What happens when a city of 3 million inhabitants has a sewer system that serves 1 million? The Great Stink! But can stench alone kill?
Category: History & Alchemy
Chatting with Courtney & Laura from I Heart Dead Things
A few weeks ago I had the privilege to sit down and have an amazing chat with Courtney Iseman and Laura Wasson over at the I Heart Dead Things Podcast we talked all things death, olfaction, and dived into some of my work . Check out the interview below and if you too heart dead things…
The Death/Scent Reading List
Over the last year I have had several requests for more information and deeper reads on subjects brought up on the blog. So after banging around my shelves a bit, here is the Death/Scent reading list. Some of them are staples of both olfactive and death literature, others are weird and wonderful deep cuts. This…
The Perfumed Mummy
Now we reach the intersection of material culture, belief systems, and death with the physical preparation of the body, which used many aromatic ingredients. The creation of the archetypical Egyptian mummy was a complex evolution that embraced the olfactive elements of the putrid and the divine.
Disasters, Mysteries, and Perfume: Unearthing the Philistines
In this post, we explore what we know and what we don’t about Philistine culture, thier death practices and how perfume may have played a role in their cosmology.
The Fragrance of the Soul: Olfaction and Death in Ancient Egyptian Religion
As a society, we have an anosmic view of history. We don’t think about how things smelt or what olfaction meant to people in the past because olfaction is not a primary consideration in the present. When we do think of the scents of the past, it is with modern snobbishness and assurance that all…
The Lost History of Women in Chemistry: The First Alchemist
This is the second post in the D/S Women’s History Month series, The Lost History of Women in Chemistry, to see Part I: The First Perfumer click here In the Indie perfume universe, the word alchemy pops up a lot. It graces the title of several popular companies. It also tends to be the word…
The Lost History of Women in Chemistry:The First Perfumer
This post is no longer available click here to redirect to Tapputi Bellatekallim: The First Perfumer? Author’s Note: In 2016 I wrote the post, The Lost History of Women in Chemistry: The First Perfumer. In the interim, my knowledge of Assyriology and Mesopotamian olfactory history has grown, and I no longer agree with how I…
Mummy Powder Incense?
To the modern Westerner, incense is the friend of the pothead teenager and long-time companion of the hippy. Incense is perhaps the oldest form of human scent manufacturing, however.
Egypt’s Sacred Scent Business
There is no scent culture with more mystery or confusion than that of the ancient Egyptians. Their perfume production wasn’t the oldest in the world nor the most sophisticated, yet the mystique of Egypt drips with fragrance. Perhaps it was because perfume and cosmetics played such a vital role in everyday life.
The Death Scent Project 
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