Aromatherapy and the Mind. Julia Lawless
air, and bonfires of scented wood and flowers permeated with perfumed unguents were lit in the streets of Athens during times of plague.
Aromatics were also still valued for their soothing or stimulating properties. The Greeks described the scent of hyacinth as being uplifting and invigorating to a tired mind, and Galen considered the fragrance of narcissus oil to be ‘the food of the soul’. In the Greek world, the need to take care of the body was also to a great extent connected with sport. During the great games at Daphne, the Greek king employed 200 girls to sprinkle rosewater on the crowd to refresh their spirits. Before a competition, the athletes would oil their skin and sprinkle it with a powder appropriate to the type of sport they were doing. In private houses too, anointing the body with oil was a routine matter for maintaining health and beauty.
Perfume also played a central role in the Roman ritual of bathing. It was employed in three principal modes: solid unguents (hedysmata) – generally a single scent such as almond, rose or quince; liquid unguents (stymmata) – compounded perfumes containing flowers, spices and gums; or powder perfumes (diapasmata) – pulverised aromatics. Thus incense and perfumes continued to be used in lavish quantities both for pleasure and for the effect they had on the mind and spirit.
THE CHRISTIAN LEGACY
Christian theology forged an absolute gulf between humanity and nature. Pagan worship of the divinity within nature was rejected.14
Under the Romans, however, as the papacy grew in strength, the Church became increasingly sensitive to any competition from physicians with regard to the cure of the mind or soul. The third century AD also witnessed a rapidly shrinking market for myrrh and frankincense, due to the opposition of the early puritanical Christians to what they saw as ‘pagan fragrances’. In their eyes, the human body and its natural instincts were something to be regarded with distrust and repulsion and, since perfumes and incense stimulated the senses and could be used to heighten sensual pleasure, they were rejected by the Church.
Then in AD 529 Pope Gregory the Great passed a decree that forbade any form of learning that was not acceptable to the political ambitions of the papacy. This included knowledge of materia medica. The School of Philosophy at Athens was closed the same year and the works of Galen and Hippocrates had to be smuggled to Syria.
Arab physicians played an important role in the development of medicine, especially with regard to the prophylactic and therapeutic use of odours. By the third century AD, Alexandria was a vital centre and repository for Greek science and the Alexandrian School of Chemists was developing the process of distillation. Later, Avicenna (AD 980–1037) improved upon this process by inventing the apparatus and method of alembic distillation for the extraction of essential oils. He did much to promote the benefits of aromatic oils and their life-giving virtues:
For the Prophet … the interest in using excellent odours is that they fortify the senses. And when the senses are strong, the thoughts are strong and the conclusions upright. When, on the other hand, the senses become weak, thoughts become unbalanced and their conclusions confused.15
The convergence between ancient ideas and contemporary Arab concepts influenced physicians to use essential oils increasingly for their purifying, restorative and reviving capabilities. Aromatics were back in vogue! They were thought to combat the organism’s destructive passions like fear and sorrow which make the body more susceptible to illness. Being surrounded by pleasant odours was consequently seen as a way of ensuring good health and preventing the spread of disease, especially during times of plague.
By the thirteenth century, ‘the perfumes of Arabia’ and the therapeutic use of aromatic oils had spread throughout Europe. In France during the 1348 plague, the Collegium of the Faculté de Paris prescribed the ‘cold’ scent of roses, sandalwood, nenuphar and camphor during the summer-time, and hot aromatics like eagle wood, amber, nutmeg, sweet gum or ‘pomander’ during the winter months. Pomanders, which originated in the East, were hollow spheres of ornamental gold or silver containing solid perfumes which only the rich could afford, such as musk, aloes, cinnamon and ambergris. In Britain during the Middle Ages, pomanders, scent boxes and ‘tussie mussies’ (little posies of aromatic herbs) were popular, while the floors of dwelling-places were strewn with sweet rushes, rose petals, lemon leaves, chamomile and other herbs.
In the minds of the common people however, perfumes were still bound up with magic and superstition. In the Anglo-Saxon Leech Book of Bald, a sprig of rosemary was recommended as a protection against evil spirits, while in the thirteenth-century Myddfai manuscripts, it says of the same herb:
If the leaves be put beneath your pillow, you will be well protected from troublesome dreams and all mental anxiety.16
After the Protestant reformation of 1517, the employment of aromatics and incense in Britain was again reduced by the Church – only the Roman Catholic Church, with its emphasis on the symbolic value of ritual, retained their use. Seventeenth-century spirituality further strengthened the contempt for the senses and the physical body. The founder of the Order of Redemptorists laid great stress on olfactory mortification:
As for the sense of smell, do not be so vain as to surround yourselves with amber perfumes and other sweet smelling compounds or to use toilet water, all of which have little to recommend them, even to the laity.17
The devaluation of the senses and their effect on the emotions was furthered by the philosophical climate as well as by ecclesiastical principles. René Descartes (1596–1650) defined man’s body as a machine with the soul located in the pineal gland at the base of the brain and to John Locke (1632–1704), who saw all knowledge as built up from bodily sensation, emotion was purely physiological. For the healing arts, the direction given by Descartes’ work was a turning-point – mind and body were conceived as having no relationship to one another, and the concept of ‘soul’ was eroded.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the emotions were given a visceral location, though controversy became acute at this time over whether disorders of the mind brought about physical changes in the body or whether physical disease upset the mind. In 1763, the physician Gaub wrote a response to Julien La Mettries’ essay ‘Man, a Machine’, which he summarized in the following way:
1) The causes and occasions of a great many affections of the body arise in the mind.
2) The mind can be a bulwark of health.
3) In many cases of bodily disease treatment must be directed against the mind as the source of the bodily complaint.
4) Bodily diseases may often be more readily alleviated or cured by the mind, that is, by the emotions, than by ‘corporeal remedies’.18
Gaub recommended that physicians should actively search for substances capable of affecting the mind and that it would be a ‘happy and fruitful endeavour for some far-sighted persons to occupy themselves with a subject of such importance’.19 One such ‘far-sighted person’ was Charles Fourier, an ardent defender of the emotions, who even as a child dreamt of subjecting ‘aromas’ to true scientific study. He set about cultivating a wide selection of aromatic species and conducted a series of personal experiments on the effects of their fragrance. He believed that perfumes, being linked to the powers of attraction or aversion, pleasure or repulsion, served to ‘guide men and beasts’ on an instinctual level. Apart from its profound influence on the human and animal passions, he saw scent as being fundamental to all existence.
Fourier’s notion of a cosmic olfactory foundation to all of life was to anticipate the results of contemporary