The White Queen and The Red King

[doomsday_disco]

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.

[theseagrows]

at first i get primarily red musk, then after a few minutes i get some myrrh and amber, maybe a hint of honey. later on the saffron comes through. overall it's a red musk with a fuzzy warmth and a bit of cool iris root to balance it out. very pretty and though the red musk is the strongest note, i think the other notes make it a bit more subtle than it can be.

 

[Assimbya]

To me this one feels extremely similar to A Robe All Red With Dripping Gore from the Sorores Genita Nocte collection, which is not surprising because there is considerable overlap in notes. Especially when wet, I get a saffron/amber/red musk/honey combination so similar that I could mistake one for the other, though the lab's recognizable white amber note has a silvery, liquid quality which differentiates it from A Robe All Red...'s red amber if I look very closely for it. As it dries I get some more complexity from the other resins, and the orris in particular adds a lovely smoothness. I enjoy this quite a bit and will keep my decant around but, as I already have a bottle of A Robe All Red, I won't need one of this.

[artisjok]

Okay, so the general waft of this is the red musk and white amber, musky plushness with a shimmery, silvery lining, but when I sniff my wrists I get a dirtied up, postcoital scent that has me verging on blushing. I’m thinking the musk + honey + saffron may be giving this effect. Uff! 

I was so excited about this scent, both for the notes and the theme, but I’m not sure it’s to my taste at the moment….😅 Holding onto it in hopes the myrrh & frankincense come forward more, and perhaps I’ll actually come to crave the more lusty perspective of the sacred joining. Will have to position myself near my Red King to see its effect on him, as well.  ehehehee

[kinneret_rising]

An attempt to represent the alchemical marriage of opposing principles in scent! It's interesting to experience BPAL's forceful, earthy red musk somehow also smelling ethereal (maybe from the resins). The honey comes through clearly as well. This one lasted several hours on my skin and has relatively low throw once dry. I think if I didn't have to go nose to wrist to enjoy it, I might upgrade to a bottle. It's complex and lovely, but quiet.