The search for love unites all of us. And what if you could find it — with a little help from a perfume? That would be magic, wouldn't it?
In the spiritual traditions of the Peruvian Amazon, that magic perfume is called pusanga. It's a blend of flowers and plants believed to have the power to draw toward the person wearing it the things they truly want.
For that reason, pusanga has earned an impressive reputation as the Amazon's "love medicine," because love, of course, is what everyone is after!
HOW SCENT ATTRACTS AND HEALS
Beautiful scents drawn from flowers and herbs have always been used to heal and to attract love. Even the word "perfume" comes from per fumum (Latin, "through smoke"), a nod to its ritual use in ceremonies invoking the blessings of the gods of love.
The ancient Greeks, for instance, believed sweet aromas were how the gods made their presence known. The oracle priestesses of Delphi sat in the smoke of laurel-leaf incense to let the gods speak through them during divinations meant to help people in their search for love.
In India too, seers called dainyals surrounded themselves with smoke — cedarwood, this time — which sent them into trance and gave them prophetic visions.
Perfume has also long been tied to the arts of love. In Japan, geisha priced their services by the number of incense sticks burned during an encounter, while in Indian tantric rituals, men were anointed with sandalwood and women with jasmine, patchouli, amber and musk. Saffron was crushed and rubbed beneath their feet.
The reason behind these rituals is that smell is the most powerful of our senses — capable of stirring attraction, desire and longing, of pulling up memories, and of carrying associations of love and happiness.
Scientists have found that even a year after meeting someone new, their scent still lingers in our minds, while visual memory drops to 50% after just three months — meaning we may not even remember their face.
Smell is processed by the limbic system, which governs our emotions, so scent doesn't just evoke feelings and memories — we experience not just an odor, but a mood.
That's the secret of pusanga. By blending plants and flowers into scents that shift the mood of whoever smells them, Amazonian shamans say pusanga can make someone fall hopelessly in love with the person wearing it. One such shaman, Javier Aravelo, puts it this way: "When you pour pusanga on your skin, it enters your spirit and gives you the power to attract love."
How to find the right plants for this is a secret of its own, known as the Doctrine of Signatures — the idea that the Creator left a mark, or "signature," on every plant in the world to show what it's for.
The discoverer of this idea was Paracelsus, a 16th-century alchemist who noticed how often a plant's appearance echoed its qualities — skullcap seeds, for instance, resemble tiny skulls and, it turns out, are effective for headaches; or willow, which grows in damp places, is used for rheumatic conditions caused by dampness and fluid buildup in the joints.
As Thomas Bartram, a modern herbalist, notes in his Encyclopedia of Herbal Medicine: "The examples are numerous. It is a curiosity that many remedies for the liver bear yellow flowers, those for the nerves are blue, for the spleen orange, for the bones white. Serpentaria (Rauwolfia) resembles a snake and is an ancient traditional remedy for snakebite. Herbal medicine confirms the doctrine of signatures."
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