Also called clove orange, pomme d'ambre, clove-studded orange, musk ball
A pomander was a ball of scented paste, often carried in a pierced gold or silver case, that wealthy Europeans held to their noses to ward off disease and bad smells. Today the name usually means an orange studded with cloves and dried for Christmas, a home charm for warmth, welcome and abundance.
Tonight's moon is read when the page loads.
Take care: Clove oil can irritate skin, so wear gloves if you are sensitive. Keep finished pomanders away from dogs and cats, as citrus peel and essential oils can upset pets. Discard any pomander that grows mold.
Partridge's recipe cooks benzoin, labdanum and storax in rose water, rolls the mass into an apple shape, and coats it with cinnamon, sanders and cloves before adding ambergris, musk and civet. The ball was carried in a perforated case.
Uses: benzoin, labdanum, storax, rose water, cinnamon, cloves, ambergris, musk
Wolsey's gentleman-usher recalled the cardinal holding a hollowed orange to his nose as he passed through crowds of petitioners. It was filled with a sponge soaked in vinegar and other preparations meant to guard against pestilent air.
Uses: orange, sponge, vinegar, spices
Pierced pouncet boxes held liquid perfume on cotton or sponge, and by the eighteenth century small vinaigrette boxes of scented vinegar replaced the pomander. Hogarth's 1736 print of quack doctors shows them sniffing pomanders built into their cane handles.
Uses: perfume or aromatic vinegar, pierced box
The word pomander comes from French pomme d'ambre, apple of amber, after the ambergris that scented the paste. Pomanders appear in writing from the mid-thirteenth century and were fashionable from the late Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. Under the miasma theory, disease was thought to travel through foul air, so a strong sweet scent held to the nose was believed to protect against plague. Surviving pomanders are often jewelled cases with segments for different perfumes.
Ordinary people could not afford ambergris and gold, and a spiced orange offered a cheaper version. The clove orange became an English and American Christmas and New Year gift by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, valued for scenting linens and keeping moths away. Today it remains one of the easiest seasonal crafts, and in folk magic it serves as a charm for a warm, protected, well-provisioned home.
An herbal vinegar tied to a legend of plague-time thieves who robbed the sick without catching the disease, now kept as a household protection and cleansing vinegar for doorways, hands and surfaces.
An evergreen wreath is a ring of fir, pine, holly or ivy hung on the door or laid flat with candles through the dark of winter. Its circle stands for unending life, and the Advent wreath with candles lit week by week began with a Hamburg pastor, Johann Hinrich Wichern, in 1839.
A small cloth pouch of dried rose petals and sweet herbs, carried or kept by the bed to open yourself to love. It is the gentle modern descendant of a very old and much harsher line of Greek and Egyptian love magic.
Tell us what you need and we will craft a custom spell, charm or reading for it. Or call to book a reading or a road blessing in person.
