Chapter The Passion of the Stag
The Passion of the Stag
Olibanum, with its touch of pain, is the first of four secret ingredients that make Goat Foot’s perfumes beyond compare, impossible to recreate to this day. The second, which contributes that note of passion, is obtained by Goat Foot from the musk gland of a red stag.
A mystical animal, the subject of kabbalistic psalms and obsessive dreams, the red stag, like the unicorn, succumbs before a maiden’s charms.
At the hour of twilight, Princess Goat Foot goes out to await its appearance.
She senses its presence. She approaches the magnificent creature, hides in the mist, moves stealthily, the high crosses of antlers visible through the foliage.
At last the stag reveals itself, gazing around majestically.
He bellows with thirst and love, filling the air with a fertile broth of pheromones that attract and captivate, and his call is deep as distant thunder or the low notes of a cello.
Only a maiden can hunt the stag; it’s not the kingdom’s archers but Goat Foot herself who pierces him with an arrow.
The Great Perfumer of Hadhramaut and his fellow alchemists extract the gland, put it on a hot stone to dry, and then distill it until they achieve a dense balsam, the color of tea, oily to the touch and bitter of taste. It’s what is known today as musk.
Goat Foot, as clever a craftsperson as the god Hermes, has made a discovery.
By sacrificing the stag, she can capture its spirit and pour it into small flasks, drop by drop.
The stag cedes its powers and reveals the crux of its ars armonia: Its fieriness illuminates the perfume.
But Goat Foot will have to pay the price.
The difference between today’s simple musk and the erogenous oil of those times is in the willingness the maiden shows to wound and be wounded: The stag gives her a stigma of lost love.
The essence of that wound is trapped in the perfume, a potent aphrodisiac.
The third secret component is black rose.
Black Baccara, an esoteric and Solomonic rose, utterly evasive, so impossible to find and unique among roses that most people don’t even believe it exists, and only the King of Jerusalem has succeeded in taming it.
Goat Foot doesn’t crush it in a mortar, but rather presses it in her own hand until it releases its nectar, which isn’t harmless, not the kind that brings to mind loving vows or flying doves; instead, it’s a deceptive nectar, sinful, you could even say it’s somewhat poisonous, and with it Goat Foot gives her essences a sad, Gothic aura.
Still, something is missing. The Perfumer of Sheba is not altogether satisfied.
Her fine nose tells her that, despite the magic of the three ingredients she already has, a fourth is still needed, the definitive one, which will complete the formula and make it unparalleled.
The revelation comes to her after several sleepless nights.
With great care, so as to keep the fourth element contained, the Princess of Sheba goes down to the laboratories, approaches the stills, and drops in a freshly cut piece of one of her fingernails, a tip of her hair, a drop of her bodily fluids or flakes from her skin: tiny dead particles of herself.
She’s discovered that atoms of decomposing flesh instill great spirit.
A speck of death infuses life into things, like yeast in bread.
Just like yeast, petroleum, antibiotics, asphalt, and cortisone, Goat Foot’s perfumes contain a touch of cadaverous impurity, without which they’d be decipherable and could be copied.
The sweet hint of bacterial decomposition brings its liminal drama, its bold, adventurous quality, its role as a portal.
There’s no true perfume if the perfumer who makes it doesn’t leave skin inside it.
To finish things off, as if for sport, the way a chef completes a stew with a final dash of salt and pepper, Goat Foot adds notes of wine and laudanum to her masterpiece.
She’s finally achieved what she sought: an epically layered and poetic perfume that speaks of desperate love affairs and ancient bloody battles.
A pinch of sensuality and another of rot, a drop of sweetness and another of perversion: This is the formula the world’s great perfume houses still seek to this day.
Their panacea is that it would be enough to apply their product behind the ear, in armpits, on wrists, between legs, or on other intimate parts of the body for the person who uses it to feel—when their skin’s heat wakes the perfume’s soul—that they’ve acquired a special power.
Goat Foot didn’t live long enough to learn that her secret recipe would be revealed, at least in part, and that today it’s imitated by some perfumes on the market.
Among them are two, referred to as Oriental, that might resemble—however timidly—the fragrance Goat Foot achieved by mixing olibanum’s white blood, the stag’s golden musk, and black rose extract, plus that scrap of death that crouches inside all that lives.
One of those two modern perfumes is Gold, by Amouage, whose origin seems drawn from One Thousand and One Nights.
The royal family of Oman, wanting to capture jasmine, musk, frankincense, and other legendary scents of Muscat nights, reached out to the Frenchman Guy Robert and gave him the job of all perfumers’ dreams: Use whatever you want, no matter the cost, and make the most sumptuous essence in existence.
Guy Robert was up to the task, and created Gold.
The other inheritor of this legacy is L’Air du Désert Marocain, by Andy Tauer, the discreet Swiss who personally oversees a boutique perfumery where he managed to harmonize musk with extracts of a semiprecious stone, amber; a spice from the precolonial Americas, vanilla; a bisexual flower, styrax; and a ritual resin, frankincense, to produce his potent essence, at once ancestral and intimate.
When certain nearly extinct big cats, like the clouded leopard or the Iberian lynx, seem indifferent or unwilling at the time for copulation, it is said that it’s enough to douse them in Obsession, the Orientalist formula by Calvin Klein, to unleash their sexual frenzy.
So. The jasmines of Oman, lovestruck leopards, extracts of bisexual flowers, all that is the stuff of dreams, and worthy are the perfumes that pursue, in our times, the excellence of mythic Hadhramaut.
But as for any equals to it, naturally, there are none.