Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  As angels have wings and saints haloes, so the pagan gods of love had cinnamon. In the Aeneid, the distinguishing characteristic of Venus’ divinity is her perfumed hair, wafting ambrosial aromas. To Apuleius, the erogenous trinity of Venus, Cupid and the great goddess Isis all smell of all the perfumes of Arabia. When Cupid visits Psyche invisibly by night his identity is betrayed by the smell of his ‘cinnamon-fragrant curls’.

  While few educated Romans would have confessed to a literal belief in their myths, in this respect at least faith translated into practice. For in the matter of scent and its seductions mortals aped immortals. In life as in myth scent was a weapon of seduction. As she is about to meet her lover, Plautus’ courtesan Erotium gives orders to ‘spread the couches and burn the perfumes’ as ‘a lover’s enticement’. When the penniless and lovestruck poet Catullus cannot afford to offer his friend a proper meal, ‘his purse being full of cobwebs’, he offers compensation by way of an exquisitely attractive perfume:

  For I will give you a perfume,

  That the very Venuses and Cupids gave my girl;

  When you smell it, you will beg the gods,

  Fabullus, to make you all nose.

  On account of their propitious overtones, perfumes were conventionally burned at weddings. When Catullus despairs that Lesbia will not marry him, he laments that she will never be led by her father to the house fragrant with Assyrian odours, but must make do with her furtive night-time gifts.

  As was ever the case with spices, this erotic-mythic resonance translated into social capital. Then as now, perfumes were an important fashion accoutrement with all the social fallout that entailed; in a fashion-conscious town like Rome their exotic quality, rarity and cost were not so much liabilities as recommendations. Being among the most expensive, spiced perfumes were the most socially charged. Just as style, innovation and ostentation recommended spices to wealthy Romans, so too their countrymen had a flair for eloquent and generally censorious commentary on any form of modish affectation. And there was none more eloquent than Martial.

  Along with that of a handful of writers such as Proust and Baudelaire, Martial’s imagination was acutely sensitive to smell. He was particularly scornful of vain and unnecessary luxury, a vice of which he saw expensive perfume as a prime example. To Martial, artificial scent was another form of pretension, vanity and worthless artifice. If cinnamon was the most poetic and mystical of all the spices, so too it came loaded with opprobrium, for the simple reason that it was the most expensive. Pliny quotes the price of the various grades of cinnamon oil, in mixed form ranging from thirty-five to three hundred denarii the pound, in pure form a whopping one thousand to 1,500 – six years’ wages for a centurion. It was the smell of money evaporating – which was, depending on where one stood, either a good or a bad thing. One of Martial’s targets who favoured the spice is a prissy and affected ‘pretty boy’ by the name of Cotilus. He minces about Rome singing all the latest hits from Egypt and Spain; he curls his hair just so and trips off all the latest gossip. Typical of such a vain and flighty lightweight, he reeks permanently of balsam and cinnamon – to Martial’s mind, ‘a trashy article’. Honouring a virile tradition dating back to Socrates, who disdained any masculine odour not acquired in the gymnasium, Martial affects a lofty disdain for all scent as unworthy of a real man:

  Because you are always fragrant

  With the leaden boxes of Niceros,

  Tarred with cassia and cinnamon from the nest of the proud Phoenix,

  You laugh at us, Coracinus, since we smell of nothing:

  I would rather smell of nothing than smell good.

  Nor was perfume any better on a woman. Among the clients of a celebrated parfumier called Cosmus was a certain Gellia:

  Wherever you go, you’d think Cosmus was on the move

  And that the cinnamon oil was pouring front a shaken flask.

  Don’t take pleasure in exotic trifles, Gellia.

  You’re aware, I suppose, that my dog could smell as good.

  The inference being that Gellia is a bit of a dog herself.

  Even to Martial, however, not all scent was modish excess. His gripe was not with spice or perfume as such, but with overdoing them; he was not immune to their charms. One of his most beautiful and tender poems compares the perfume of his boy’s morning kisses to saffron and Cosmus’ perfumes. He is not inclined to buy silks and cinnamon-leaf scent for his girl, he says elsewhere, but he would like her to be worthy of them all the same. The problem with spices was their cost and artifice; the real deal needed no embroidering. It was a familiar complaint of the Roman erotic poet. Home-grown and unadorned is best.

  For those who disagreed, the essential techniques of Roman perfumery endured into the Middle Ages. By the turn of the millennium, perfume’s possibilities were vastly improved with the slow revival of the Eastern trade and the steady influx of Arab science and knowhow. Distillation, acquired from the Arabs, enabled the extraction of flower essences, thereby beefing up the new perfumery and reducing its reliance on stronger gums, resins and spices. Even so a Roman would have recognised most of the ingredients and their social purposes alike. In medieval times, perfumes were commonly made on a base of oil or animal fats, with the addition of wine, spices and aromatics. The same qualities recommended spices as before; and the more exotic the ingredients, the greater the cachet. The Spanish Franciscan Juan Gil de Zamora writes of the use of fat from exotic animals such as leopards and camels with wine and cinnamon. The fat was first cut away from the flesh, then cooked in wine, then taken off the heat and left overnight. On the following day, more wine was added, then the mixture was ground, stirred, and left to sit a while, then finally reheated with seven exotic oils. At the final stage various fruits such as plums were added, along with the old staples of Greek and Roman perfumery, primarily cinnamon and cassia. He gives a formula for the medieval prototype of the underarm deodorant, advising a timely application of cinnamon, cloves and wine to counter a stinking armpit.

  Bad breath was another medieval affliction amenable to a little spice. Jean de Meun (c.1240–c.1305), author of the second part of the Roman de la Rose, advised a woman with bad breath never to speak to others on an empty stomach: ‘If possible, she should keep her mouth away from people’s noses.’ In the eleventh century Peter Damian – the same, remember, who compared Cluny to a garden of spices, and who imagined their perfumes wafting through paradise – refers to the wives of noblemen who ‘carnally’ chewed spices so as to freshen their breath; whereas the only things they should be chewing on, in Damian’s opinion, were their psalms and prayers, ‘so you might have a sweet odour in the sight of God’. Still less happily, Chaucer’s Absalom chewed cardamom before his disastrous attempt to seduce the Miller’s Wife.

  Here too, as with perfumes, some regarded the trick as just that: the genuinely savoury woman had no need of artificial enhancement. Such seems to have been the thinking of England’s King Henry VII as he looked through the courts of Europe for a new wife in 1505. He sent three trusted gentlemen to make an assessment of one candidate in the young Queen of Naples, specifying that they were ‘to note the colours of her hair’, ‘specially to note her complexion’, ‘to mark whether there appear any hair about her lips or not’, ‘to mark her breasts and paps, whether they be big or small’; and so on and so forth. The breath of his potential queen was of some importance to Henry, his instructions requiring that his ambassadors ‘approach as near to her mouth as they honestly may, to the intent that they may feel the condition of her breath, whether it be sweet or not, and to mark at every time when they speak with her if they feel a savour of spices, rosewater, or musk by the breath of her mouth or not’.

  The ambassadors reported back satisfactorily: ‘We have approached as nigh unto her visage as that conveniently we might do, and we could feel no savour of any spices or waters, and we think verily by the favour of her visage and cleanness of her complexion and of her mouth that the said queen is like for to be
of a sweet savour and well eyred.’ A more telling complaint was her lack of cash; Henry remained a widower.

  That the bad-breathed should have used spices in the absence of toothpaste is perhaps no wonder; but why was it that the smell of spices was considered not merely attractive, but sexy? It is, at present, a question with no satisfactory answer. Scientists have long known of affinities between scent and sex drive, though their findings tend to be more suggestive than definitive. It is true that the part of the brain that processes smells also deals with appetites. People lacking a sense of smell commonly report diminished sex drive, and certain odours can indeed stimulate desire. Freud claimed as much in Civilisation and its Discontents, admittedly on a somewhat speculative basis, and that the repression of such responses is a necessary condition of civilised life. None of which, of course, says much about spices in particular. The safest argument is the most modest, that advanced by the anthropologists, who have tended to look more to traditions and beliefs, less to innate than to learned responses. If the nose ‘knows’ that spices smell sexy, then conceivably the body will respond accordingly: if faith can move mountains, it can move much else besides.

  And that the nose has long known of spices’ sexiness, it should now be clear, is not to be doubted. According to the American sexologist James Leslie McCary, it still does. In his article ‘Aphrodisiacs and Anaphrodisiacs’ he turns a scientific eye on the old belief that the best way of bedding a potential partner is to serve him or her a fine meal. McCary put the hypothesis to the test by preparing a dessert of pears and strawberries soaked in Cointreau, ‘drenched in a fragrant sauce of beaten egg yolks, confectioner’s sugar, cloves and cinnamon’. On being questioned in a controlled environment more than half the subjects commented that the dish was ‘very “sexy”’. McCary’s reasoning as to why stemmed from texture, taste and aroma: ‘The dessert is smooth, rich and creamy in texture – qualities we subconsciously equate with sexuality. In addition, its redolence (cloves, cinnamon, liqueur) is “exotic”, another word we tend, however vicariously, to identify with sexual concepts.’ So nourished, we have a perfectly scientific explanation as to why ‘it is only natural … to be well prepared for the ultimate physical and emotional expression – love-making’.

  By the standards of some of the powers attributed to spices this is mild stuff; advocates of the airborne method have traditionally made still grander claims. Perfumes have the supreme advantage of being delivered invisibly, their effect all the more subtle for being purely aerial. An eighteenth-century charlatan by the name of Dr James Graham gave public lectures in which he hawked one of his products, a ‘celestial, or medico, magnetico, musico, electrical bed’, an extraordinary contraption guaranteed to increase desire through a battery of the senses. As Graham promised his audience:

  The sublime, the magnificent, and, I may say, the supercelestial dome of the bed, which contains the odiferous, balmy and ethereal spices, odours and essences, and which is the grand magazine or reservoir of those vivifying and invigorating influences which are exhaled and dispersed by the breathing of the music and by the attenuating, repelling, and accelerating force of the electrical fire – is very curiously inlaid or wholly covered on the underside with brilliant plates of looking-glass, so disposed as to reflect the various attractive charms of the happy recumbent couple, in the most flattering, most agreeable, and most enchanting style.

  For a small additional fee a rented orchestra would ensure a successful session of great passion, at the bargain-basement cost of £50 a time.

  Graham’s clients presumably knew what they were letting themselves in for, but part of the attraction of the airborne method, or to others its danger, was that it could be administered to an unwitting recipient. What better way to assault the unsuspecting object of one’s attentions than an invisible battery of seductive scents? The most spectacular claim is made in The Perfumed Garden of Sheik Mohammed al-Nefzaoui, a traditional Arab sex manual written in the fifteenth century at the request of the prime minister of Sultan Abdelaziz al-Hafsi, the Hafsid governor of Tunisia and Algeria. Part practical instruction manual, partly a collection of racy anecdotes, it is one of very few works improved by translation, being further enlivened by Sir Richard Burton’s rendering into fruity Victorian English.

  As the title suggests, perfume is the most subtle and refined instrument of seduction: ‘The use of perfumes, by man as well as by woman, excites to the act of copulation. The woman, inhaling the perfumes employed by the man, becomes intoxicated; and the use of scents has often proved a strong help to man, and assisted him in getting possession of a woman.’ The most remarkable instance cited by the good sheikh is the tale of the lecherous goings-on and cunning seduction of the false prophet Moçailama, ‘the impostor, the son of Kaiss (whom God may curse!), that he pretended to have the gift of prophecy, and imitated the Prophet of God (blessings and salutations to him)’. When challenged by a second impostor, a prophetess, to prove his skills, Moçailama was perplexed: how could he possibly hope to convince his rival of his fraudulent claims? As he pondered the problem, a lecherous-minded old man approached him with a solution: he should seduce himself out of trouble.

  The method was simple. Before his meeting with the prophetess, he should erect a tent and fill it with the scent of flowers and burning spices. ‘When you find the vapour strong enough to impregnate water, sit down on your throne, and send for the prophetess to come and see you in the tent, where she will be alone with you. When you are thus together there, and she inhales the perfumes, she will delight in the same, all her bones will be relaxed in a soft repose, and finally she will be swooning. When you see her thus far gone, ask her to grant you her favours; she will not hesitate to accord them. Having once possessed her, you will be freed of the embarrassment caused to you.’

  Moçailama needed no further bidding. He did as the old lecher advised, and when the prophetess was seated there the irresistible perfume worked its tricks: ‘She lost all presence of mind, and became embarrassed and confused.’ Moçailama wooed her with his irresistible charm: ‘Come, let me have possession of you; this place has been prepared for that purpose. If you like you may lie on your back, or you can place yourself on all fours, or kneel as in prayer, with your brow touching the ground, and your crupper in the air, forming a tripod. Whichever position you prefer, speak, and you shall be satisfied.’

  Befuddled by the perfume, she was unable to decide: ‘I want it done in all ways!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let the revelation of God descend upon me, O Prophet of the Almighty!’

  When Burton was working on his translation Queen Victoria sat on the throne of England, and the reception for this sort of thing was not unmixed. Such images were grist to the mill of those who saw in spices one of the hallmarks of the sensual decadence of the East; it was perhaps inevitable that spices came to be considered the aroma of the libidinous Oriental. Yet while scholars have generally regarded such attitudes as a modern phenomenon, part and parcel of imperialist assumptions of cultural superiority, in the case of spices the association is apparently as old as knowledge of the East itself. In the eyes of their critics, spices’ exoticism, so large a part of their appeal, reappeared as an insidious moral poison, their foreignness not an asset but a problem. It was, moreover, an idea the Hebrew prophet shared with the pagan Roman. In his poem on the civil war that ended the Roman Republic, Lucan (AD 39–65) stresses the decadent smells pervading the banquet Cleopatra laid on for Caesar, painting a picture of Oriental decay and oily debauch reclining on couches amid the gorgeous splendours of the Nile. In her gilded palace, Cleopatra served her guests every luxurious dainty of her realms, shamelessly showing her décolletage in fashionably fatigued silk (ancient grunge!): luxury, so Lucan would have it, never before seen by the honest Roman soldiers. Conquered, the effeminate Easterners unmanned the conquering Romans:

  Their hair drenched with cinnamon,

  Still fresh in the foreign air and smelling of its native land,

  And car
damom, newly imported …

  In the works of Christian polemicists the Roman critique of cinnamon as a vain and pointless luxury returned with new vigour. In a Christian universe scent acquired a troubling ambiguity: at once a metaphor of beauty and devotion – ‘You are the odour of Christ,’ said the apostle – it was also, par excellence, the sense of seduction, harbinger of a dangerous irrationality. Perfumes were particularly insidious corrupters of the flesh for being subtle and invisible. To Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.211), leader of the early Christian community in Alexandria, ‘attention to sweet smells is a bait which draws us into sensual lusts’. His opinion was that the model maiden should studiously avoid perfumers’ and all other such places, where women cavort like so many whores slouching in the brothel.

  From here it was but a short step to argue that to smell bad was to smell good. The Christian ideal was not odourless but malodorous, an instinct admirably summarised in a life of St Arsenius the anchorite (c.354–455) attributed to Rufinus of Aquileia (c.345–410/11). Racked with guilt and shame for the Babylonian luxuriousness of his former life, the sweet perfumes that delighted his senses, Arsenius turned his back on a life of riches and ease and retreated to a cell in the Egyptian desert where he slept on rotting palm mats dampened with old and stinking water. His fellow monks complained of the stench, to which he replied that he had nothing but scorn for the sweet smell of incense and musk. He would rather put up with foul stenches in return for that sweetest of odours that his soul would enjoy in the hereafter. It was a simple trade-off between the pleasures of this life and the next, which, as Arsenius saw matters, was no choice at all. Were it otherwise, when the last trumpet sounded the riches and pleasures on which his body had feasted on earth would condemn his soul to an unavoidable perdition.