Introduction
7
While I don’t know if my Aunt Mary had actually become an angel, I do believe her spirit communicated with me that night. Since then I’ve come to realize that I have a guardian spirit who makes himself known with a gentle sandalwood-like scent. He seems to show up when I need reassurance as well as when I’m engaged in spiritual activities. With the help of essential oils, we can invite communication with spirits as well as enhance divination, psychic work, and dreamwork.
Alchemy Instead of Therapy As I previously mentioned, I refer to the blending of oils for magic and ritual as aromatic alchemy. I purposely avoid the term aromatherapy because it implies that something is broken and needs to be fixed. We are not providing therapy to our magic, rituals, or divination therapy when we use essential oils. Instead, we are using them to aid us in transforming our practices and breathing life into our intentions. As mentioned, essential oils carry the essence of life. In an experiment using Kirlian photography, a fresh-cut leaf and a strip of blotter paper with pure essential oil were photographed side by side. Both showed strong auras indicating life-force energy remains within essential oils.6 Understandably, the synthetic oils that were tested did not exhibit auras because they are not from living organisms. Although I originally wanted to focus this book on pure essential oils (those created through distillation) and omit extracts created through other processes, I realized that this approach would be limiting. For example, jasmine has such delicate flowers that the distillation process does not work with them, but to disregard this popular scent with its range of magical potential just didn’t seem right. Since I opened that door, I decided to also include the hydrosols (previously known as floral waters) in the arsenal of magical scents presented here. I have not found research using Kirlian photography with these other products, and I do not know if they produce auras as do pure essential oils. However, they do carry the vibrational energy of the plants from which they were produced. And so I leave it to each individual to decide what to include in magical practice and ritual. After all, the purpose of this book is to encourage exploration and creativity in the realm of scent. Let your intuition and imagination guide your aromatic alchemy and shape your magic. As noted, there are no hard and fast rules for creating essential-oil blends, but there are basic guidelines for choosing oils that will have a mutually enhancing effect when combined. 6. Aftel, Essence and Alchemy, 49.