Osmé
A Cultural History of Fragrance

If you know the name Pazuzu, it probably conjures spinning heads and pea soup. Thanks to The Exorcist, he’s pop culture shorthand for pure evil. Which is deeply unfair. In ancient Mesopotamia, Pazuzu was not the villain—he was the monster you summoned when something worse was at the door. A king of wind demons, feared yet invited, he embodied the dangerous power of air, breath, and scent, fighting chaos

This autumn, Sunday Scent School returns with a new three-month course devoted to one of my favourite intersections: scent & systems of belief. The Scent of Gods & Monsters: Olfaction & Belief runs from October through December and brings together six classes exploring the extraordinary roles fragrance has played in the human experience of the divine. It is a course about scent, yes, but it is also about much more. We will look at how aromatics function in society as ritual t

Explore the depths of Aphrodite's cult and the theology of sensuality. Discover how this divine allure influenced the evolution of fragrance.

Ancient Greek myths link aromatic plants with queer desire, sacred ecology, and tragic metamorphosis. Believed to hold Pneuma and Archē, fragrant plants embodied powerful emotions made material. Stories of Ampelos, Hyacinthus, and Narcissus show how queer youths became botanicals, blending love, loss, and divine jealousy while revealing the fragile, celebrated, and perilous place of queer men in Greek thought.

Listen to this article. In Early Modern Europe, witchcraft was as much a sensory threat as a moral or theological one. In the Witch Trials, the witch was imagined as possessing penetrating supernatural senses that could harm people by simply sensing them. To accuse a woman of witchcraft was to accuse her of perceiving, feeling, and knowing the world in a fiendish way. She embodied the diabolically corrupted form of the female senses. The brilliant Constance Classen referred t

Every summer in ancient Athens, strange gardens emerged in courtyards and on rooftops. Seedlings were precariously sown into handfuls of soil within clusters of broken pottery.