is it made from real minoans?
for this month's full moon rite, we made minoan incense and minoan oil and then consecrated them, had a libation and chatted. we started making the substances promptly at 7:30, but by the time we finished them--around 10:00--it was too late to try to set up a full circle and do the entire rite since it was a week night and chris has a long commute.
i love making minoan incense. it's one of those formulas that makes a ton of incense and uses a buttload of ingredients. plus, it smells like the best incense in the entire world to me--it's like the incense version of home.
chris blended the herbs and added some appropriate oils, while i powdered a wide range of resins to make the large amount of finest powdered gums we could come up with. the softer resins (i.e. elemi) got mixed up in the grinder with herbal matter.
we found herbal substitutes for ingredients you can only get as synthetics these days and they worked just fine. in fact, they take a little of the tang off the burn of the incense.
my house smells so fabulous from making the incense and doing a few test burns. so far, the burn is nice, but i'm sure that over the next month or so, it's going to ripen into something even more wonderful.
after we finished the incense, we made minoan oil. again, no synthetics--plant substitutions instead. it has the same smell as i've come to know minoan oil, but no high, screechy, synthetic ambergris smell to it. the ambergris substitute we used was an indian (subcontinent, not north america) essential oil from a plant called chaulmoogra. one of the cool things about chaulmoogra is that it's used to treat leprosy, so we don't have to worry about anyone in our grove having limbs falling off during circle and, although i'm just speculating here, it probably protects against mother theresa showing up announced during rituals.
the entire time we were making these wonderful things, i keep thinking in my head of wednesday addams asking "is it made from real minoans?" the answer of course is "that's a mystery i cannot reveal to you."
chris brought his mother's amazing corn muffins as cakes for the libations. my tummy wants to hug his mother forever. they are simply out of this world good.
i love making minoan incense. it's one of those formulas that makes a ton of incense and uses a buttload of ingredients. plus, it smells like the best incense in the entire world to me--it's like the incense version of home.
chris blended the herbs and added some appropriate oils, while i powdered a wide range of resins to make the large amount of finest powdered gums we could come up with. the softer resins (i.e. elemi) got mixed up in the grinder with herbal matter.
we found herbal substitutes for ingredients you can only get as synthetics these days and they worked just fine. in fact, they take a little of the tang off the burn of the incense.
my house smells so fabulous from making the incense and doing a few test burns. so far, the burn is nice, but i'm sure that over the next month or so, it's going to ripen into something even more wonderful.
after we finished the incense, we made minoan oil. again, no synthetics--plant substitutions instead. it has the same smell as i've come to know minoan oil, but no high, screechy, synthetic ambergris smell to it. the ambergris substitute we used was an indian (subcontinent, not north america) essential oil from a plant called chaulmoogra. one of the cool things about chaulmoogra is that it's used to treat leprosy, so we don't have to worry about anyone in our grove having limbs falling off during circle and, although i'm just speculating here, it probably protects against mother theresa showing up announced during rituals.
the entire time we were making these wonderful things, i keep thinking in my head of wednesday addams asking "is it made from real minoans?" the answer of course is "that's a mystery i cannot reveal to you."
chris brought his mother's amazing corn muffins as cakes for the libations. my tummy wants to hug his mother forever. they are simply out of this world good.