Perfumes of the Spirit

Dr. Paolo Rovesti of Milan University in Italy was an interesting man who was something of a pioneer in the study of the effect of essential oils on the mind.  In Medical Aromatherapy Kurt Schnaubelt described Dr. Rovesti  as a man "traveling around the globe, he researched the role of fragrance in past cultures, such as the many ways fragrance was integrated
into spiritual, magical, and social rituals." 

Dr. Rovesti lamented modern man's loss of olfactory sensibilities through sterile living.  He found tribes in India who had the olfactory capacity of animals who could detect visitors by their smell over 100 yards away.  In Essence and Alchemy, Mandy Aftel quotes Dr. Rovesti from In Search of Perfumes Lost, "We who are immersed in the unnaturalness of modern-day life cannot recall, without nostalgia and sadness, those gifts of nature at man's disposal, now neglected or in disuse.  Among those are paradises of natural perfumes, of the perfumes of the past and of the spirit." 

A particularly charming olfactive story told by Dr. Rovesti was that of a colleague who kept a sample of the perfume of each of the great loves of his life - eight by the end of his life - labeled by name, years of love and places to which the scent and women were associated.  According to Dr. Rovesti "he told me with half-closed eyes, 'I relive in a film of memories the delicious romances of my life, when the whole world rotated around one woman, her name and her face, under the spell of her perfume, which now erases time and brings back in all its beauty what by now, as far as reality is concerned, has turned to ashes.'" 

I have heard that the fragrance Jicky was created by Aime Guerlain to honor a lost, unrequited love for a girl he met while studying in England.  The story is lovely, and the fragrance may be as well, but Dr. Rovesti's scent collecting colleague likely would find such an experiment futile despite its creativity.  Memory is what it is and cannot be created anew.  To déjà vu the ghost of lost love some unextractable molecule of the past must be brought forward embedded in the heart and brain.  Such is the nature of smell.  Such is the nature of love.