Among the human senses, smell remains the most elusive and subjective, neither theoretical nor practical
sense, often overshadowed by sight and hearing in philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic discourses. The
perfume of things has a unique capacity that other senses do not offer: it enters through our nose and
searches through folders right from the dusty cupboards of our memories. The absence of a pushed educational
input through symbolic systems allows us to create raw and natural relations between our environment and our
mind. As these reactions are not being dominated by rationality and intellect, they let themselves be guided
by emotional responses. Smell, in this sense, functions as a deeply psychological trigger rather than a purely
aesthetic experience.
Regardless of these significances, perfume is often painted as an aesthetic or commercial object rather than a
vessel capable of carrying memory, meaning, and collective experiences. Given the history of perfumes and
their original form of use, which I will discuss more thoroughly later, perfume can be associated with a
higher state of being and a bridge between our material world on earth and the spiritual heavens capable of
recollection and nostalgia.
The following essay examines how perfume acts as this higher medium through the biblical myth of the Garden of
Eden, approached here not as a historical claim, but as a symbolic and archetypal narrative rooted in our
reality. The essay interprets the shared and collective memory of Eden as a desirable and nostalgic longing we
have to our place of origin and in some way of home. In this context, nostalgia is understood not merely as
personal reminiscence, but as a deeper longing shaped by shared myths, collective memory, and a sense of loss
that exceeds individual experience.
“And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.”
(Gen. 2.8, King James Version)
To understand perfume as a vessel of nostalgia and transcendence, it is necessary to first return to the
biblical origin of loss itself.
Before the Fall, Adam and Eve lived in the abundant garden of Eden, unbound by matter. It wasn’t a
simple garden ornamented by nature, but a non-material timeless state of existence. Time did not pass and
leaves did not fall nor did they know what was matter or death. Yet one day, the serpent came to Eve with a
whisper. It claimed that sinning would not bring death as she had been warned, but sight. Her eyes would open
and make her like the gods themselves. Charmed by those words, Eve reached for the fruit, followed by Adam.
And with that single bite, their whole world suddenly was ground into dust. God’s punishment was not
only moral exile from the oasis, it was a transformation: Adam and Eve were cast into the material world
governed by time and mortality. Adam was condemned to labor upon the earth to feed his loved ones and Eve to
labor in childbirth, bringing life into the world through pain. And so it was from that day onward, these were
the two conditions of reproduction and survival in the cycle of life. From this moment on, existence is
defined by loss. Matter inevitably deteriorates itself, and time becomes the silent force that carries
everything towards death.
It is after the Fall that Adam became aware of his nakedness and instantly felt shame. It is the realization
of his body as something that can be seen, judged and represented. The new reality they were thrown in is a
world of image and perception where the self is no longer immediate but mediated through the gaze of others.
Eden symbolizes the home we were promised and the ideal that once was ours but no longer exists. This ideal is
so deeply embedded within us that we continue to long for it. This longing of Eden can be understood as a form
of collective nostalgia: from the Greek nóstos (return home) and álgos (pain), an ache for a
home we cannot return to. Nostalgia is therefore the emotional response we have towards a memory as a
psychological aspect of recalling past happenings. However, nostalgia interprets the past as a loss, a
desirable state we idealize in the way what we can not have or can not return to.
The Garden of Eden can be symbolized as an archetype giving reason to our human experiences of loss and
desire. Eden is a memory shared by our collective unconscious and thus acts as an outline for understanding
the world and our existence within it (Jung)
. Understanding desire is the greatest way to explain why we yearn
for Eden. In psychology, a sense of absence is thought to be the source of desire. Desire endures because
something is lacking that cannot be completely satisfied, as opposed to being motivated by fulfilment. Desire
is a reaction to a loss or absence of a tangible object rather than the pursuit of one (Lacan)
. The state of
completion that the object seems to promise is what is desired, not the object itself. It is actually only
after being expelled from Eden that this place became desirable, as the desire comes from the act of missing
it rather than wanting or pursuing it in the present. We dedicate our life to chasing a nostalgic satisfaction
that we will never find again (Freud)
.
This phenomenon is pushed by fantasy and linked to experiences that we might have lived at the beginning of
our life, marking a hole in our present lives. This feeling is in constant tension with reality, creating a
movement of perpetual insatisfaction pushing us to seek for that lost object. This shared nostalgia for Eden
persists not because humanity remembers Eden directly, but because the psychological structure it represents
remains active. The desire for Eden continues to orient itself toward an imagined state of harmony, innocence,
and completeness. Eden becomes the unconscious reference point for this longing, which is deeply embedded
within cultural and psychological frameworks.
In this sense, the collective nostalgia for Eden is not about returning to the past, but about expressing the
enduring human desire for a state of being that precedes loss itself.
My focus of interest lies in the trigger of this nostalgia of Eden through smell. Although memory in general
can be elicited through all our senses: an old photo we find in an album or a song from our childhood,
memories elicited through smell are rarely neutral. They are more often charged with nostalgia, longing,
comfort and loss, since smell is directly linked to memory and emotions (Herz and Schooler; Chu and Downes)
.
Scents, for instance, are strongly linked to autobiographical memory, a phenomenon often referred to as the
Proust effect (Jacobs)
. In Marcel Proust’s book Swan’s Way, the narrator describes eating a
Madeleine, a vessel transporting him involuntarily to his childhood memories. “A delicious pleasure had
invaded me, without my having any notion as to its cause. It had immediately made the vicissitudes of life
unimportant to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory, acting in the same way that love acts, by
filling me with a precious essence: or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased to feel I
was mediocre, contingent, mortal.” (Proust 47)
. The Proust effect shows that smell can transform
recollection into nostalgia by collapsing temporal distance and making the past sensorially present and
intimate.
Scent has long been associated with death and spirituality. Incense and fragrant resins have long been used in
religious ceremonies, funerals, and burial procedures to honor the deceased and direct souls to the divine
(Lattao and Cantoni)
. In churches, scent operates as an invisible mediator between the earthly and the sacred.
At the same time, perfume has further served a more pragmatic function: masking the pervasive smell of rot,
disease, and death. During plagues, for instance, people carried scented cloths to protect themselves from the
floating stench of death that filled the streets. From this dual function of spiritual elevation and
concealment of decay, emerges the idea that the base note of every perfume is death. Strikingly, at the
threshold of death, smell is the last sense to fade (Sourjya Baibhabee Nath, personal conversation)
Humans do not smell perfume merely to hide decay but we smell scent against decay as an unconscious response
to forget the world around us. Smell is therefore both present and absent at the same time.
As perfume exists as a vessel between us and the loss of Eden, it is a sensory articulation of the lack
itself: a trace of something absent, and a promise that is never fulfilled. Perfume bypasses intellectual
defenses, allowing repressed fragments of a lost ideal to surface (Freud). It operates as a mnemonic device,
anchoring emotions to sensory experience and allowing memory to be accessed in a non-linear, almost
involuntary way.
Nowadays scents are no longer limited or confined to religious or spiritual purposes but are a largely mass
produced consumer good, marketed through desirability, sensuality, and identity, especially for women.
Countless marketing campaigns within the perfume industry draw on biblical depictions of the genesis. If its
literal depictions of a nude couple in a garden, snakes and apples, or simply women seducing men: the topics
remain the same. Temptation and the act of eating the forbidden fruit whilst it's primarily the women seducing
the men. Through these narratives, desire is framed as transgressive and seductive, echoing the biblical
origins of longing itself. While such marketing does not recreate the scent of Eden, it visually and
narratively evokes the idea of a lost innocence and heightened desire rooted in the Edenic myth. The targeted
consumer does not purchase only a smell but is participating in a cycle of longing that sustains itself. To
put it in a nutshell, the experience we have of a perfume is constantly preceded by a collection of visual
cues. A visual and symbolic system constructing a narrative that precedes and conditions the olfactory
experience. In this way, the scent contained in the bottle becomes inseparable from its vessel’s
narrative and representation. How could we contextualize a scent without imposing a visual story? How can one
accompany without leading?
Although we portray Eden through our collective memory, certain scents appear in the Bible enabling a
reconstruction of the historical landscape framing those times. As those scents (such as Frankincense,
Spikenard or Cinnamon bark) are still accessible nowadays, they form an ornamented door to a certain
historical, philosophical and spiritual reality.
In dialogue with the scents described in the Bible, it becomes inevitable to consider their opposite: the
smell of decay. The smell of decay can be understood as a marker of entropy, or gradual decline into disorder.
It indicates to us that a change of state is happening, signaling what remains and what has disappeared. It
isn’t a sign of destruction but transformation through the production of absence.
Given this insight, we can reflect on the functionality of perfume as a vessel. Instead of building a vessel
transporting us to what used to be, perfume could be a medium reflecting what will be, as a way to meditate on
the present moment. Decay might not be a dramatic event but a continuous underlying tendency within all
systems. In this case, scent becomes a clear example of how absence is produced. The molecules within a scent
evaporate at different speeds. The lighter ones are the first to diffuse into the air, making space for the
heavier notes to emerge and dominate.
Looking at the role of decay from the philosophical viewpoint of entropy, there is a suggestion that every
structured system, be it societal or idealistic, breaks down over time signalizing the inevitable existence of
a universal trend towards disorder, chaos and decay. In his book Entropy and Art, Rudolf Arnheim suggests that
entropy is a metaphor for the drift from form towards formlessness (Arnheim)
. In this sense the garden of Eden
perfectly and expectedly represents the inevitable entropic transition from harmony and balance to
destruction. Decay in this way becomes the silent slow force of this transition.
The death drive expresses a paradoxical impulse within life that was coined by Sigmund Freud. The theory
symbolizes a human need for a melange between Eros (life) and Thanos (death). Freud conceived this theory by
the fascination of people to relive trauma. The fascination lies in the drive for people to turn organic life
to an inorganic condition; a drive towards self destruction, self hate or aggression. This death drive, in
many ways on smaller scopes, can be associated with the human drive to partake in self destructing behavior.
Linking this to the myth of Adam and Eve this can be interpreted as partaking in something “wrong”
or self destructive, and in this way risking to disturb the current state of harmony and peace. Jacques Lacan
was inspired by this drive for death idea and perhaps it links to his theory of the significance of desire
that exists the mere presence of loss.
In dialogue with the death drive comes the theory of archival fever by Jacques Derrida. It describes the
obsessive and anxious human desire to store and remember the past in order to destroy or alter memory. The
archive paints itself as an internal system shaping, storing and holding on to narratives of memory, authority
and truth resisting decay as it fades over time. In literal as well as metaphorical ways, ink fades, documents
rumble and hard drives fail. And therefore everything turns to dust. In the context of Eden, we recall a lost
state of presence preserved only by archiving what is left of it, such as smells for instance. We preserve
traces that don’t lead to a return, but archive and store memories to fix something that is lost. By
doing so, we transform organic memories into static stillness which itself leads to decay and death. This is
the paradox. This is the drive of death. In this way everything leads to dust. Involuntarily and continuously.
“I know that all beneath the moon decays,
And what by mortals in this world is brought,
In Time’s great periods shall return to nought;”
William Drummond of Hawthornden,
I Know That All Beneath the Moon Decays
The biblical story of the origin of life can be read as a foundational memory shaping the collective
consciousness and raising questions about the idea of time and materiality. The Eden myth can be understood as
the original story of loss: a moment in which humanity becomes aware of what it has lost and what remains. Yet
this loss should not only be understood as something negative. Through the lens of entropy, decay reveals
itself not as destruction, but as an ongoing process through which systems shift, transform, and open up new
states.
Like the forbidden fruit, its appeal lies in the fact that it promises something that can never be fully
possessed, and it is precisely this distance, this impossibility of return, that intensifies desire, driven by
the same paradox Freud identifies in the death drive, a movement that seeks both preservation and dissolution.
And this desirable loss is resembled through decay. In this way, the archive does not restore what was lost,
but makes visible the processes through which loss is produced. The entropic transition of an idealistic
abundant place of harmony and peace that slowly decays to the forgotten. And all we have left of it?
Fragments, shattered and broken memories we archive in order to retain this lost state, yet by doing so
paradoxically trapping what we hold on to till it rusts and turns to dust.