doomsday_disco

You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. – Maya Angelou Under a terrible moon, tides still answer the pull. Roots still find water. Breath still moves from body to body, unseen and unstoppable. To keep breathing together is to refuse erasure and deny despair. Authoritarianism thrives on isolation and fascism feeds on hopelessness. We are living through a terrible moon, indeed, but we are not alone. You are not alone. Every breath you take is an act of defiance. Every hand you reach for refutes the lie that you stand by yourself. We will get through this together. A protective, communal scent to call one another closer and stand united against the darkness. A scent to remind us that even now, especially now, we rise. Smoldering beeswax illuminated by honeyed amber, an embrace of skin musk, body-warmed wool, cacao-dusted sandalwood, and cardamom milk.

Orange Blossom Honey and Silver Musk.

Honeyed Oud.

Bittersweet cacao drifting through the aromatic warmth of freshly brewed black tea.

The ultimate personification of the Lovers, the crowned White Queen and Red King appear as personifications of solar and lunar forces, opposing currents poised before their great meeting. Here the King extends his branch and the Queen hers, and in the symbolic imagery the sun and moon stand beside them in the watery vessel where their union will be enacted, reflecting the ancient alchemical principle that the opposites must enter the prima materia if transformation is to occur. In the illuminated plates of the Rosarium Philosophorum, the crowned King and Queen stand facing one another beneath a descending dove, sovereign and sovereign, fixed and volatile, their bodies poised at the threshold of sacred union. He burns with solar tincture, sulfurous and red, the embodied heat of will and form; she gleams with lunar pallor, mercurial and receptive, the shining mirror that receives and transforms. Their meeting is courtship through coniunctio, the deliberate joining of opposites beneath divine blessing. They are the Lovers stripped to archetype, the sun and the moon brought into perfect equilibrium. The King must surrender his isolated dominion, the Queen her cool separateness, and in their embrace the sealed vessel becomes a womb of transmutation. Above them, the spirit descends; below them, the bath and tomb await. What appears as union is also dissolution, for each must die to solitary sovereignty in order to be reborn as unified essence. Alchemically, their conjunction generates the Stone, the filius philosophorum, the radiant third that arises when polarity is neither denied nor allowed to dominate. From red and white emerges the tincture that perfects, the hermaphroditic child crowned in both suns and moons, embodying the reconciliation of sulfur and mercury within a single body of light. The Lovers here transcend flesh and narrative, becoming emblem and equation, the purest symbolic revelation of the card’s mystery: that true union is the marriage of contraries under spirit, and that from such sacred joining comes incorruptible gold. Crimson musk and white amber twined with solar frankincense and lunar myrrh, warm saffron steeped in cool iris root, gold-threaded honey darkened by silvered benzoin, a marriage of fire and pearl beneath a rain of distant stars.

The sun illuminates all. It is sublime consciousness, infallible clarity, perfect revelation. The Lovers live in the sun’s gaze, their union open, witnessed, and sanctified, the beams of life-affirming light warming and sustaining them. Amber and heliotrope aglow with golden frankincense, neroli, citrus peel, golden rose petals, and smoldering cedar incense.

In the First Book of Samuel it is written: “And it came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,” (1 Samuel 18:1) and in that binding the axis of a kingdom trembles. Robe, armor, sword, and girdle are given freely, a voluntary unmaking of inheritance in favor of devotion. This is love as sacred oath, not fever but fidelity, a bond forged in the shadow of Saul’s rising wrath and the uncertainty of exile. When David laments, “thy love to me was wonderful beyond the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26) grief becomes testimony and loyalty becomes scripture. Jonathan’s renunciation is ego relinquished so that another may ascend, sulfur tempered by mercy, ambition dissolved into covenantal gold. Here the Lovers stand not in garden innocence but beneath the weight of throne and spear, choosing allegiance over advantage, devotion over dynasty. Love does not seize power but surrenders it, and in that surrender is transfigured into something that outlives both battle and crown. Shepherd’s wool and wild honey, cedarwood and olive leaf, sun-warmed leather, plumes of frankincense rising from a quiet altar, and a thread of red pomegranate seed crushed between steady hands.

Winding through the Tree of Knowledge, the serpent offers transformative awareness, wisdom, and the awakened potential that elevates the soul or brings its downfall. Far be it from me to pass up an opportunity to revisit my beloved Snake Oil (especially with a Biblical twist) so I’ve crafted a Serpent in the Garden take on the original formula, suffused with fig, pomegranate, apple, green sandalwood, olibanum, blackcurrant, and iridescent serpent scale accord.

Death had come into the land from the time Osiris had been closed in the chest through the cunning of Sêth; war was in the land; men always had arms in their hands. No longer did music sound, no longer did men and women talk sweetly and out of the depths of their feelings. Less and less did grain, and fruit-trees, and the vine flourish. The green places everywhere were giving way to the desert. Sêth was triumphant; Thout and Nephthys cowered before him. And all the beauty and all the abundance that had come from Rê would be destroyed if the pieces that had been the body of Osiris were not brought together once more. So Isis sought for them, and Nephthys, her sister, helped her in her seeking. Isis, in a boat that was made of reeds, floated over the marshes, seeking for the pieces. One, and then another, and then another was found. At last she had all the pieces of his torn body. She laid them together on a floating island, and reformed them. And as the body of Osiris was formed once more, the wars that men were waging died down; peace came; grain, and the vine, and the fruit-trees grew once more. And a voice came to Isis and told her that Osiris lived again, but that he lived in the Underworld where he was now the Judge of the Dead, and that through the justice that he meted out, men and women had life immortal. And a child of Osiris was born to Isis: Horus he was named. Nephthys and the wise Thout guarded him on the floating island where he was born. Horus grew up, and he strove against the evil power of Sêth. In battle he overcame him, and in bonds he brought the evil Sêth, the destroyer of his father, before Isis, his mother. Isis would not have Sêth slain: still he lives, but now he is of the lesser Gods, and his power for evil is not so great as it was in the time before Horus grew to be the avenger of his father. – Padraic Colum In the account preserved by Plutarch in On Isis and Osiris, Osiris is betrayed by the cunning of Set and sealed within a chest, a king slain and committed to silence and darkness, his body later torn and scattered across the land he once made fertile. Death enters Egypt with that closing of the lid of his sarcophagus. Destruction engulfs the kingdom, and the fertile soil of grain and vine yield to the encroaching desert. Isis refuses the reign of fragmentation and shadows. In a boat of reeds, she searches the marshes, patient and relentless, gathering one fragment and then another, though the gods’ penis has been consumed by a river fish. She laid the pieces together and reformed Osiris through spell and sacred utterance, enacting the mystery that Plutarch describes as the restoration of the good and ordered principle against chaos and devastation. She fashioned a phallus for Osiris through her craft and magic, and conceived their son, Horus. As Osiris was reconstituted, peace returned, the fields bloomed green once more, and through their union, a third god is created. Alchemically, the body is dissolved into multiplicity, scattered into chaos, and through the labor of love is gathered and consecrated into renewed form. From this restored polarity emerges a third: Horus, the child born of their union, guarded by wise Thoth and steadfast Nephthys, raised to confront and overcome Set. In Horus, the Lovers create continuity and correction, a living reconciliation that tempers destruction without erasing it, for even Set remains, diminished and bound within a larger order. Esoterically, this is sacred marriage enduring beyond death, the Lovers as integration and reconciliation of life and afterlife and the power of the passion and devotion of the lovers to create new life from death. Isis does not deny mortality but transforms it. Through her love and labor, Osiris lives again, enthroned in the Underworld as Judge of the Dead, dispensing justice and granting immortality through balance. The union of Isis and Osiris is altered yet unbroken, shifted from earthly kingship to eternal dominion. This is the Lovers as cosmological force, the force of the reassembly of creation itself. Isis and Osiris embody the Lovers as divine covenant transcending death, unconditional devotion that restores wholeness, and the sacred act through which two become not only one, but three. Their bond does not end at the tomb; it passes through it, transforms it, and returns bearing life immortal, a testament that love, when joined in true polarity, does not perish but remakes the world. Blue lotus incense and kyphi resin dancing in a dusk-shadowed temple, black loam of the Nile and green papyrus crushed beneath bare feet, myrrh and cassia steeped in date honey, a glimmer of lapis and gold leaf pressed into linen, and a surge of floodwater returning to parched earth.

Beeswax, wildflower honey, copal resin, vanilla bean, balsam, and frankincense.

White musk, green mandarin, moonflower, oolong tea, crushed grass, ume blossom, and green amber.

Polish A mischievous mark: black raspberries, red currant, and rose hip cordial in honeyed cream.

A salty skin musk dusted with pink pepper.

O, who rides by night thro’ the woodland so wild? It is the fond father embracing his child; And close the boy nestles within his loved arm, To hold himself fast, and to keep himself warm. The pale sugared blossoms of innocence wrapped tightly in sleet-soaked arms. Vanilla bourbon, cream peony, and white carnation enveloped in a warm, protective fortress of tonka, white cedar, orris root, red amber, and leather.

Honey Champaca.

Honey Marshmallow.

Honey Dust, Patchouli, and Orris Absolute.

Caramel cream, golden oud, sweet amber, praline milk, hazelnut, and cacao.

Finnish A playful, tidy, sweet bruise: chilled blueberry cardamom cream.

Matcha & Pumpkin Rind.

Spiced Rum & Dark Chocolate.

Folk horror, but make it breakfast cereal: dehydrated pumpkin marshmallows and blackened cocoa corn puffs in sugared milk.

White tea, black cherries, gardenia, tonka bean, carnation, and almond.

An impossibly sweet concoction of green tea and frothed almond milk poured over fresh rose petals and glistening tapioca pearls.

Scarlet silk, sweetened rice milk, ube, peony petals, candied ginger, persimmon, red dates, red carnation, lavender, and red amber.