by Katinka Soetens

Scents can make you travel, in your mind and imagination…

Have you ever wondered what the scents of ancient Goddess Temples may have been like? Perhaps you feel the longing to visit some of these Temple sites where the memory and scent of this ancestry linger.

Can you imagine the scent of the priestesses who worked and lived there? Priestesses that are part of our European ancestry?

Scent, insence, aromatics, have always been a part of making the presence of the Goddess felt, and is part of the reason why we like to wear perfumes.

Our ability to smell and to detect (and respond to) pheromonal messages, is thanks to our vomeronasal sensory organ deep in the nose. Did you know that smell is the only fully developed sense a foetus has in the womb? It’s also the one that is the most developed in a child through the age of around 10, when sight takes over.

Another thing that is so fascinating, is how scent is related to memory.

Our sense of smell is closely linked with memory, probably more so than any of our other senses, because smell-sensing neurones in the nose extend directly to the brain areas involved in memory.

So interesting how odours take an immediate route in our brain to the limbic system, including the regions related to emotions.

Smell and emotion are stored as one memory.

This is why certain smells can remind us vividly of childhood, or of people long gone, and ‘take us back’ to places we have lived or visited that we may have specific scent associations with. They can bring us back the feeling of these times and places, as if we were right there again.

But it is also true that those of us with full olfactory function, are able to think of smells and evoke particular memories!

This means that we may be able to imagine the scent of the priestess perfumes in the past, and transport ourselves to the Goddess temples, remembering what life was like there.

From the libation perfume oils created for the Goddess Conference each year by Fragrant Earth, to the incenses smoking in the ancient Temples, and the beautifully scented natural spaces where our ancestors honoured and celebrated Goddess, can you imagine how beautifully scent, perfume, would have been part of ritual, ceremony and magic?

Perfume was seen as symbolic of the spiritual connection in life.

Intoxicating fragrance were worn by Her priestesses, who were the living embodiments of the Goddess in human form. These priestess’ perfumes were in fact the very presence of the Nature of Goddess, that had been captured in the perfumes of the priestesses who served these Deities since ancient times.

“Priestesses richly adorned, 

Anointed with myrrh, perfumed with lotus, 

Their heads garlanded with wreaths, 

All together drunk with wine, 

Fragrant with the plants of Punt, 

They danced in beauty, doing my heart’s wish, 

Their rewards were on their limbs.” 

Tomb of Wennefer

Perfume making is ancient, at least as long ago as 5000 years BCE, when the ‘origin of perfume making’ is attributed to archaeological finds from Mesopotamia.

We are aware of the perfume cones worn on the heads of Egyptian queens and priestesses in ceremonies and festive rituals.

A research team in Germany, led by archaeologist Barbara Huber of the Max Planck Institute, has deciphered and recreated the fragrance of an embalming oil employed during the mummification of an Egyptian woman more than 3500 years ago, known as the ‘scent of eternity’.

What the ingredients of the perfumes of the priestesses of the Goddess was like is beginning to be re-discovered through Organic Residue Analysis of the vessels that contained these fragrances.

We know for example, that saffron was also an important component of perfume manufacture in Crete and especially Thera (Santorini).

Did you know that there was a perfume making workshop on Mochlos island in Minoan times that made the perfume for the priestesses of Knossos and the local priestess who lived there as the embodiment of the Goddess in the New Palatial Area (ca.1500 BCE)?

Would you like to imagine what the scents of these Temple Priestesses may have been like?

During my Ariadnean Pilgrimage to Crete, we spoke to the archaeologist working on Mochlos excavation during our visit there. They told us of how, when they uncovered the perfume making workshop with the impressive vat (now is Sitea museum) still in situ in 2005, the air filled with the fragrance of the ingredients of the perfume that was made within.

They were literary inhaling the scent of the Ariadnean priestesses of Mochlos, and, as most items made in this extraordinary place were meant for Knossos palace-temple, we can safely assume, the perfume of the priestesses of Knossos as well.

But what was in the Mochlos and Knossos Priestesses’ perfume?

Organic residue analysis of the vessels found in the perfume makers workshop in Mochlos, as well as on material found in a later (post palatial period) ‘stirrup pot’ from Tourloti on the Lasithi plateau has given us definitive proof that the Priestess perfume was a sophisticated olive oil-based perfume infused with botanicals like Cretan Rock Rose, Coriander and Linden, that would all have been locally available in East Crete, with base,- heart- (mid) and head- (top) notes like our complex modern perfumes have.

It is fascinating to notice that the ORA findings show us that the earlier perfume from Mochlos contained an ingredient missing from the later one found at Tourloti  (a refuge site from post the collapse of the Temple culture of Crete and Thera eruption) This ingredient is Linden blossom (Tilia cordata). Significantly, the pollen cores from the island echo the same pattern as the perfumes: Linded trees disappearing.

The disappearance of Tilia from the palynological (pollen) record is, in fact, specifically connected with climatic shifts at the end of the Bronze Age, after the eruption of Thera, that diminished the tree’s natural habitat. The recipe for the ‘perfume of the priestesses of Knossos’ frist from Mochlos, and later perhaps from Tourloti, is a direct reflection of-, and tells us the story of, climate change (e.g., aridification) that occurred at the end of the Late Bronze Age and the ending of the Ariadnean goddess culture of Crete.

With thanks to “Ancient Organic Residues as Cultural and Environmental Proxies: The Value of Legacy Objects” by Kathleen J. Birney and Andrew J. Koh.

Memory is carried on the smell of certain things and places…. the aromatics of the perfume of the Priestess of Knossos is lingering just like the fragrance that the archaeologists got to smell when they excavated the perfume workshop.

Take a deep breath, can you smell it?

Right here now, at the back of your remembering?

When you stand on the sacred ground of the Goddess Temples on Crete, the wind and the sun, the sea and the hot scents of the earth, trees and herbs can certainly take you there.

As for the Priestess perfume of Knossos, made by the ancient perfume makers of  Mochlos…

This was a sophisticated olive oil-based perfume infused with botanicals like Cretan Rock Rose, Coriander and Linden, that would all have been locally available in East Crete, with base,- heart- (mid) and head- (top) notes like our complex modern perfumes have.

For the Ariadnean Pilgrimage, I have attempted to recreate this delicious Priestess scent for those who come with me in June each year, to wear and anoint themselves with, in honour of the ancient Priestesses of Knossos and the perfume makers of Mochlos.

Follow your nose, and come join me next year in Crete!

Pilgrimage information is on the website, under ‘Tours‘.