social tet-d'-tets, or used lavishly for those moments of warm intimacy and excited closeness of thot or soul... Rumored to be suitable for Curandismo and songs for Plants....And living Well.

 

 

 

A Little About Parfum

The words parfum, cologne, eau d' toilette, esprit d' parfum, all refer to differing concentrations of extracts, oils and alcohols, and this also depends on their origins of manufacture.
Contrary to popular modern opinion, alcohol is an intrinsic and important part of parfum making. People have erroneously attributed negative qualities to alcohol, lumping it into the same catagory as syntheti...c and artificial perfumes. There are many different forms of synthetic alcohols of various consistencies, that perform different jobs in the body of a perfume. At The Old Civet Cat, we do as our french predecessors did. We use alcohol of nearly 100% strenghth specifically made for the food industry. We specifically denature the alcohol ourselves, making it suitable for parfum manufacture. The process of denaturing is specific to each different scent aroma our director makes - this allows it to be customized to need, and this is where the addition of ingredients not friendly to distillation are added. This also allows the director to employ the use of natural fixatifs. A fixatif is a blend of balsams and resins and oleo resins, that are added in specifically altering small amounts to both retard evaporation of your parfum, allowing the scent to stay longer (something sorely missing in alot of modern day parfums) and to customize the alcohol to accomodate specific ingredients more harmoniously in the parfum proper. Doing this gives a deeper depth and complexity to any parfum formula. Alcohol, because of its volatile evaporation, carries the scent out and into the air with it, something that came into vouge in victotorian times, when your parfum was a kind of 'signature' of your person . When fixatifs are used in a parfum, they do not exibit the skin drying effects that modern parfums tend towards. Also, your parfum is strong enouph, you need not use so much of it that skin dryness and your parfum become an issue in todays ultra sensative social milleu. Back when it was the thing to promote ones status by showing off your scent, it was meant for others really, instead of keeping it close to your own bodies warmth to be enjoyed by self and close intimates of your life.
A parfum has a higher concentration of essential oils and extracts than does eau d' parfum/esprit d' parfum. Though less concentrated, none the less leaves an intense and lingering aroma. Eau d' Toilette and Eau d' Cologne are lighter than parfum, with cologne considered to be the lightest. In todays view of organic, or 'green' focus, we would add the Aromatic Artisan Hydrosols to this list, making it the lightest of them all, but because of the nearly complete water content, it is suitable for a traveling sponge bath (hence the use of the word 'toilette water' in years bygone.) to a pleasent additive to drinks and appertifs and such.
Parfum became prominent in Europe at the time of the crusades. The creator of the first cologne was Gian Paolo Feminis. The percent of essential oil in this type of cologne is about 5%, whereas parfum has the highest concentration at 20-25% range.
So here at The Old Civet Cat we are here to present high quality parfum, done in a manner and way nearly lost to the sands of time, and shown off to its heights by the French tradition. We are eager to have your reactions to our modern and ancient interpretations and extrapolations to our scented offerings. Though it may take some time, never feel bashful to send a letter to our scent director to give direct input and feedback.
Please write us if you have a special need or desire of our custom skills in making something to suit you and be one of a kind, to walk with you like it was born with you! Inquiries from both individuals and businesses are welcomed and desired, let us create something exclusive to yourself or your store front or organization.

What is the scent of nurture and protect?

 The Memories of the scents of Sagebrush and Juniper pervade my consciousness as I have been recapitulating my perceptions as one is wont to do in a reflective middle age. These are the scents of both childhood and a true love of my past. So I get my Chinese Zodiac daily prediction today:

 

 

You feel that you are being misunderstood right now by just about everybody, no matter what you say or do. You are tempted to sneak quietly away and never come back. But will that change anything? Probably not. Don't give up on your dreams just yet. "

 

 

Wow! never had some social horoscope hit the mark so darned well and accurately, its spooky. Well now, I have already decided to move back to my old cabin in the mountains, my own hokey walden pond. I don't need to sneak away, there is no one to miss my presence. But as an experiment of sorts, I left the marauding ranks of facebook. I found that I will not be missed, nor talked too, if I am not present on that great bastion of meaningful interaction, no matter what the protestations of 'I don't really hang out that much on facebook'. haha. Everybody hangs out there, including the popes cute little dog. So it pleases me in some bizarre manner to see I don't have to go to far to disappear, merely a change of cursor positioning.  So, going to the mountains isn't really disappearing, they can't find me either way, so it is a sojourn and return to a different quality of personal life. My grandma once said, if you lay down with dogs, you will get fleas. From this i extend my extrapolation to mean, if I persist in hanging out and communicating with persons that cannot, or will not, live to a higher standard- I may end up adopting the same spiritually barren  mind space, and I could end up treating people like that myself, which would just make me gag. One can put up with a lot of craparoonies sometimes in personal and worldly interactions, that goes with our modernity and less authentic way of being with each other as people. But if I think i am approaching acting in the same way- oy! Time to vacate living a shared experience of less substance, and get back to myself. I need not worry, indeed I need to trust my own process. There will be no hurt feelings outside of myself, for I am having my experience off of facebook. So I need not worry about the future- it is clear, clean, and won't have the detritus of the outer world, thankfully that same lack of presence, also doesn't extend any energy into this, the real world i live in. So I have in essence, already moved, tho yet  I have not packed the truck. And so I smell sagebrush and juniper, and the crispness of truth and reality in the solitude and quiet moan of coming winter wind. Now I smell these things, and realize that what used to feel like being isolated, is the smell of real reality, and my mind, no longer running space for people that have become mental abstracts, is coming to a calmer, inwardly focused acceptance of my uniqueness and desire to meet the world sensorial as my grandpa did, mourning the dying of love, and celebrating the birthing of self sufficiency without emotional need from traditional sources of nurturing, with glorious nature as the backdrop to my perceptions, and my dialog with The Spirit That Moves Thru Things.

 

And with that, i remember the taste and scent of mahogany leaf tea, in ceremonial sweats, cleansing the soul and body. And look forward to the snow for the first time in many a year.

Essential Oil Distillations of The Week

Essential Oil Distillations of The Week

 

 

 

Claude Monet (French, Impressionism, 1840-1926): Rising Tide at Pourville (Marée montante à Pourville), 1882. Oil on canvas, 66 x 81.3 cm. Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA.

 

 

I am hoping your weekend was spent staying cool and relaxed, being safe and not forgetting

our companion pets and animals in this heat wave most seem to be experiencing this week.

 

And you  Aromatherapy enthusiasts keep a few essences in mind for dealing with

overheated bodies-  peppermint or spearmint are cooling in sensation, peppermint can be used neat

or in combination with other oils, increasing their efficacy and regulating excesses of essences.

Lavender is healing to skin damage, whether from working or accident, and can

be applied neat to wounds and scrapes. It is helpful to some folks for the bites of

mosquitos and other small insect pests. In combination with peppermint, can be used

in recipes for sunburns, something all of us need to be mindful of in this sweltering heat!

Rosemary is used with these types of things in combination, being very healing topically

itself. Its neutral to warm, so some cooling essence would augment it nicely. And

i always include some Lime or Brouts to freshen these blends, mixing very nicely with them.

 

Something known for ages, for heat rashes ("prickly heat") and other topical irritations

caused by fluxing high enviroment temperatures-  which is a little hard to find, but

authentic White Sandalwood powder, lightly rubbed on the body, like talc. It will amaze

you to feel how effective it is! sometimes Baroo's camphor (Borneol) is added at

1-3% to increase the usefulness of the sandalwood.

 

Now in this weeks essential oil news for The Old Civet Cat- i met some lovely men high

in oregons lush Applegate River area, that were gracious to offer a nice garden's worth

of Lavender and Clary Sage for distillation. I do beleive this was possibly the sweetest

lavender i have ever smelled, surley due to the Organic growing in these sweet

mountains.  And the Clary Sage was equally as captivating, having a deeper and

rounder note than most Clary. I co distilled Frankincense with it, which made it

even more pleasing and desireable. Overall, a productive week. And some joggling

on the formula for Red Hawk was finalized for production and distributions.  If you

may be intrested in being a distributor, do drop me a message so i may send

relevant details and qualifiers.

 

 

 

Be Well!

This Week in Essential oil deis



Spagyric
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Spagyric /spəˈdʒɪrɨk/ is a name given to the production of herbal medicines using alchemical procedures. These procedures involve fermentation, distillation and the extraction of mineral comp...onents from the ash of the plant. These processes were in use in medieval alchemy generally for the separation and purification of metals from ores (see Calcination), and salts from brines and other aqueous solutions.



Origin: Greek: Spao, to tear open, + ageiro, to collect. It is a term probably first coined by Paracelsus. In its original use, the word spagyric was commonly used synonymously with the word alchemy, however, in more recent times it has often been adopted by alternative medicine theorists and various techniques of holistic medicine.
Spagyrics in practice
Spagyric most commonly refers to a plant tincture to which has also been added the ash of the calcined plant. The original rationale behind these special herbal tinctures seems to have been that an extract using alcohol could not be expected to contain all the medicinal properties from a living plant, and so the ash or mineral component (as a result of the calcination process) of the calcined plant was prepared separately and then added back to 'augment' (increase) the alcoholic tincture. The roots of the word therefore refer first to the extraction or separation process and then to the recombining process. These herbal tinctures are alleged to have superior medicinal properties to simple alcohol tinctures, perhaps due the formation of soap-like compounds from the essential oils and the basic salts contained within the ash. In theory these spagyrics can also optionally include material from fermentation of the plant material and also any aromatic component such as might be obtained through distillation. The final spagyric should be a re-blending of all such extracts into one 'essence.'
The concept of the spagyric remedy in turn relies upon the three cardinal principles of alchemy, termed as salt, sulphur and mercury. "The basis of matter was the alchemical trinity of principles – salt, sulfur and mercury. Salt was the principle of fixity (non-action) and in-combustibility; mercury was the principle of fusibility (ability to melt and flow) and volatility; and sulfur was the principle of inflammability."
The three primal alchemical properties and their correspondence in spagyric remedy are:
Mercury = water elements, representing the life essence of the plant, the very alcohol extract of the plant is the carrier of the life essence.
Salt = earth element, representing the vegetable salts extracted from calcined ashes of plant body.
Sulphur = fire element, virtue of plant, representing the volatile oil essence of the plant.
Paracelsus stated that the true purpose of Alchemy was not for the vulgar purpose of gold making, but rather for the production of medicines.The term 'Spagyria' has been used by Paracelsus in his book Liber Paragranum, deriving from the Greek words 'spao' and 'ageiro', the essential meaning of which is to 'separate and to combine'.
He formulated that nature in itself was 'raw and unfinished,' and man had the God-given task to evolve things to a higher level. As an example: The 'raw' medicinal plant would be separated into the basic components he termed 'mercurius', 'sulphur' and 'sal' and thereby cleaned of non-essential components. 'Mercurius', 'sulphur' and 'sal' were then recombined forming the medicine.
In contemporary terms, this would be the extraction of the essential oils with vapour gaining the 'sulphur'. Then fermentation of the remaining plant and distilling the alcohol produced thus gaining 'mercurius'. Extraction of the mineral components from the ash of the marc which would be the 'sal'. Diluting the essential oils in the alcohol and then solving the mineral salts in it would produce the final potion.Note that this is a simplified representation of the process which varies strongly depending on the source chosen.
Joseph Needham devoted several volumes of his monumental Science and Civilisation in China to Spagyrical discovery and invention. In 1965, Malaclypse the Younger and Lord Omar Khayyam Ravenhurst popularized the term as a result of their joint seminal work Principia Discordia.

M.C Ramos Sánchez, F.J. Martín Gil, J. Martín Gil. "Los espagiristas vallisoletanos de la segunda mitad del siglo XVI y primera mitad del siglo XVII". Estudios sobre historia de la ciencia y de la técnica: IV Congreso de la Sociedad Española de Historia de las Ciencias y de las Técnicas: Valladolid, 22–27 de Septiembre de 1986, 1988, ISBN 84-505-7144-8, pags. 223–228See More