The Aromatic Apothecary: Part One
Building a Practical Materia Aromatica for Subtle and Magical Work
The focus of my writing at Substack feels like it should shift away from what I write on Patreon. I feel more inspired to write over here about vibrational and energetic work, and how it applies to things like witchcraft as opposed to copying and pasting public posts from my Patreon, which is primarily about numerology. So, because that is what I want to write about, let’s kick things off with a series about one of my favourite topics: subtle aromatherapy. Grab some tea and strap in!
What is an Aromatic Apothecary?
Apothecary vs Dispensary
An apothecary, by definition, is someone who makes and sells remedies or medicines in a way that is consistent with what we would consider to be “holistic healing” in modern terms. It is an old-fashioned term, and the original apothecaries are the ancestors of the modern pharmacists, particularly compounding pharmacists. They are creators and sellers of herbal and plant-based remedies. Their focus is on holistic, natural, and herbal goods like teas and, nowadays, essential oils. Although we tend to think of them in old-fashioned environments, an apothecary can absolutely be in a modern wellness boutique.
While their shops can also be called apothecaries, the word dispensary can also be used. A dispensary is a place where remedies and treatments, as well as related supplies, are stored and prepared, then given out to people. A lot of modern cannabis shops call themselves dispensaries, although this word does not solely apply to them.
I use both words interchangeably and have favoured dispensary in years past because of my esthetic training, although these days I am more likely to use the word apothecary because when I say dispensary, most people’s heads go right to cannabis.
The specific apothecary I will be talking about in this series of articles is (mostly) essential oils. Along the way, I will also be talking about resins, macerations, CO2 extracts, and other things that people just lump under the term “essential oil”. I have been studying aromatherapy since 1993, and I’ve been an aromatherapist since 1998. I’m not going to talk a lot about contemporary aromatherapy. There are enough websites that do this. I don’t particularly feel the desire to throw my voice into that great big sea.
There’s nothing wrong with modern aromatherapy or its scientific outlook. I practice it every day, and it works. What I want to talk about is something that fell off the radar around 1998 when a few really big essential oil companies began to dominate the landscape and reshaped the practice of aromatherapy to be acceptable to mainstream Western notions of wellness….and to get us to spend more money consuming more of their product because selling people a bottle of something that will last a few years isn’t a great business model. I want to talk about subtle aromatherapy.
What subtle aromatherapy means
Subtle aromatherapy is how I first learned of aromatherapy in the early 90s. It is the use of essential oils in non-physical ways. This particular niche in the field of aromatherapy makes use of essential oils to affect the subtle bodies, the psyche, and perhaps even the soul, which in turn benefit the physical body. Subtle aromatherapy is a form of vibrational healing. Practitioners draw upon the energetic or vibrational qualities of essential oils, rather than just the physical ones.
Every plant and the essential oils derived from them are believed to emit specific megahertz frequencies (MHz) that can interact with the human energy field to restore vibrational balance. Some essential oils, like Lavender and Frankincense, harmonize with a broad spectrum of people.
Many of us practice different forms of subtle aromatherapy today, perhaps without realizing that this is what we are doing. When we diffuse oils in a room to assist with relaxation, uplift the collective mood of the household or office, shift our focus for prayer or meditation, or “clear the air” after words have been exchanged, we are engaging in the vibrational work of subtle aromatherapy.
During a subtle aromatherapy treatment, the aromatherapist may not touch the client at all, while during a more mainstream treatment (usually massage, body treatments, or facials) the therapist is very much hands-on. Some of the things that fall under the subtle or vibrational category are things like auric massage, chakra balancing, distant or absent healing, meditation, ritual purification, or spellwork (often referred to as “spiritual work” in many New Age-y books on wellness).
Aromatic materials as a magical language
Have you ever written a magical sentence with a string of runes? Essential oils can function in much the same way. Aromatic materials do not function as isolated parts put together in a container or as keywords in a manual. Their meaning and energy shift according to how they’re mixed, what they’re mixed with, what the emphasis is in the recipe, and the vibrations and energetic projections of the person doing the mixing. While we may start out looking at them as a collection of correspondences, as the particulars of each work progress, they become a constructed statement.
Imagine that you’re writing a sentence and the subject is the person, condition, place, or goal that your work is all about. The verb is what must happen. Are you trying to do a road opener, or are you attracting something to yourself? Maybe you’re protecting yourself or trying to have information revealed. Perhaps you want to sever or strengthen ties. The modifier of your magical sentence could be the quality shaping this action. Should it be gentle and slow-acting or decisive and urgent? Perhaps it should happen quickly but quietly or go off with a bang. Then we get to the conclusion of your sentence; how should the work stabilize?
Let’s look at an example. Maybe you need to encourage someone to speak honestly without making the interaction argumentative or combative. Your aromatic sentence might contain the following ingredients:
Lavender to lower their defensiveness so they become more approachable.
Petitgrain to support open communication as well as composure.
Frankincense to establish sincerity and longevity.
And a small amount of black pepper to provide courage.
Why a practical collection does not have to be enormous
Good quality essential oils are not cheap! There are some that are quite reasonably priced because they exist in great quantity on this earth, but others are much more dear. Essential oils derived from popular culinary herbs that are already grown in huge quantities are going to be more affordable than essential oils derived from flowers that only grow in one or two places on the planet. When most people first start looking at essential oils, the first reaction is generally sticker shock because this itty bitty bottle that holds a quarter teaspoon of watery oil is selling for the same price as a cut, colour, and foils. Thankfully, we don’t have to go broke buying them, although it can be tempting! When I studied aromatherapy in school, we started with a kit of twenty-five oils and out of that kit I used five or six in hot and heavy rotation.
Start small and build. If you’d like to start using essential oils in spellwork, buy just the oils you need to make a candle anointing oil or two or three oils for a particular spell. If you’re going to try your hand at vibrational healing, buy one or two oils for that and when you’re ready to get more, get them. It took me years to build up my apothecary, one spell or healing at a time.
The same goes for things like carrier oils, creams, powders, butters, waxes, and anything else you might need to do your work. Buy things as needed, because if you’re just starting out, you don’t know exactly what you need. You don’t want to waste a bunch of money on oils and support ingredients only to never use them.
Building according to use rather than consumer trends
The young witchcraft content creator on TikTok is clicking and clacking her long nails on the side of the glass apothecary bottle ASMR style, while she intones in a little vocal fry about the ancient powers of the oil inside. You watch it twice because the bottle is pretty and you like the background music, and the algorithm springs into action. You see another video, and another, and another. No, it’s not a sign from the universe that you need to spend 39.99 on candle oil. It’s your viewing habits telling every platform you visited that day that you’ll pay attention to those videos.
Do not go broke buying things you see being hawked on social media. Many influencers are peddling garbage because they’re getting a commission. A lot of it, particularly in the wellness or spiritual niches, is full of absolute crap. Even the big essential oil companies are not immune to quality issues. Adulteration and misidentification are well-documented in the essential oil market. Some popular companies have had their turns in court in various countries because private individuals in different places took their products to independent labs to have them tested and found them to be full of fillers.
Before you click “add to cart”, stop and ask yourself, “Do I need this because it fills a genuine space in my apothecary or because I’ve seen it so many times online this week?”
Purity Is Not the Same as Authenticity
Sometimes the fillers are more common essential oils that mimic the smell or have similar healing properties to more expensive or harder-to-get oils. The more expensive or rare an oil is, the more likely you are to be buying something adulterated; the more popular an oil is, the more likely it, too, is not truly pure. For example, Linden essential oil is an extremely expensive, rare oil, and because of this relative to the amount actually sold worldwide, it is a fair bet that most of it, if not all, is adulterated. Lavender, a very popular oil, is also often adulterated, because even though it is widely grown, demand still outpaces supply and it is often used as a filler for more expensive florals and herbals.
Sometimes the fillers are laboratory-created compounds that occur naturally in the oil. This is generally dressed up in terms like “biotechnology” or “clean science” in wellness and skin care literature. It is possible to create some essential oils, like Lavender, in a lab. When I used to do in-house esthetic education for a salon company I worked for several years ago, we used Dermalogica. At that time, they quite proudly taught that some of their botanicals — Lavender oil among them — were synthesized in a lab. Their reasoning was that they were saving land, reducing their pollution footprint, guaranteeing a consistent product because they didn’t have to rely on nature, and according to the educator, “Linalool is linalool whether it comes from a lab or a plant.” Synthetic molecules may be chemically pure, and they may pass basic compositional specification testing, but more specialized testing can sometimes reveal a synthetic origin.
Can a Lab-Made Aromatic Carry Plant Spirit?
Clean tech extracts occupy a grey area between natural and synthetic. You should do your own research and come to your own conclusions on it. I’ll give you some of the talking points:
Chemists and environmentalists love this method because it solves two big problems in many industries today, like wellness and beauty, because it eliminates environmental instability and exploitation.
It solves the batch problem because widely different varieties can appear under the same name. If we use Lavender as an example again, some cultivars have high levels of linalool, making them very soothing. Others have high levels of cineole or camphor, making them great for congestion but irritating to skin. Suppliers have been known to mix batches or just swap one out for the other. Lab-created botanicals will always have the exact chemical balance brands want.
It solves the sustainability paradox as well. Farming enough botanicals, like real rose or sandalwood to satisfy global demand would involve huge amounts of deforestation and water use. Biotech is viewed as the only ethical way to keep using these ingredients without destroying the planet.
On the flip side, there is the “fake” feeling that people have. There is also an idea being promulgated amongst the witchcraft community that essential oils are “dirty” or somehow spiritually “unclean”. Consumers and purists hesitate to work with aromatherapy for these reasons, so let’s look at some of their talking points:
The “soul” of the plant is missing. Let’s just eat dessert first here, because this is a thing we need to consider if we are talking about the vibrational or energetic use of something. If you open up any book about aromatherapy, by the third page you’ll have read a sentence which says that essential oils are the living force of the plant or contain the life energy of the plant. Is a lab-concocted botanical “alive”? Does it have the “ancient memory” that many attribute to plants?
Critics will also argue that a true essential oil contains hundreds of trace compounds depending on the landscape, elevation, water, weather, and frequency/vibration of the land and that these elements all work together in symphony to produce certain effects. The lab can not reproduce this.
There are also “greenwashing” concerns. Among many purists exists the suspicion that companies hide behind phrases like “biotech” and “clean tech” or “nature identical” simply because it is cheaper than farming actual plants but market it as “Look, we’re saving the planet” to charge a premium price.
Many high-end beauty and wellness brands have quietly moved to this production model. Science views the molecules in question as being indistinguishable from the ones found in nature, even though they were born in a beaker or via yeast fermentation instead of in a garden or a farmer’s field. Biotech is considered a superior option because it is viewed as “cleaner” than nature — free from pesticides and soil contaminants.
I’m not going to tell you how to think about either side of this argument, and I won’t condemn anyone for their choices. Over the years I have experimented with oils purchased from MLM companies like DoTerra and Young Living, from NOW, Eden’s Garden, Aura Cacia, and even from companies based in European countries. My primary go-to is a company whose owner is an established and credible voice in the scientific community and does not shy away from the more contentious discussions in the industry. My secondary choice is a family business that tries to develop personal relationships with the farms they buy from.
The idea of a personal materia aromatica
Books of correspondences are great to have, and they certainly deserve a place on your bookshelf. Sometimes, though, correspondences end up being oversimplified lists that can flatten complex ideas into a few keywords. We can all recite “Lavender for peace, rosemary for protection, rose for love, patchouli for money” in our sleep. Those correspondences are not wrong, but they are incomplete. Correspondence lists can tell you where to get started, but they don’t tell you how the ingredients will shift every time they’re used.
Your personal materia aromatica becomes part of your grimoire. It is your personal recollection and record of what your aromatics have shown you through consistent use.
It can contain the common name, the Latin binomial, how the essence is extracted and from what parts of the plant, what country or region it came from, relevant chemotypes, where you bought it, as well as notes about its aroma, blending behaviour, and maybe even a little sketch of the plant if you are artistically inclined.
A section for traditional knowledge should be in there as well. This might include information that connects your aromatic ingredients to folklore or mythology, religions, or established magical practices.
You should also write down your personal associations. Maybe certain plants or their oils trigger certain memories. Perhaps when you worked with a certain oil, you had certain dreams. Perhaps you associate Lavender and Sage with comfort because your grandmother placed them in her linen cupboard to keep things smelling clean. Or maybe you associate these smells with institutional cleaning products from your workplace. None of your personal associations or responses cancel out their traditional symbolism, but both of these things can affect how the aroma functions for you.
Finally, you should record your practice-based observations. What did you use these oils for? What were they blended with? How were they applied? What sort of atmosphere did they create? Did everything turn out as you expected? Were there unintended occurrences? Did your results change over time with different proportions or methods of use? Over time, patterns will emerge, and this will probably become the most important part of your records.
You don’t have to invent new meanings for every bottle on your shelf. Your materia aromatica simply documents the space where established knowledge and direct experience break bread together. The traditional correspondences give us a language structure that we inherited from other practitioners, and personal experience and observation teach us to become fluent in this new language.