Mermade Magickal Arts / Dionysos, Icaro +

July 2, 2015 at 8:04 am (Agarwood / Aloeswood / Eaglewood, Amber, Balsam, Benzoin (Loban), Champa / Durbar, Copal, Elemi, Evergreen, Frankincense, Honey, Incense, Mermade Magickal Arts, Mike, Myrrh, Pine / Pinon, United States)

One of the things I’ve been noticing of late is that I can often have a Mermade incense in queue to review (the latest two are the fantastic Heart of the Sun and Honey (Amber Champa) incenses) and then they’re already gone by the time I make a move to writing about them. So it should be said that in general Mermade vintages are going out to higher demand, so it behooves oneself to move quick on these things, perhaps even quicker than waiting for our reviews as unfortunately we can’t get to everything in time as much as we’d like to. Olfactory Rescue Service is of course well pleased that more and more people are experiencing Mermade and Katlyn’s bountiful creations as I can’t imagine a time where we wouldn’t have good things to say about them. The latest creations could be gone by the time I get this posted and it would be a shame as both of these are comparatively unique to the roster and well worth checking out.

Another thing I’ve been noticing is how Mermade’s linking of myth and magick to the incenses give them a sort of power in their own right. Dionysos is one of these and the label immediately puts in mind the feral Greek wine God and his intoxicated entourage. When the first notes of the incense arise from the heater, the scent is grape, berry and wine all of some mysterious vintage. But woven through this central note is the wildness you’d associate with this God, an evergreen, balsamic and grassy mélange that speaks of remote pagan locations. Two of the incense’s notes are Greek Aleppo pine resin and Bay laurel leaves, both of which work with frankincense, myrrh and labdanum to give this scent a noticeably different feel to it. It’s a brave creation and has that touch of the weird to it that helps to get these images rolling.

Icaro moves across an ocean from frankincense and pine to copal blanco, elemi and Breu Claro, from European forests to the rainforests of Brazil. The comparison between these two incenses shows how different scents can be. It is something of a hot, dry incense especially in comparison to the liquid resin-like qualities of Dionysos but it’s also defined by an intense cactus-green scent that likely comes from the ground ayahuasca that is buried in the copal-heavy mix of ingredients. This combination speaks to the shamanic myths of the area and strangely enough I’m also reminded of how close to the word Icaro (defined at the Mermade link), the Greek figure Icaros sounds, and how both speak of long voyages and journeys. Once again, we’re seeing new directions being assayed by Mermade and this is a heady combination that has an impact similar to the Dream Snake of many years ago.

I was sent other current samples of Mermade works, including two variations of a stick version of Pan’s Earth, one an aloeswood version thereof. I had enough to know these were beautiful and heady blends that speak of how strong Mermade’s stick incense has been getting with new variations (and this goes for the Honey/Amber champa sticks to which I’m looking forward to more of after I rocketed through my tube of the amazing things). Mermade is also selling Styrax Benzoin, which comes looking like a fragile geode of dark crystals sparkling in part due to the added tincture/essential oils. This nurturing of the natural brings out a very gentle amber-benzoin scent on a heater, mild and unassuming and avoiding some of the harsher qualities of cheaper benzoin.

I also received a sample of small disc-like lozenges of Deep Earth, but when I opened the little package, I lost one of them as it shot out of the package into that same dimension lost socks go. The other landed on my heater where its familiar but variant scent reminded me of how much I love the lineage of this incense, I believe I still have samples going back at least five vintages.

In summary, it’s just always a joy to go through Katlyn’s latest work and share it, but don’t forget these incenses are getting more and more fleeting as people learn about this venerable company, so it doesn’t hurt to grab a vial or two right away. Also, next review I should have some incenses from a new entry into the nicely growing US field of incense artists, a “newer” company I have really been looking forward to talking about…

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Mermade Magickal Arts / Earth Church, Heart Beat, Dark Goddess, Babylon

July 26, 2008 at 7:24 pm (Agarwood / Aloeswood / Eaglewood, Benzoin (Loban), Cedar, Copal, Elemi, Evergreen, Floral, Frankincense, Hougary/Premium, Incense, Juniper, Mermade Magickal Arts, Opoponax / Opopanax, Pine / Pinon, Resins, Rose, Ross, Sandalwood, Sweetgrass, United States, Woods)

These are new offerings from Mermade Magickal Arts. They all come in glass veils with cork stoppers sealed with beeswax. There is enough incense in them for  easily 10-12 large burnings( really, you will find you get more then this) except for the Earth Church which has six large “wands”. I am quite sure by this point that these people are very fanatical about the quality of the ingredients and how they are made and there is a lot of R & D involved i each scent. Plus the price for what you are getting is extremely good.

Earth Church
These are thick sticks, about a ¼ inch wide by 2 ½ long. They are composed of finally ground woods and plants that together produce a lot of fairly sweet smelling smoke. Given the thickness of the stick you can count on quite a long burning time. It’s prefect for setting the up the energy or vib in an environment for metaphysical work or perhaps just to clean up the scent in a room. I am reminded of very sweet smelling campfires or of walking into a wood shop where many different types of woods have recently been cut. It’s a very fresh clean scent.

Heart Beat
As the name suggests, this is a very upbeat, vibrant and spicy incense. It is a sort of brick or chunk of material and needs to be heated up slowly, either on coal or in a heater.
It has a whole lot of resins and such: Oman and Hougary Frankincense, Rain Forest Elemi , Copals , Benzoin, Juniper EO, Sweet Grass EO, Cedar EO and wild crafted tips, Opopanax and Pinon Pine resin. It is really very lively and rich and the scent tend to change up as different parts ignite. It is packaged in a glass vial with extra ingredients surrounding the bricks. What this means is that you can heat just the bricks, the extra powders or any combination thereof. It’s great fun to experiment with. All in all, this is a very uplifting and rich incense which I find myself using quite a lot, Also, when used in the heater it does not produce smoke, or very little, which opens up possibilities for more people to enjoy the scent.

Dark Goddess
Another loose incense for coals or heater. The woods in this mix really stand out at first with a fresh forest scent. Then all the resins kick in and the scent gets much deeper and earthy. There are a lot of different aspects to this incense that keep it interesting, a huge play of different smells interacting with each other as well as the environment you are in. One of its ingredients is Salupati which is supposed to have “psychoactive properties”. I have not noticed anything of this nature but experimentation is still in progress 🙂 . Again, like the Heart Beat mentioned above, not much smoke is generated on the heater but quite a lot of great scent is. A small amount ( ¼ teaspoon) will pretty much give a very nice scent to a standard bedroom. This one is woods and earth tones as opposed to the spices and resins in Heart Beat.

Babylon
A Bakhoor style incense, Quite possibly one of the, if not the best, rose incense ever. I kid you not. This stuff is a light, clean, uplifting rose scent that gets help from the Aloeswood and Sandalwoods in the mix. I believe they help to lift the scent up and give it some exotic overtones. I have not been a big fan of the florals but this one opened up whole new vista’s to me. There are none of the off or synthetic scents that so many of the floral scents seem to come with. Really, it’s just a huge pure river of rose scent that just keeps coming. Plus one bottle will last quite a while; it does not take very much and you will find yourself gravitating back to it for that floral hit. Well, at least I do and I am generally an Aloeswood kind of guy 🙂  !

If you do not yet have a heater you can put these next to a coal on a bit of foil and you are in business!

-Ross

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Mermade Magickal Arts / Serpent Flame, Pan’s Earth, Wings of Air, Mermade Moon, Sacred Spirit, Salome, Wilderness

May 6, 2008 at 10:17 am (Agarwood / Aloeswood / Eaglewood, Balsam, Benzoin (Loban), Cones, Dragon's Blood, Elemi, Evergreen, Floral, Frankincense, Hougary/Premium, Incense, Jasmine, Juniper, Labdanum, Lavender, Mastic, Mermade Magickal Arts, Mike, Myrrh, Sandalwood, Spice (Cinnamon Clove Nutmeg etc.), Sweetgrass, United States)

[Note: several of these incenses were limited editions and have been since discontinued. Check with Mermade Magickal Arts for availability]

I will always be fond of Mermade Magickal Arts as one of the companys that really showed me how amazing incense could be. While the company does not make them anymore, at one point loose incenses like Shamanic Circle and Dragon Fire were among my staples, blended incenses with fantastic ingredients that had a similar effect like aloeswood on my subconscious. When these were first available, several of the blends had unusual and possibly psychoactive ingredients like datura in them. I noticed the last time I bought these blends before their discontinuation that the ingredients had changed a little and while the new versions were similar, by then either they weren’t having the same effects on me or they were truly different. I originally tried Shamanic Circle in the practice room of a band I was working with and it had a pretty major impact on everyone. I remember thinking hours after the experience that I could smell the incense floating around my memory. In fact the very existence of this site may be partially because of this blend and its company, so in a way I feel I’m coming full circle in being able to talk about them.

I wanted to set this up to demonstrate that to some extent because of these experiences, I’ll always be fond of this company, one that appears to base their products (from incense to music and beyond) on Wiccan/magickal concepts. Immediately I thought of the Scott Cunningham Llewellyn books on incense and my own experiences in making blends from those recipes over a decade ago. This relatively new line of incense “cones” that I’ll be covering here sticks fairly closely to these spiritually minded methods of making incense allied with an experienced hand in incense creation. Every cone here feels like the recipe was experimented with and slightly changed to reach a balance between the woods, resins, herbs and oils in them. And not only that but those familiar with experimenting with these ingredients on their own will realize that there is a rather high quality of ingredients in these “cones.”

I use the term cones in quotes because these are not your typical cones, rather they’re shaped more like flat triangles. The first five incenses (part of the Nature Spirits series) here follow western magickal elemental correspondances and in most cases the element corresponding with the incense can be guessed from the name. And better yet, the elemental quality of each cone comes out quite obviously upon burning. One thing is for sure, most of these incenses have very high quantities of resin in them and if you’re coming over from the Japanese incense side and known Minorien’s Frankincense, you’ll already have your foot in the door in terms of the spicy resin like quality of the cones.

Appropriately the series starts off with Serpent Flame, the incense corresponding with the fire element. Expectations that this would be spicy and hot were met. The base appears to be benzoin, dragons blood and balsam tolu, but particularly I was thinking of the hotter Benzoin Siam when burning this, except that Mermade have managed to balance some of the more difficult sides of this resin. The quality of (Madagascar) cinnamon in this appears to be high and it gives the incense a sort of cinnamon bun like scent, except with hints of shoe polish (in a good way of course) that I’d chalk up to the dragon’s blood. It’s a very friendly incense that really got the whole series off to a nice start.

Pan’s Earth reminded me quite a bit of some of the Cunningham earth-related recipes. I was pretty surprised not to see patchouli on the list of ingredients as it seems by far the strongest note in this incense. This sort of patchouli oil is similar to the types that tend to put some westerners off, except that this is definitely higher quality than what I walked by this morning, a little sweeter and closer to the Himalayan patchouli that I’m fond of. I’m left wondering if part of this might be the vetivert. The other ingredients in the incense are aloeswood, Hougary frankincense and juniper and I particularly get the juniper which gives it a bit of evergreen spice. I thought I got benzoin and lemon from this as well which undoubtedly was the frankincense ingredient.

Lavender is almost always associated with the air element, so its presence in Wings of Air was not surprising. Adding sweetgrass and Himalayan juniper to the mix intensifies this feeling and in terms of hitting the element on the nose, this is almost close to perfect. Using lighter resins like elemi and mastic seems like a very intelligent choice, you get the depth of aroma from the resin without the more definitive notes that come with frankincense, myrrh, benzoin and the like. If the oil note in Pan’s Earth was somewhat overwhelmed by the patchouli (or vetivert) notes, in Wings of Air it’s almost picture perfect. While every single one of these incenses really gets the elemental correspondances right, this might be the classic example in the group.

Mermade Moon is the line’s water incense and as of today looks like the company’s number one bestseller. It’s basically a spicy myrrh incense with quite a bit of play in the oil, which, given the ingredient list, I’d probably chalk up to the Jasmine Sambac. In fact it’s hard to imagine many watery incenses without jasmine as its perfume tends to really capture the changeable nature of a body of water. Apparently the base was white sandalwood, which was a note I didn’t notice so much probably due to the stronger aromatics. Or better yet, this incense uses the fixative onycha, an ingredient from a certain seashells that was apparently used in the original Hebrew temple incense. It all adds up to a rather sultry and slightly Scorpio-like musky blend that could rank as one of Mermade’s best cones.

The Nature Spirits series final “elemental” incense is Sacred Spirit. This is the series woodiest incense by far with liberal amounts of aloeswood and sandalwood. While both of these ingredients do show up in some of the other cones, this was the first where I really noticed them as part of my notes. The woods give this scent a bit more of a sublime scent than the other four, which strikes me as perfect for the “akasha” element in that it’s the one that triggered the most subconscious impressions for me. Like Pan’s Earth, this also has a bit of frankincense to it that gives the scent some more depth.

Mermade’s line Scents of the Sensuous includes Salome. This appears to be a much thicker cone than usual, possibly due to the high number of ingredients in the blend. It’s slightly reminiscent of the above-mentioned Serpent Flame, although not as spicy (and certainly not firey). I’d assume the Tolu Balsam is the ingredient that connects the two. It seems with this incense that it’s a little less about a concept and more about the aroma itself and as such this seems a bit more complex than the elemental line, with varying notes of frankincense and labdanum. It’s very rich and sultry and it strikes me that you actually need very little of the cone to fragrance a space. I was reminded at this point just how important resins are to Mermade incense and there were times this reminded me of a catholic or orthodox resin blend.

I couldn’t find Wilderness on the Mermade site (and it also took me a while to track down Salome), which makes it a little more difficult to describe. But like Salome, Wilderness is very similar to loose resin blends, in this case usually close to forest/celtic type blends with overtones of greenery and trees. I found this a really nice, evocative scent, with the base resin blend spiced up by various herbs. Some of these were spicy, roughly in the nutmeg, mace, clove and cinnamon territories except I wouldn’t swear to any of these being part of it per se. Of the incenses here, this was the one that took the longest to absorb as there seems to be a lot going on with it.

Mermade Magickal Arts have been around since 1984, a family operation whose long years of experience really shows in the creation of these incenses. All of their cones show a great deal of thought in terms of combining base notes, oils and resins and as so many of their incenses are based on various resins, it’s almost as if these cones are a new class or style of incense and as such are a welcome element of one’s diverse collection of scents. It’s great to see this outfit still in operation over the years, still combining art, music, spirituality and craft into a distinctive name brand that continues to be one of the best creative enterprises for scent in the US market.

A second installment of Mermade incenses is forthcoming, covering a few of the company’s loose blends, all of which take me quite a bit longer to go through.

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