BPAL - Dee

I haven't been inspired recently, and somehow that has kept me from posting the last couple of BPAL reviews I did write. These are now months old. But my opinions are the same!

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There's one particular BPAL scent I've been struggling to write a review for. It's not because it's bad, or even that I have conflicted thoughts about it. In fact, it's become a favorite, right next to the Antikythera Mechanism... I wore it no less than three times this week. I love it. It's called Dee, and it is excellent.

The official description is as follows...

John Dee: master of science, alchemy and magic, Hermetic philosopher in the schools of Rosicrucian Christian Mysticism and Platonic-Pythagorean doctrine, and Queen Elizabeth's astrologer, advisor, cryptologist and spy. With Edward Kelly, he created a field of study and work in Angelic Evocation, and isolated the Angelic language: Enochian. His scent is soft English leather, rosewood and tonka with a hint of incense, parchment and soft woods.

...and when you smell it, you get leather. And wood. And something kind of sweet. And more leather. It's not a harsh, leather-jacket sort leather... and that's perfectly appropriate, because John Dee was a 16th-century mystic, not a Hell's Angel. I couldn't tell you what "soft English leather" is supposed to be like, but to me this is closest to a comfy leather couch.

So why is it so hard to review? First, of course, because I can't very well make a crisp, concise, to-the-point post. I'd get bored. But also because I can never pass up an opportunity to research the fascinating history of hermeticism (or mysticism, or Renaissance magic, or anything in that broad category, really). The topic is generally ignored and treated as nonsense nowadays, but it's actually quite critical to understanding our world, in this case, particularly the "western" world. Most people, to be bluntly honest, are content enough to have almost no comprehension at all of matters beyond their own daily routines. However, I am not one of these people, and I realize that I'll never be able to fully understand the development of philosophy, science, religion -- frankly, just about anything more than a hundred years old -- unless I get a grasp on historic patterns of thought, which are positively swimming in mysticism, the occult, and the metaphysical.

But it's not as easy as just "researching" it. This is something scholars would dedicate their entire lives to, both trying to understand and contributing toward it. In fact, while it's not quite as common in modern times, some people still do spend decades studying it. It's very complex, and very hard to tackle.

But even in my frustration in trying to even get a feel for the surface of hermeticism, I may have at least found a way to make a rambling review of Dee! A week or so ago, Beth emailed me saying that I really ought to review it. I wrote back in what turned out be a long-winded rant of why I couldn't touch the subject:

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I totally need to write a review on Dee, but I keep getting too fascinated with the research. I don't even know where to start... I've wanted to research Renaissance magic, mysticism, and hermeticism for years, but it's way too hard to approach. There's really no clear distinction between all of them, and even in the cases where it is more clear-cut, they're all intertwined. Hermeticism, for example, encompasses alchemy, philosophy, natural philosophy ("science"), cabalism (Kabbalah), mathematics, theology, astrology, astronomy, linguistics (from all sorts of languages), and plenty more. Oh, and you pretty much have to trace it all back to ancient Greece, and pick up on everything you've missed in-between in order to understand it (because as far as I can tell, they studied their own origins too).

And that's just in order to begin to comprehend the surface of hermeticism! Magic (or magick) is a whole other story... Renaissance magic takes anything and everything from hermeticism, and from mysticism in general (of which hermeticism is basically like a "sect"), and then digests and uses the knowledge for purposes of manipulation of some sort... and there are many categories and schools of magic, all with different philosophies and areas of focus. Also, some of them may or may not have actually been practiced. And just when you think you have even a conceptual grasp on some part of it, you suddenly realize that Aleister Crowley screwed it all up a century ago through gaining a ridiculous and unprecedented level of influence over the community of western mysticism, which has always operated on interpretation in the first place.

So... trying to gain even an elementary understanding of Dee is kind of difficult. And after hours of (albeit distracted) research into even just Enochian, angelic divination, and Dee himself, I still can't figure out why leather, rosewood, tonka, or "soft woods" have anything to do with him.

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So there you have it. In a sentence: "The subject matter touches on some deep-seated frustrations."

That said, a very helpful person and fellow man on the BPAL forums, T.Harker, pointed to to me the leather's relevance to John Dee -- book bindings! I felt pretty dumb for not realizing that, but yeah, that's what it is. Even aside from the parchment (which is essentially thin leather) he would have used to work on transcribing Enochian, or the books he would have probably had around... Dee had a gigantic personal library, and the books would obviously have been bound in leather.

So lots of leather, wood, and... there's a kind of sweet-and-spicy bit that I imagine is incense. This is the scent of a grandiose Renaissance study. And it's good. Even Beth enjoys wearing it... it's a manly scent, yes, but it's not exclusively manly. Which is kind of strange, but awesome.

Definitely getting a bottle of this one. Try it. Don't bother trying to understand Dee's work or you'll give yourself a headache, but his BPAL namesake is excellent.