Scent doesn’t get much attention in modern occult discourse. It’s either left to the realm of aesthetics or reduced to a token puff of incense at the start of ritual. But within the older initiatory systems—including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—scent was far from incidental.
The Order certainly used incense to create atmosphere. But there’s more to it than that. Rituals were designed to engage all the senses, and smell had a unique role: it bypassed the intellect, penetrated directly to the unconscious, and primed the subtle body for contact.
Adept training wasn’t just about memorising correspondences or rehearsing gestures—it was also about refining perception, both material and astral. Olfaction, the most primal and least filtered of the senses, is a doorway between both.
What follows looks at scent not as an accessory, but as a kind of technology—used for invocation, transformation, and anchoring states of consciousness. In short, a forgotten tool in the magician’s toolkit.
Historically, incense and aromatic resins have been tied to temples and mystical rites: ancient Egypt, the Greek mystery traditions, the Oracle at Delphi, early Christianity—and yes, even the Rosicrucians, where the rose itself is a central motif. Scent has been used as offering, as purifier, and as bridge between the material and the spiritual.
It’s often said that scent is the most evocative of the senses, capable of triggering vivid, long-buried memories.
So how do we apply this to our work?
Certain classes of plants and minerals can be grouped by scent. Bitter or sweet is a basic start; more complex systems classify them by Sephira or Path. When well-developed as a sense and used ritually, scent carries a unique astral signature—so that one evokes the other. Scent evokes symbol; symbol evokes scent.
For a trained olfactory system, tattwa work—and later, advanced skrying in the spirit vision—becomes more than audio-visual or even textual. It becomes enlivened.
There is merit, even for a Zelator, in building both olfactory capability and your own tables of correspondence. The Order doesn’t hand you anything fixed when it comes to scent. It’s a blank canvas. Your task is to fill it—with attention and experience.
Crowley’s 777 probably has a table your ego will want to consult to “check if you’re right.” Go ahead—but know this: without dogma, your insights are as valid as mine, Regardie’s, Crowley’s, or Mathers’. Crowley just had the biggest ego publishing his.
Literally: go smell the roses. Do it often. Deliberately smell half a dozen distinct things a day. Let the scent permeate you. Try to differentiate it. You will improve over time. Just know: if you smoke, you’re closing two of the seven “Gates of the Soul.” Quit, if you’re serious—on that basis alone.
Once you’ve opened up your olfactory sensitivity and can detect subtleties, begin experimenting with correspondences. Smelling roses—what does it evoke in you? Write it down as a symbol: an element, a planet, an astrological sign, a Tarot card, even a Hebrew letter.
Try the same with daffodils. The smell of clay. Of dark earth, new leaves, red things, green things. Classify each under a symbol. Eventually you’ll build a personal table of correspondences—something you can map onto the Tree of Life and apply directly in your work. Especially once you can identify incense or resins that replicate the scent-symbol association.
These days, I’ll burn a specific scented incense stick for meditation. I also use it as a timer. My mind is trained to recognise when the incense burns out—it’s like a bell going off. I know I’ve meditated long enough.
Just one more way scent can—and should—permeate the work.
Scent isn’t set dressing. It’s a tool—primal, immediate, and often overlooked. In Golden Dawn work, it can act as bridge, anchor, trigger, and offering all at once. You don’t need anyone’s permission to start experimenting with it. The Order didn’t hand down strict rules on olfaction, which means the field is open for your own direct experience.
Train your nose like you’d train your concentration. Build your own symbolic correspondences based on actual encounters with smell. Apply them to meditation, ritual, and vision work. Let scent become part of your magical vocabulary.
Your nervous system and your Soul already knows what to do. You just need to give it something worth smelling.
Kasmillos
Note – the associated image is a paining “Priestess of Delphi”, by John Collier (1891).
