I wanted to share with you my journey in becoming a Scent Priestess – it’s the beautiful path I have been walking this last year.
What is a Scent Priestess?
A Scent Priestess is one who works with scent through essential oils to create transformation, higher states of connection and consciousness. They work with the spiritual properties of the oils to heal. The scent priestesses hold the mysteries and magic of anointing and know its deep holy nature. To anoint is to make sacred, to come back into your sacred divine nature and recognise you are so much more than just a human being – you are also a being of the divine.
There is a thread of Scent Priestesses throughout history, these women who held the holy oils. The most famous of course was Mary Magdalene, the woman with the alabaster jar, who anointed Jesus with her precious balm of Spikenard (which would have been unbelievably expensive in ancient Jerusalem, considering it grows in and is produced in Tibet!). She is the pioneer inspiration for many modern Scent Priestesses, as she is the heart of love and compassion.
We also have holy oils being used extensively by the priests and priestesses of Egypt in the death rites, both to preserve the body of the departed and to assist their soul in the afterlife, and a tradition of women tending the holy oils out of the temple of Hathor at Dendera, Egypt.
Anointing with holy oils has been a part of most royal coronation ceremonies for centuries as the new monarch was made holy, recognised as divine, or christed (there is a strong mary-magdalene-and-jesus bent to a lot of modern anointing stuff) so that they could rule. In fact so you know, the anointing oil used in the UK to anoint a new monarch contains neroli, rose, benzoin, and jasmine alongside other ingredients (including a base of sesame and olive oil, and non essential-oil additions of musk, civet and ambergris sourced from animals.).
Let’s not forget the use of anointing in the Catholic Church, where for centuries they used a base of olive oil mixed with other holy oils. Olive oil might seem like a mundane cooking ingredient these days, but that’s just a reflection of the decadent times we live in – Olive oil is a BIG DEAL. They church have different oils for different purposes, but one oil called the Oil of Chrism seems to always be an olive oil and myrrh blend – sometimes with balsam, cinnamon or cassis oil too. I’ve read that the ingredients for it come from an ancient recipe in the bible book Leviticus, but I haven’t read leviticus to confirm that.
In the modern world the Scent Priestess is often a Death Priestess too, holding and honouring that place between life and death and preparing and tending the body and soul of the departed. There has been a great book on the sacred nature of essential oils in the last few years called Sacred Oils by Felicity Warner, and she is a soul midwife/death doula who helps people cross over, and my teacher is also a specific death priestess.
My Scent Priestess Journey.
I’ve been in love with scent and perfume as long as I remember, my tastes always a little too expensive for my wallet! My mum used aromatherapy in the house a lot when I was a kid to heal us when we were sick, so I have always had a bottle of lavender oil to hand.
I’ve had wanted to go deeper with the oils, but I knew it had to be in the right way. There was this whole evangelical DoTerra thing a bunch of years back, and even though it tempted me because I wanted a way to work with the oils more in my life, as the daughter of an aromatherapist I cringed at the reckless and blasé way they prescribed oils and the weird pyramid scheme marketing.
I knew as an Aphrodite devotee there was something more to the oils than just healing toothache and relieving stress and I wanted to know the sacred secrets behind the oils.
So last year I joined a Scent Priestess programme lead by Diana Dubrow of the Emerald Temple. She’s a US priestess whose life was changed by a vision she had of the ancient temples of Egypt where she received powerful recipes to make and use beautiful anointing oil blends. She’s in her seventies now and has been doing this work for forty years! Last year due to the pandemic was the first year that she taught her smarts online and I could actually attend.
The scent priestess journey was a year of deepening into the sacredness of the holy oils and and we anointed ourselves with Diana’s oil blends every day, inviting the sacred energies of the oils to come into our lives and heal our hearts with the intention of really building a connection with the oils.
Each essential oil has a powerful sacred purpose and vibration – myrrh for instance is a holy healer that activates our hands of light for healing (… and magic!); neroli is an uplifting oil that calls in the presence of the angels and washes you with light: vetiver is a deeply grounding oil that holds you in the embrace of the great mother so you can slow down.
Just like with herbs and crystals, the oils have a practical purpose and a subtler spiritual purpose. It’s like how you can imbibe and meditate with rose water and rose petals to help heal and soften and comfort a broken heart AND at the same time you can totally mundanely use rose petals as just yummy tea ingredients or as candied treats on top of a cupcake. Or you can use mugwort to help bring on your period AND on a more subtle level to connect more deeply in divination. Oils are the same – you can use lavender oil to heal a burn AND to clear your aura and settle you into soft sacred presence.
Essential oil compounds stay in the body for six weeks after they are applied – so if you have a massage with lavender and geranium oil, that oil is still in your system working it’s magic five weeks later.
In my scent priestess training I learned to use these oils every day in prayer, to call in the healing and transformation of the plant spirits in these oils, and go deeper into the tradition of scent priestessing, learning about the death rites of the priestesses… … but the thing that has stuck with me as a Scent Priestess is the magic of these oils to connect us with our divine selves and bring us instantly back into awareness of who we are.
I anoint every day I am at my altar. The ritual of rolling the oil between my hands, inhaling the precious sacred scents and marking my body and aura with the energy of the oil prepares me for spiritual work (or really just for being a stable functioning human) in such a powerful grounding way. The scent of neroli, jasmine, balsam, angelica and rose just transport me away to a deeper connection with the divine more swiftly than anything else can.
The oils become my companions for deeper work – myrtle for divination, rose for connecting with the sacred, jasmine for power and grace – and they lead me back to the soft truth of who I am.
One day I hope to continue my Scent Priestess training and learn the death rites in detail and practice this art in the world as my service – but for now, as I wait for world travel to be clearer and for the time to be right, I am working with the grace that the oils have stirred up for me and letting it melt into all areas of my life and priestess practice.
Do you love to work with essential oils? How do you use them in your practice? I am a curious scent priestess – let me know!
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