What Makes a Ritual Offering Authentic?

The topic of authenticity comes up often in spiritual magical practices. Some practitioners prefer to use ingredients that follow historical records. Others use tools or materials that are easier to find, or better suited to their needs today.

A common example is the use of candles. Some practitioners use tallow due to it's prominent use in other eras. Some choose beeswax, soy, or palm. I won't go in to my thoughts on the best option for candles, I will say however that tallows are best for ointments, reason being is that it penetrates through the skin, and for a perfume you'd want to consider not using Tallow and looking for a wax substance like Jojoa, Jojoba stays on the top of the skin longer allowing the perfume to linger insead of absorbing in to your skin.

Now in the making of oils. Preperations can be made through herb maceration, fragrance oils, natural perfume materials, or essential oils.

The core of your work should always hold meaning for you. It should reflect your beliefs and respect your deity.

As someone who studies historical practices, I’ve found that many of my choices, guided by intuition, often line up with what historical sources describe. That leads to an important question:

What makes an ingredient the best one?

• Is it made with care?

• Is it rare, or prepared with skill?

• Was the basic plant or herb available during that period in time?

• Is it something valuable to you, something you would offer with reverence?

In ancient Egypt, when making kyphi, a sacred incense, they used the best materials they could import. That tells us something. They knew quality mattered when the offering was meant for the divine, there were different preperations for those of high rank, or for themselves. These categories changed over time. And now that we have access to more materials and at times, better ones, there is no reason not to use them.

That is why some of the oils and incense I make include natural perfumery ingredients ( I use absolutes, essenetial oils, macerations, and extractions). What we know is that Egyptians used maceration and enfleurage methods. The world's first recorded perfumer or Alchemist is a woman known as Tapputi. Her existence is recorded on a Cuneiform tablet of 1200 BCE in Babylonian Mesopotamia. Proof the ancients had early forms of distillation. We have built on those. Our tools are more refined in some cases, and that means our offerings can carry more potency.

There is nothing wrong with using ancient methods, or choosing the ones that feel right to you now.

As new resources and research become available, we also get closer to what may be historically accurate. I'll use Kyphi again as an exmaple. One may use translated texts from temple walls, which in recent years the lexicon has changed, as a student of the mysteries, it is my goal to maintain and build on my knowledge, There are two modern Egyptologists that have deciphered these recipes and one varies on the ingredients. This is something that can be missed, if you do not continue to research in to moderns vs. historic discoveries. I am a perpetual student of perfume and incense. To me incense is a perfume, it is still used as a fumigation to perfume the body today in some regions. By re-evaluating my learnings as often as time allows I ensure that I am making the best possible recipe available to my rituals and customers. Some of this is done through courses, other times this is checking out new discoveries or news on the subject. It's something for you to remember. Much of what survives of recipes and everyday living of our ancestors and historic places, are recorded through outsiders lens or from a modern lens, and sometimes even a religious clergy lens, not always from native voices. We cannot know every tool or ingredient our ancestors used. Much of it hypothesis, based on translations and historic reconstructions. That is not to say we shouldn't follow confirmed sources, but it's also important to consider who's work we're using as the final say on the subject.

In my practice, I use a two-part method. I learn from scholars who share their research. I study occult texts. I research with every creation and I listen to my intuition. That balance is what grounds my work. It lets me honor tradition while staying true to what resonates now. So in this context often times "authenticity" is for the largest part still debatable except for in traditions that are currently untouched and active today.