Anointed with Ambrosia: Scent in Greek Myth

This class is a module in the course

The Scent of Gods & Monsters: Olfaction & Belief 

This ticket is to audit this lecture only. Join the course here.

Ancient Greek stories and myths are laced with odours, from divine to disgusting.

Join perfumer and historian Nuri McBride for an immersive two-hour lecture exploring how scent shaped Greek mythology, ritual, and ideas about the divine. We will explore how fragrance revealed divine bodies, aromatics connected the material and ethereal worlds, and how scent could bless, seduce, deceive, or curse.

We will also trace how Greek ideas about the senses, knowledge, and divinity changed over time. As philosophers separated reason from sensory experience and framed divinity through abstract ideas, the connection between the human body and the gods also transformed.