Osmé
A Cultural History of Fragrance

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.

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 to this as the Diabolical

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.