Häxan is a fascinating fragrance from Parfum Prissana, which was launched in 2018 as a limited-edition release. The perfumer was Prin Lomros.
This fragrance was created for a private individual, Rajesh Balkrishnan. Rajesh is a casual acquaintance, Facebook friend, and fellow fragrance-lover. He offered to send me an advance sample, which I accepted. I subsequently purchased a bottle from him, at full price, as soon as they were available. This review is of that fragrance. Here are the notes that accompanied the sample:
Häxan is an ode to the ancient practices of sorcery, magic, alchemy and witchcraft. It is inspired by Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 seminal film on this subject. The perfume uses over 100 ingredients that are traditionally represented in potions and elixirs associated with these practices. Created as a bespoke perfume for Rajesh Balkrishnan by Prin Lomros, Häxan is a dark witchy fougere style perfume which incorporates dark woody and aromatic elements on a mossy bed representative of the ambience of the smells of places where dark occult ceremonies were conducted.
A FRIENDLY WARNING
This discussion is about the witch trials in Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. As such, it is full of lascivious sexual details. Also, though this was a sad time for women, it was a marvelous time for art, as the existence of witches gave fine artists license to portray glorious full-on female nudity, so there’s some of that too. There’s also a little bit of straight-talk about religion and the patriarchy, though I’ve restrained myself considerably, because I know you don’t have all year. So, if any of those things offend you, you might want to stop here, or at least skip down to the very end where the fragrance description is.
HÄXAN, THE FILM
The fragrance is inspired by the Swedish-Danish documentary-style silent film of the same name, which was completed in 1920 and released in 1922. Häxan was written and directed by Benjamin Christensen and was partially based on his studies of the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), a 15th-century German guide for witchcraft inquistors. The film explores how superstition, misogyny, fear, censorious moral beliefs about women’s sexuality, misunderstanding of disease and mental illness, desire to ascribe blame for random events (including men’s failings), and a multitude of other factors could lead to hysteria among the people — and witch hunts!
I hadn’t watched the movie in a while, so I happily watched it again (and bought the newer Criterion Collection DVD). The film is brilliant and charming and disturbing all at the same time. The thought that it was made 100 years ago brings me great joy and amazement. It was so far ahead of its time, cinematically, and yet its subject matter was four hundred years old then. And, its themes are still relevant today (in the form of feminine objectification, oppression, subjugation, and persecution – feminine sexuality is still policed, we just don’t call it “witchcraft” anymore).
Häxan is presented as a documentary but contains dramatized scenes, so watching it is a bit like watching an old horror movie. I highly recommend watching it, and also reading this excellent essay about the film – Häxan: The Real Unreal by Chris Fujiwara.
The scene from the movie that always speaks to me most, and reminds me most of perfumery, is the one where the witch Karna is making spells, potions, and ointments for the local women. Because the movie doesn’t go “all the way there,” one might even think that Karna is making perfumes when she’s talking about the her ointments.
Lovelorn Woman: Karna, can you perchance get me a love potion that has power over a pious man of the church?
Karna – the Witch: Here, young maiden, take a potion of cat feces and dove hearts, boiled during the full moon. A drop of this in a man’s drink will soften his heart at once.
Lovelorn Woman: Karna, can i have an even stronger potion?
Karna – the Witch: If the maiden wishes to drive the man out of his wits for love… I have a potion boiled in May from a young and playful male sparrow. Hold your coins, maiden! First smell my ointment! This ointment is good, should you wish to travel to Brocken one night. Secretly smear this ointment on and the pious monk might come directly to your chamber. You will then fly high up in the night air together and he will bestow upon you many hungry kisses.
MALLEUS MALEFICARUM
Remember how we said that the film Häxan was based on Benjamin Christensen’s study of Malleus Maleficarum? Well, that book was written by German Friar and inquisitor Heinrich Kramer, who also would have surely been named ‘Head Incel in Charge’ if there had been such an office at the time. (Seriously, when I read the words of Elliot Rodger, I instantly thought of Kramer’s work).
Kramer wrote the Malleus following his expulsion from Innsbruck by the local bishop. Kramer had become obsessed with a woman named Helena Scheuberin, who he accused of witchcraft because he decided she was a slut. Helena was hooking up with a knight who was ill, and the knight was advised to take a break from Helena for the benefit of his health. But alas, he kept banging her, and succumbed to his illness. That’s proof right there. A man’s misfortune can always be traced back to someone’s vagina.
During the trial, six other women were implicated of witchcraft also. But Kramer annoyed the court by relentlessly pursuing a very pervy line of probing and graphic questions about Helena’s sex life, and eventually it became apparent to the church officers that Kramer just a lecherous old creep, so all the charges were dropped and he was asked to leave.
Kramer retreated to Cologne and channeled his rage to create the predecessor to 4-Chan, his misogynistic manifesto and BDSM tutorial book called Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487. Known as “the treatise on witchcraft,” it was used for 300 years to persecute women in both the church and the royal courts.
In his revolting tome, Kramer explains why most witches are women, using a litany of misogynistic commentary from the Bible, the Church Fathers, and classical literature. He describes women as being far more foolish than men. He quotes Seneca, “when a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.” He says that women are inherently evil, which is traced back to Eve, “the first temptress,” and the forbidden fruit. He fumes about womens’ bodies and appearances, “consider also her gait, posture, and habit, in which is vanity of vanities… there is no man in the world who studies so hard to please the good God as even an ordinary woman studies by her vanities to please men.” Also, he warns that women are treacherous, “they kill [men] by emptying their purses, consuming their strength, and causing them to forsake God.”
But the most central theme in Malleus Maleficarum is Kramer’s unhinged, furious ranting about female sexuality. According to historian Anne Barstow, 20% of Malleus constitutes “a tirade against women’s sexual powers.” Kramer argued that women are naturally more carnal and are absolutely obsessed with sex. He said, “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is, in women, insatiable.” Furthermore, he uses Proverbs 30 to equate maternal desire with sexual impropriety, stating that “the mouth of the womb… is never satisfied,” and concluding that “for the sake of fulfilling their lusts they consort even with devils.”
His audience being celibate men of the cloth, Kramer used the authority of the church and the efficiency of the printing press to distribute erotcia throughout Europe in the form of his guide/spankbook to finding and torturing witches. The book is full of examples of all the things that these lusty, horny witches do to themselves, and to men’s penises, as well as all the ways in which they must be tortured, made to confess, and put to death. Many a pious man probably tossed and turned at night, sweaty and restless due to thoughts of young witches, their insatiable sexual urges, and what must be done to them in the name of all that is holy….
Malleus Maleficarum cemented the connection between feminine sexuality and evil. According to the text, whenever a woman took pleasure in physicality, or a man couldn’t perform sexually, witchcraft was afoot. There was no possibility of female sexual pleasure without evil, because any enjoyment outside of reproduction was condemned. Kramer singled out “female fornicators” as the type of women who were “frequently sorceresses.” Women were targeted and these women’s sexuality was the proof of their evil nature. The publication and dissemination of the Malleus Maleficarum opened the floodgates of the inquisitorial hysteria that resulted in the persecution of women in the name of protecting the pious and the innocent from the danger of the devil.
FLYING OINTMENT AND THE WITCHES’ BROOMS
Even before the publication of the Malleus Maleficarum, there were stories of the witches’ sabbaths. This brings us back to dear Karna, and her ointment.
Female sexuality, separate from men, was considered an abomination. And pleasure? What for? Sex is strictly for procreation, in the name of God. And so, it was believed that these horngry, freaky witches were constantly perverting their domestic tools and objects of daily life in order to pleasure themselves. An item that particularly took hold in these stories– whether because of truth or easy visual imagery — was the broomstick.
That’s right. When witches were “riding their broomsticks,” it may have had a deeper meaning than you thought as a child. But wait, it gets better!
It turns out, the story doesn’t stop with the broomstick just being a dildo. It was also widely believed that the witches used psychoactive substances to make ointments which weren’t exactly safe for consumption, but they were quite effective if applied to mucous membranes….. As Michael Pollan explains:
Witches and sorcerers cultivated plants with the power to “cast spells” — in our vocabulary, “psychoactive” plants. Their potion recipes called for such things as datura, opium poppies, belladona, hashish, fly-agaric mushrooms (Amanita muscaria), and the skin of toads (which can contain DMT, a powerful hallucinogen). These ingredients would be combined in a hempseed-oil-based “flying ointment” that the witches would then administer vaginally using a special dildo. This was the “broomstick” by which these women were said to travel.
Michael Pollan – The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (p. 119)
So when the witches were believed to “fly off to meet the devil” (who they always let penetrate them, because women) and have their sabbaths (meetings of groups of witches, which turned into giant girl-on-girl orgies, because women), they may have just been hallucinating. Or, you know, they might have been having orgasms for once in their otherwise dreary and miserable lives?
Anyway, in Häxan when Karna offers the ointment to the lovelorn woman, it is probably an ointment of this type. And when another woman, Maria, admits to letting a woman named Trina smear “witch ointment” over her naked body while she was in bed, which made her fly, this was another reference. The film then cuts to a scene of a “wild ride,” where a multitude of women with billowing, flowing hair riding various domestic implements like brooms, stools, and forks, are gathering with increasingly frenetic and erotic energy.
Here are some examples of “Flying Oinment” being mentioned in witchcraft trials:
“In rifleing the closet of the ladie, they found a pipe of oyntment, where with she greased a staffe, upon which she ambled and galloped through thick and thin.”
From the 1324 investigation of Ireland’s first accused witch, Lady Alice Kyteler
“But the vulgar believe, and the witches confess, that on certain days or nights they anoint a staff and ride on it to the appointed place or anoint themselves under the arms and in other hairy places.”
From the “Quaestio de Strigis” by Jordanes de Bergamo (1470)
“the Devil, whose name was Robinet, was a dark man who spoke in a hoarse voice. Kissing Robinet’s foot in homage, she renounced God and the Christian faith. He put his mark on her, on the little finger of her left hand, and gave her a stick, 18 inches long, and a pot of ointment. She used to smear the ointment on the stick, put it between her legs and say, ‘Go, in the name of the Devil, go!’”
from the confession of Antoine Rose, the Witch of Savoy, in 1477
The main reason that the superstition of witches flying was so important to preserve in a literal form was because it made them so much more efficient in their evildoing, and therefore especially terrifying and dangerous. But supernatural activity was a problem for the church, so Kramer explained it away — God was allowing the devil to test the purity of the people by letting the devil grant witches the power to fly in the form of an ointment. He further elaborates:
“They make [the ointment] at the devil’s instruction from the limbs of children, particularly of those whom they have killed before baptism, and anoint with it a chair or a broomstick; whereupon they are immediately carried up into the air, either by day or by night, and either visibly or, if they wish, invisibly”
The reason for using unbaptised children, of course, is that in Catholicism all those who die without being baptised are condemned automatically to hell, and most churches would have refused to bury them in consecrated ground. Notice that a woman could be accused of having flown away to the devil’s orgy invisibly, by her own choice, and she could not refute this logic, for it was written in the one-handed manual for (ahem) pounding out witchcraft.
Kramer also presents several examples of flying witches for his readers’ perverted fear and delight. For example, a witch living in the Rhineland was not invited to a wedding, and being a woman she became overcome with envy and rage. After “anointing” herself, she was carried through the air by a devil to a hill near the wedding, to enjoy a birds-eye view of her own urine raining down on Bride Becky and all her wedding guests. The first golden shower porn? Hawt.
WRAPPING IT UP….
For nearly two centuries after its first publishing, Malleus Maleficarum sold more copies than any book except the Bible. Conservative estimates say that 40,000 to 60,000 of people, most of them women, were tortured and killed because of the witch-hunting frenzy it incited. Most of the women who were killed were in Germany, and the Germanic areas of Switzerland and northeastern France, as the Catholic Church and the Protestants tried to recruit members and amass power by stoking demonic witch paranoia and making public displays of witch trials and witch burnings.
Basically, two rival religious groups persecuted, demonized, and killed women to get likes and follows, and ultimately money and power, but hey, that’s a story for another day. What matters now is that they did this by making people afraid that women were hunching broomsticks and getting high. So afraid that they were willing to watch them die horrible deaths en masse, for a couple hundred years, and not say or do anything to stop it.
IMPORTANT SAFETY MESSAGE!
I love plants, and herbs, and sex toys, and I’m not morally opposed to psychedelic fun either. But there are people out there TODAY selling stuff that they call “flying ointment” and I can’t urge you strongly enough not to mess with any of that. Or to try to recreate it using any of the “recipes” or “spellbooks” that are circulating. Please. If you’re reading this, I love you, and it’s not worth the risk. Some of the ideas, products, and recipes out there, despite being “natural” and plant-based, are extremely dangerous, and not to be fucked with. Stick to FDA-approved lubes and make your own magic.
HÄXAN FRAGRANCE DESCRIPTION
As fun as this has been for me (and I could go on for days), there is a perfume at the end of this joyride.
I kinda wish I could say that the perfume smells like a liniment, and slutty women, and their implements of pleasure, but alas it does not. Someday, if I have a bespoke perfume made, it definitely will. But this is not my vision. It seems to focus more on the herbalist nature of the witches, and their potions and elixirs.
Häxan starts off grassy-fresh. I often have vivid dreams, and in my dreams there are always smells. This is the smell of grass in my dreams. It’s quite floral, like tiny herb flowers. If you’ve ever had a garden where you grow microgreens and herbs and edible grasses and flowers, it’s a similar scent Blissful. Like tiny thyme blossoms and sweetgrass and pea sprouts…. If I ever came across a patch of grass like this in the wild, I’d sink right into it and never leave.
The heart of Häxan is a very pleasant camphoreous-thujonic melody, owing to the combination of rosemary and wormwood. For the multitude of heavy things that are in here, the deft light touch is the real magic, and Pryn Lomros is the witch who worked the miracle. Aromatic basil, bitter marjoram and oregano, earthy sage and chamomile, just the right amount of fir. And in the base there is a plushness that is like moss — but never dry or the least bit powdery. It’s lush and moist and alive.
I have to say that, I have seen other reviews of this perfume, and even the brief, which use the word “dark” and I never get any sense of darkness from it at all. I’ve worn it many, many times and paid careful attention throughout, and it is a brilliant, clear, crystalline green.
After about an hour, I can detect a lot of the styrax, which is something that I appreciate. It smells leathery and has a lilac-like undertone. I also smell black pepper, a smidgeon of clove, and a bit of beeswax.
After two hours, I can smell more of the fougère aspects of Häxan. A bit of smooth lavender, and some labdanum. There is still a bit of the beginning pleasant floral grassiness.
In the third hour I can just begin to detect some of the woodiness form patchouli. The pleasant green grassiness is still there. It gets softer but doesn’t really change much from this point on.
Ironically, the reason that Rajesh contacted me about this fragrance is because I have such a love for anything with goat hair tincture, and although this does have some in it, it is so subtle that I don’t ever detect it. There is only ever enough animalism to give the fragrance life — a heartbeat perhaps, but no purr, growl, or bite to be found here.
HÄXAN DETAILS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
My husband never fails to notice and comment when I wear Häxan, and today is no exception. We always end up talking about how nothing smells as good as that first time you mow the grass in the spring. It is a smell of paradise. It is not slutty or lusty, or wicked and evil. It is beautiful and natural, and has an air of innocence. I have to think really hard, and do a lot of contortions, to get “witch” from this. The image that always comes first to my mind is Julie Andrews, twirling out in the fresh air, amidst all the greenness:
This is in no way a criticism of the fragrance itself. It could just mean that the things I associate with the scent are a million miles away from the witchcraft and occult practices that inspired it. OR, it could mean that Julie Andrews is secretly ONE OF US, and that we all enjoy dancing and singing and musical theater, and the rest of you are all missing out (#winkwink #secrethandshake).
Last year, on Halloween, I’d had my bottle of Häxan for a few weeks and I got a sweet, spoopy little message from Rajesh thanking me for my purchase and reminding me that it would be a great day to wear it. And, I thought, meh. Halloween is Samhain for me, and I want to smell like a feeding baobhan sith, a thousand rutting beasts, and a fire so big it touches the sky. But during spring and summer, I couldn’t wait to wear Häxan, it’s a lovely perfume.
And so, dear reader, there are two lessons to be learned. The first is that, as consumers, patrons, and critics, our experience is our own. I used to be more self-conscious and shy about this when I wrote about and discussed perfume, because I am not the one who conceived of it and made it. But as someone who buys all my own “stuff” and always wears it thoughtfully and always puts some effort into what I put back out into the world, I’m not going to try to describe my experience through someone else’s storyline and vocabulary.
The second lesson is….. words and names and phrases have meaning. History and context are real and important, and to me, they are fascinating. So, if your perfume is named after a Biblical, mythological, or historical being, or a person or place, or a phenomenology, or anything…. I might explore that. Deeply. Probe it. Test it. Because what so many people are doing right now is overt fawning and glad-handing, which I find dull and depressing. If that is what fragrance “reviews” are now, I’m moving on to just being a writer. I write stuff. I do it for myself. There’s usually perfume involved to some degree or other.
So, back to the brief, what would have been in the potions and elixirs, and what would have been the smells of the places where these “dark occult ceremonies” took place? Well, I thought of poor Helena, whose pussy launched the whole war on witches, and I looked for a photo of Innsbruck. Here’s what it looks like today — maybe my Julie Andrews image isn’t too far off of what the witches’ world was like:
The main thing that I would really like to stress here is that, despite the 100 ingredients used, Häxan is brilliantly balanced. Nothing sticks out, nothing is out of place, nothing is overpowering. Frankly, when I saw all the stuff that was going to be in the fragrance, I was expecting a hot mud pie. But it isn’t muddy at all, in fact it has an exceptional clarity and even a prismatic effect — all of the different elements come together to form a brilliant beam of pure light. That is the magic that Prin Lomros created to make Häxan. It’s like the spell of a witch that takes us to a different place and time.
Häxan is an extrait with a light and airy feel and is surprisingly long-lasting. The brief calls it a fougère, to me it’s every bit as green as it is aromatic/herbal. I’m not really a fan of green fragrances but this one is stunningly beautiful and I really do treasure it.
Here are some of the over 100 ingredients from a list provided by the brand:
Chamomile, Saffron. Galbanum, Lavender, Rosemary, Clary Sage, Marjoram, Wormwood, Sage, Jasmine Absolute, Cypress Absolute, Fir balsam, Spruce, Beewax Absolute, Elemi, Thyme, Basil, Oregano, Incense, Labdanum, Goat Hair tincture, Styrax, Opoponax, Nutmeg, Gaiacwood, Clove, Black Pepper, Caraway, Tobacco Absolute, Castoreum, Costus, Nargamotha, Cedarwood, Sandalwood Australia, Cashmeran, Mushroom, Vetiver, Patchouli, Muscone
