Key Takeaways
- The witches' "flying ointment" wasn't invented from nothing. An early detailed recipe appears in a 1456 treatise, three decades before the Malleus Maleficarum repeated the story. Other recipes later attributed to such ointments sometimes contained dangerous nightshades, henbane, belladonna, mandrake, though historians still disagree on whether any accused witch actually used them.
- What people actually burned, carried, and wore, frankincense, myrrh, dragon's blood, mugwort, rue, has thousands of years of documented use, older and stranger than anything sold as "witchy" today.
- There's a real indie perfume scene built around this, not a TikTok trend, houses that have been doing it seriously for over a decade.
A total solar eclipse crosses Greenland, Iceland, and northern Spain on August 12, the first to reach mainland Europe since 1999. An 1881 Ohio county history preserves a local account, written seventy-five years after the fact, of an unnamed Native American woman killed after predicting "a darkness would come over the earth." The eclipse she's said to have predicted did happen, in June 1806, but the account is uncorroborated, written by a settler historian generations later. "Witchy perfume" reads like a TikTok category now, black bottles, tarot branding, a candle named after a moon phase. Under that is a documented history, stranger and better sourced than the marketing around it.
The Flying Ointment
An early detailed recipe appears in a 1456 treatise. Later recipes attributed to flying ointments sometimes contained dangerous nightshades. The chemistry's well documented, whether any accused witch actually used them is a live argument among historians.
What People Burned, Carried, and Wore
Frankincense, myrrh, dragon's blood, mugwort, vervain, rue. Thousands of years of real, documented use, burned, hung, carried, or worn for reasons that had nothing to do with each other.
A Real Scene, Not a Trend
A genuine indie perfume scene, over a decade running, sold through pagan and occult retailers. Seven houses show up in the full piece, Nui Cobalt Designs anchors the story.
The Scent for Today
I went back and forth between two of my own Nui Cobalt bottles, Two Crows and Forbidden Library. Forbidden Library won, #694 in my perfume collection. Incense, leather, amber, cedarwood, aged paper. I read a lot, and a scent built around old books felt apt.
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Read the Full Article →A note on the images here: the hero and gallery illustrations are AI-generated, not photographs, except Forbidden Library, a real photo of the actual bottle.