Decided to try Thanatos this morning. Wasn't quite sure what to expect, and I didn't honestly have a very clear idea of who Thanatos was. And since I can never just shut up and get to the point already, let's do some background research!
So, Wikipedia, help me! Thanatos is the Greek personification of death (that much I'd gathered already), and his Roman doppleganger is named Mors. He's a pretty minor character, which seems odd to me considering just how much death there is in Greek mythology... but hey, maybe the bards got tired of having to describe metaphorical fight/snuff scenes every time they needed to kill someone off. I could understand that. Also, he's basically hated by everyone and everything, including the gods, and he hates them all back. He's the son of Nyx (goddess of night) and Erebus (god of shadow/darkness), and the twin bother of Hypnos (personification of sleep)... although that may not be entirely true, because some of the more detailed accounts I'm seeing claim that Nyx seems to have asexually reproduced almost all of her children (and she herself was apparently mysteriously spawned by Chaos). So... who knows! Furthermore, Thanatos, from what I'm reading, is not actually a god but rather a "daemon," just a sort of vague, spirit-like personification of human phenomena.
...actually, upon further reading, nevermind. I've come to the conclusion that there is no actual consensus on who the heck Thanatos actually is, because now I'm reading something which suggests that he only personifies peaceful deaths, while his sisters, the Keres, who are basically a less awesome version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I am so confused now, and I'm starting to understand why there is so little ready information about Thanatos.
One note, though: Thanatos is not Hades! Hades is the god of the underworld, but it is Thanatos who sends people there. Except that it's Charon who actually does the transportation. Once again, I'm getting a headache, and now I'm wondering why Thanatos exists at all. Why can't the Greeks have just done like their European counterparts and created a cold, skeletal figure with a scythe? How does Thanatos even kill people?
Screw this! Thanatos is getting me upset. But there's another side of Thanatos which, given my personal interest in psychology and psychoanalysis, I find more interesting and less confusing: the Freudian theory of death-obsession has been called "Thanatos" as well. Freud, from my own observations, seems to have viewed the psyche as a struggle between different sides. It's not surprising, then, that he saw us as simultaneously being obsessed with both life and death... for example, we seek self-preservation and safety, but at the same time we also may find ourselves attracted to danger and risk. Modern mainstream thought, of course, rejects this sort of view in favor of a more mechanistic mind which simply weighs perceived pros and cons against each other, but as I do not personally hold to such a view, I think that, while not always entirely accurate, psychoanalysts like Freud really may have been onto something. However, this probably doesn't have much to do with anything since I doubt even BPAL would try to combine Freud with Thanatos (regardless of what it says below).
So, without further ado...
One of the horrible, painful, cruel, brooding, mocking and malignant children of Nyx, he is Death Incarnate, and is seen as a willowy young man, accompanied by a butterfly, bearing an inverted torch and funeral wreath in his hands. In modern thought, thanks to Sigmund Freud, it is the Death Instinct: love of death, destruction and decay, and the desire to embrace the quiescence, silence and peace of the grave. Dry white sandalwood and soft Siamese benzoin over a lugubrious blend of myrrh, Moroccan rose, mastic, tomb moss and a thin whiff of Greek incense.
Couldn't tell you what most of this would smell like, but they're definitely going for the more malevolent version of Thanatos here, although simultaneously being the psychological essence of death. Complex, yes, but at least it's not trying to duct tape two or more completely different characters into the same two-dimensional entity. I approve!
In the bottle, it's sandalwood. Something kind of floral in there too, but mostly sandalwood.
Wet and on the skin, it still smelled strongly of sandalwood, but the floral scent was stronger. Much stronger. And developing. For something which is supposed to invoke the Greek version of the Grim Reaper, this sure came close to compromising my masculinity. (I know, BPAL in general is enough of a compromise... but it's cologne, okay? Manly. Totally not perfume oil.)
Drying, though, it took a different turn. Some of the floral "notes" (as I guess they call them) became less intense, much to my relief, but a new scent also surfaced: moss. Yeah, that was odd. It wasn't like smelling a tree, though... the description says "tomb moss" and I think that's right. Probably mostly because of those words, but the smell did make me think of a tombstone.
As it aged, the floral scents became less and less, and eventually I was left with the sandalwood, the moss, and a new earthy scent. Someone on the forums described it as an overpowering "dust," but it wasn't that way for me. Dust was Miskatonic University, where a single sniff could invoke coughing. This was more of a dirt-like smell. Not a dirt which left me feeling like I needed to take a bath, but one which placed my mental image to the ground. I rather preferred this to the earlier floral scents.
It wasn't until afterward that I put it all together and I started to figure how impressive the scent really was. But first, based off my experiences, I'm not entirely sure why it's called "Thanatos," nor why BPAL would focus on his malicious personality when the scent would have, for me, matched his more "peaceful death" personality where he guides you to Charon. But even that aside, I'm not sure what Greek incense is supposed to smell like (was it part of the floral or sandalwood scents?), so the whole Greek theme in general didn't really work out. Also, I don't understand the significance of sandalwood, which is probably just my own ignorance. So the Thanatos theme, while it might very well be clever in ways I can't pick up, was lost on me. There's the Freud-inspired meaning going too, I guess, but then again why pick a figure from either Greek mythology or quasi-obscure psychological theory?
However, Thanatos WAS ingenious in retrospect. I don't know if it would work this way on most other people, nor do I understand how a fragrance could be designed to take this path... but, with a clean sandalwood smell consistent through the journey (which may or may not have significance), it went first from floral, then to a mixture of floral and moss, then to moss and dirt. And again, it felt clean throughout. What this one did, really, was take me through the cycle of death.
First the funeral flowers, representing memories which carry on well after death. Then the moss starts to grow... from an olfactory perspective, this adds some earthiness to the smell which brings your mind to the gravesite, but there's also something about the moss which grows on tombstones. It somehow solidifies the death... I don't mean in a morbid way, but rather that it somehow seems to represent an acceptance of death. And finally, the dirt, the eventual return of a the physical body to become part of the earth.
I had expected a morbid, dark, or malevolent scent, so Thanatos was a bit of a disappointment early on, but I appreciated it a lot in retrospect. Due to the changing nature it's more for art than everyday use, but it's not at all unpleasant, either. A good experience.
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