Читать книгу Encyclopedia of Essential Oils: The complete guide to the use of aromatic oils in aromatherapy, herbalism, health and well-being. - Julia Lawless - Страница 12

Between the seventh and thirteenth centuries the Arabs produced many great men of science, among them Avicenna (AD 980‒1037). This highly gifted physician and scholar wrote over a hundred books in his lifetime, one of which was devoted entirely to the flower most cherished by Islam, the rose. Among his discoveries, he has been credited with the invention of the refrigerated coil, a breakthrough in the art of distillation, which he used to produce pure essential oils and aromatic water. However, in 1975 Dr Paolo Rovesti led an archaeological expedition to Pakistan to investigate the ancient Indus Valley civilization. There, in the museum of Taxila at the foot of the Himalayas, he found a perfectly preserved distillation apparatus made of terracotta. The presence of perfume containers also exhibited in the museum dating from the same period, about 3000 BC, confirmed its use for the preparation of aromatic oils. This discovery suggests that the Arabs simply revived or improved upon a process that had been known for over 4000 years!

Rose water became one of the most popular scents and came to the West at the time of the Crusades, along with other exotic essences, and the method of distillation. By the thirteenth century, the ‘perfumes of Arabia’ were famous throughout Europe. During the Middle Ages, floors were strewn with aromatic plants and little herbal bouquets were carried as a protection against plague and other infectious diseases. Gradually the Europeans, lacking the gum-yielding trees of the Orient, began to experiment with their own native herbs such as lavender, sage and rosemary. By the sixteenth century lavender water and essential oils known as ‘chymical oils’ could be bought from the apothecary, and, following the invention of printing, the period 1470 to 1670 saw the publication of many herbals such as the Crete Herball published in 1526, some of which included illustrations of the retorts and stills used for the extraction of volatile oils.

In the hands of the philosophers, the art of distillation was employed in the practice of alchemy, the hermetic pursuit dedicated to the transformation of base metals into gold, the gross into the subtle. It was primarily a religious quest in which the various stages of the distillation process were equated with stages of an inner psychic transmutation, ‘dissolution and coagulation’: separation (black, lead), extraction (white, quicksilver), fusion (red, sulphur) and finally sublimation (gold or ‘lapis’). In the same way that aromatic material could be distilled to produce a pure and potent essence, so could the human emotions be refined and concentrated to reveal their valuable fruit, or true nature. In this context, volatile oils can be equated with the purified human psyche or ‘quintessence’ of the alchemists, being an emanation of matter and manifestation of spirit, mediator between the two realms.

Alchemy was the bridge across which the rich symbolism of the ancient world – Arab, Greek, Gnostic – was transported into our own era … thus symbolism fell from the rarefied heights into the melting-pot, and began to be tested in a continuous, dynamic interaction with the findings of chemistry.⁵