Essential Oils and the Archive

Essential oils, which constitute a $7 billion per year industry, are significant players in American consumer and religious culture, with manufacturers, sellers, and devotees claiming that they work miracles on conditions from curing chronic pain to aiding in prayerfulness.Footnote ¹³ Essential oils are commonly advertised and used as sensual, aromatic enhancements––conduits, even––for a range of contemporary spiritual practices. Contemporary Western spirituality is concerned primarily with the individual's connection to the sacred––God, the spirit, nature, the metaphysical dimensions of life. Regardless of what spiritual practitioners name this sacred, most proclaim it to be universal, accessible to anyone, anywhere, at any time.Footnote ¹⁴ Understanding essential oils consumption, and with it, the sensory action of smelling, as a vital aspect of contemporary spirituality illustrates a spirituality paradox. I argue that we should not overlook contemporary American spirituality's perennialism. Instead, perennialism, the understanding that all religious or spiritual traditions are fundamentally one and the same despite external differences, coexists with and informs the privileging of individualized experience and bodily expression that are often facilitated by the purchase of consumer products and of American spirituality more broadly.Footnote ¹⁵ Religiously diverse essential oil users explicitly advocate for, and utilize, the aromatic properties of oils as part of the following practices: (1) New Age yoga and chakra balancing; (2) Christian prayer, Bible reading, and anointing; and (3) witchcraft and divination.

The sources I examine come from a vast and understudied archive of popular books published in the United States over the past forty years, and from mainstream media coverage and social media posts about the varied applications of essential oils. In these sources, essential oils are understood to possess extraordinary powers. They are material objects that act as “facilitating agents” for spiritual practices.Footnote ¹⁶ The sources in this archive differ from traditional corporate marketing materials because they are personalized, even intimate, reflections on how the seller uses essential oils in spiritual practice.Footnote ¹⁷ Throughout this article, I allow these primary sources to speak largely for themselves. Self-identified yogis and chakra healers, evangelical Christians, and witches advocate in their own words for the spiritual benefits of essential oils in their roles as practitioners, sellers, or both, often creating use cases designed to solve spiritual problems or make spiritual experience heartier. Rather than interrupting these sources with scholarly intervention, I dedicate one section of this article to each group, providing analysis in the introductory and concluding sections.

These three cases follow discrete groups writing about essential oils as spiritual amplifiers today. I present these cases to show how, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, spiritual smelling, specifically of essential oils, provided diverse practitioners with new techniques for discerning purity, an essentialist logic. These cases also demonstrate how spiritual smelling cultivated a perennialist logic of shared sacred, ancient histories within postmodern, hyperindividualized, brand-based, and consumption-driven communities. This archive, broadly construed, is best described as a collection of self-help materials concerning essential oils and scent. The materials represent the views and experiences of aromatherapists, masseuses, yoga teachers, and authors, using their guiding practices such as Bible reading, postural yoga, and tarot card reading. With this range, we can glean deeper insight into how essential oils are understood by consumers, as well as the ways that they are used creatively to foster spiritual experiences within traditions. That the experiences authors convey and promote are made possible through purchase––either of their products or books––should not cause scholars to discount them. In an era of public sharing, influencing, and self-help guidebooks, studying neoliberal consumption is no longer confined to corporate-sanctioned advertising or sales kits. Essential oil–scented spiritual practices are prime cases for extending our methods and archival sources when studying contemporary American spirituality.

Essential oils transitioned from niche, hippie, healthcare products to mass-market consumer goods during the 1990s, primarily because of the success of the multilevel marketing (MLM) companies Young Living Essential Oils, founded in Riverton, Utah, in 1994, and later, dōTERRA, founded in Pleasant Grove, Utah, in 2008. Although these MLMs are some of the best-known companies in the contemporary essential oils space, others serve more traditional customers who are not involved in direct sales. Yet, it is important to take characteristics of MLMs into account as we consider that many oilers, often white women, double as sellers and practitioners.Footnote ¹⁸ Many of the largest MLMs are based in Utah and have capitalized on the extensive social networks and communitarian nature of American Mormons, specifically Mormon women.Footnote ¹⁹ Christian evangelicals have succeeded as direct sellers for similar reasons. In both Mormon and evangelical church communities, participants create close interpersonal bonds based in a shared culture. Trusted networks of this sort allow direct sellers to more easily host home parties for product demonstrations. They also make the text messages and emails of direct sellers more effective—because customers are also friends and family members. MLM discourses speak of empowering women to work from home while utilizing the skills of maternal emotional labor and preserving the traditional gender roles important to many Mormon and evangelical families.Footnote ²⁰ In this article, I focus on middle-class white women as the primary noncorporate consumers of essential oils in the United States.Footnote ²¹ Historically, members of this demographic have been the main purchasers of spiritual wares and services, particularly religious and instructional books that model how to cultivate a more pious or spiritually fulfilling home life or to express one's internal self through external physical presentations.Footnote ²²

Spirits, Souls, Quintessences

Essential oils are “volatile oily substances … highly concentrated vegetal extracts” that come from over three hundred different species of organic materials.Footnote ²³ In other words, they are liquid substances that evaporate quickly and do not leave behind the greasy residue typical of oils. Oilers ascribe meanings to particular essential oils, create at-home apothecaries for treating themselves and their families for ailments of all forms, and intentionally scent their bodies and personal spaces for a purpose beyond aesthetic preference. They describe their substances using a range of terminology that evokes what religious studies scholar Ann Taves has referred to as “non-ordinary” or “charismatic” powers. Essential oils fit into two categories of Taves's typology of material objects containing nonordinary powers: “The capacity to act, which presupposes at least some primitive level of awareness or animation, but not conscious intentionality; The capacity to produce an effect, which does not require awareness or animation.”Footnote ²⁴ Writers of essential oil and aromatherapy guidebooks describe oils in religiously inflected language that elucidates transcendence and purity, or irreducibility. For examples, various authors have written that “essential oils represent the spirit or soul of the plant. They are the most concentrated form of herbal energy”Footnote ²⁵; that they contain the “ability to operate effectively not only on the cellular, physical level, but in the emotional, intellectual, spiritual, and aesthetic areas of our lives”Footnote ²⁶; that “[t]hey are like the personality, or spirit, of the plant”Footnote ²⁷; and that “[t]he pure intelligence of essential oils may be the only tool that can reach into the deep recesses of our brain, cross over the chemical barriers and open the hidden channels of our minds, allowing access to greater knowledge and discernment in reaching our higher potential to become more Christ-like.”Footnote ²⁸ In these descriptions, we see explicitly how authors imbue oils with agency and spiritual importance. Given that essential oils are mechanically processed and not simply extracted from plants, it is ironic that they are understood to be the “ethereal,” “essential souls” of the flora from which they come. Yet, for oilers, these defining characteristics give essential oils charismatic agency, the capacity to act and the capacity to produce an effect, that is therapeutic, intercessory, and, embodied.

Essential oils, and aromatic oils generally, have long religious histories, which the groups discussed in this article publicize frequently in their respective marketing and independently authored use guides. Authors who promote essential oils, no matter their own starting places or reasons, begin their books by describing shared crosscultural ancient origin stories.Footnote ²⁹ According to this perennialist logic, diverse cultures, from ancient Egypt to ancient China to ancient Israel to the Vedic cultures of the Indian subcontinent, all found spiritual and ritual value in aromatic oils or materials. Authors of aromatherapy guidebooks cite not only the Bible but also the Ramayana and the Vedas, the Greek philosophers Hippocrates and Dioscorides, Egyptian mummification practices, Mesopotamian temple rites, the third-century CE Chinese text The Classic of Herbal Medicine, and medieval European monastic texts as evidence of the universal importance of scent in religion.Footnote ³⁰ According to a Christian chemist and aromatherapist, “aromatherapy is shamanism for everyone.”Footnote ³¹

In oiler literature, perennialist beliefs follow in the tradition of nineteenth-century American movements in Transcendentalism and Theosophy. Later, comparative religionists Aldous Huxley and Huston Smith popularized beliefs in both a universal Truth that underpinned the metaphysical world and the idea that the world's religions, particularly their respective mystical traditions, had each developed the tools to attain this Truth––just using socially, textually, and practically different ways.Footnote ³² Huxley, Smith, and other “world religion perennialists” argued that all religions are one—that Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam converged on one God or one mystical experience or one ethic of compassion. Oiler perennialists are convinced that oils are perennial too—that they have been used in all civilizations and all religions because of their essential charisma. Perennialism was particularly salient among American New Age and Counterculture groups during the 1960s. Today, oilers’ version of perennialism actively reinforces a trope in contemporary American spirituality that there is tremendous value in ancient wisdoms. Many spiritual practitioners believe that humans once knew more about the Truth––including how to use essential oils and scent to reach the divine––but they somehow lost their wisdom along the course of history. Essential oils can serve as conduits to reconnect with the truthful past.

Consequently, oilers blend perennialism, the belief that all traditions that engage with the spiritual are different paths up the same mountain, as Smith argued, with essentialism, the understanding that certain objects or concepts hold an “enduring identity, core, substance” that is self-evident.Footnote ³³ For oilers, essential oils are essential because they are understood to be the most fundamental of substances––they are the souls or the lifeblood of nature, divinely created for human benefit, and were accessible in all periods to those who knew how to find them. When they are pure, they are irreducible. Oils’ powers are immediately recognizable to anyone who comes in contact with them. Spiritual oilers delight in the recovery of a mythologized, essentialized “ancient” that can be uncapped in the here and now because it authenticates their own knowledge and experiences.

In Hearing Things, Schmidt argues that new technologies of hearing allowed sound to compete with sight as a more refined and spiritually attuned sense than it had previously been considered.Footnote ³⁴ Historian Alain Corbin characterized smell as “ephemeral,” emotionally powerful and evocative, but impossible to capture or preserve.Footnote ³⁵ Writing about nineteenth-century France, Corbin noted that people in the modern West were sharpening their senses of smell, but the sense was “unintelligent” and used to understand and create social divisions associated with race, class, and ethnicity––poorly plumbed cities versus floral gardens; unbathed, lustful bodies versus clean, civilized ones. For postmodern essential oil enthusiasts, the magic of these oils resides in their tangibility and universality, expressed through their ancientness and their essential purity. In oiler logic, an unchanging piece of nature is distilled, purified, bottled, and labeled for anyone to uncap as needed. Through technology, the ephemeral is made a reliable and useful medium for accessing the transcendent.Footnote ³⁶ It can be ritualized, and it embodies memory of the ancient past. Oilers often point to the biological workings of olfaction to validate their claims about oil efficacy, discussing the finer points of microparticles and the limbic system as contemporary testaments to the authenticity of ancient knowledge.Footnote ³⁷ We know, furthermore, that smells have the uncanny ability to conjure distant memories and déjà vu.Footnote ³⁸ Oilers find these aspects of smell highly appealing and often discuss them in their writings, alongside lore about ancient temple rituals, the scented smoke of imagined prehistoric fires, and the potions and spiritually therapeutic brews concocted to heal all manner of ailments.

Essential oils range from the well-known (lemon or lavender) to the obscure (acacia or galbanum). They are stored in miniature brown glass bottles sold for between $10 and $100, depending on the essence. Because of their extremely high concentration, essential oils pack powerfully pungent aromas. Used for therapeutic or spiritual purposes, they are traditionally inhaled, but some are rubbed into the skin after being blended with a more benign “carrier,” such as almond oil.Footnote ³⁹ Oilers curate at-home essential oils apothecaries by purchasing individual essential oils that fit specific needs. To do so, they must acquire knowledge about how oils work and how to use them. Over the past forty years, essential oils experts of all persuasions have published prolifically, forming a subset of the self-care, self-help, and spirituality book space. These books equip oilers with specialized knowledge and techniques for using oils most effectively.Footnote ⁴⁰

Oils could easily have moved from obscurity to commodity as demand grew. Yet, the importance of brands and their value propositions kept essential oils from becoming full-blown commodities, interchangeable from one bottle to the next. Regardless of their sales structure, essential oil companies had a dual mission in creating today's international consumer market.Footnote ⁴¹ First, they needed to establish the value of oils themselves––for wellness and spiritual purposes. In economic terms, they created demand. Second, they needed to differentiate themselves as brands. Companies distinguish themselves from one another over claims of purity, which they link directly to oils’ efficacy, as well as their degree of ecological sustainability, which is a measure of moral purity.Footnote ⁴² Purity is illustrated with glossy images of flowers and trees, spelled out in Latin species nomenclature, and discussed in terms of agricultural practices, distillation techniques, and harvest batch numbers. Purity is of utmost importance to oilers. In oiler literature, less expensive oils are denigrated for being adulterated––either for containing synthetic additives or for being cut with alcohol. To be adulterated is to be impure, and to be impure is to be ineffective. In other words, adulterated oils lack charisma or nonordinary properties––they are “just” smells. At best, they make fine perfumes, but at worst they make you feel sick or derail spiritual connections. Dedicated oilers, then, tend to be brand loyalists who buy into their chosen company's promises of purity.

Of course, everyone's sense of smell varies, and people's sensory, psychological, and physical reactions to odors are complex and culturally informed.Footnote ⁴³ Yet, in both branded and unbranded essential oil guides, consumers are entreated to trust their noses, just as nineteenth-century spiritualists learned to believe their ears when they heard the trumpets of angels or the voices of deceased relatives.Footnote ⁴⁴ If postmodern purchasing practices reflect individualized needs, desires, and forms of meaning-making, essential oils––as products and lifestyle––pose an interesting quandary. While oilers use purchased products to connect to a conception of a universalized sacred, they do so on their own terms, using knowledge learned from sources purporting different worldviews. In the following three sections, we see how essential oils are afforded ancient, supernatural powers by very different religious groups: (1) contemporary New Age yogis and chakra healers, (2) evangelical Christians, and (3) witches and tarot card devotees.Footnote ⁴⁵

Scenting Yoga, Meditation, and the Chakras

Of the three cases, yoga and meditation are most imbricated with the act of breathing, which naturally draws in the sensory experience of smell. For oiler yogis, essential oil–enhanced breathwork is ontologically important to their spiritual practices. By centering smell, as well as beliefs about essential oils’ charismatic properties, we see how yogis and yoga-adjacent spiritual practitioners’ uses of essential oils are employed in ways that intensify the postural yoga experience.

In an article published by the online magazine Well + Good titled “Yoga and Essential Oils: What to Sniff for a Better Practice,” author Zoe Weiner describes her first experience with essential oils in a yoga class in New York City. The instructor placed small, scented cotton pads on each mat and asked the students to breathe in deeply. Weiner writes, “It was a combination of peppermint and frankincense, and the odor was intoxicating. When I entered the room, I had been feeling tired and just kind of meh . . . but one quick inhale of the unassuming square of cotton had me perked up and ready to focus.”Footnote ⁴⁶ In other words, Weiner wanted to practice yoga, but her mind and body were not cooperating. She was not prepared to focus. The instructor explained that she combined peppermint and frankincense oils to produce the exact physical response that Weiner experienced, citing the active chemical agents in each oil as propellers of both increased energy (peppermint) and a “mindful state of being” (frankincense). In her firsthand account, Weiner makes two important arguments. First, she attests to the chosen scents changing her mood and, consequently, her ability to practice yoga. Second, Weiner understands the instructor's explanations for selecting the two oils to be authoritative––they seemed scientifically sound, and they produced beneficent effects. New Age yogi oilers incorporate essential oils into their practices because the oils’ essential properties create amplified states of concentration, or mindfulness, a primary goal in yoga and meditation. This state of wakefulness is ostensibly universally available, but it is made more attainable via essential oils, themselves considered universal.

In Essential Oils for Mindfulness and Meditation, aromatherapist Heather Dawn Godfrey notes, “Breath [is] considered the portal of consciousness, the connection between the world and the Divine, the connection between the soul and manifest material universe.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Godfrey argues that because of these direct connections, an “essential oil–impregnated breath” is immediately and tangibly more powerful than regular breath.Footnote ⁴⁸ What at first appears to be a demarcation between sacred and mundane breath is actually not so. Rather, if breath is a winding or obstacle-strewn road connecting the human with the sacred––as it so often is in our stress-laden, multitasking culture––then essential oils make the path more direct. Essential oils, in this case, aid in training the mind to monitor the breath. Godfrey recommends the use of essential oils prior to meditation, in a bath, diffuser, or in self-massage; during meditation “to aid in concentration, focus, alertness, and wakefulness, and to calm racing thoughts and ease restlessness”; and after meditation, as a “memory cue, a gentle reminder to return attention to the here and now.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Godfrey presents a four-tiered argument in favor of incorporating essential oils into breathwork practices. First, oxygen is crucial to life and as it is brought into the body via inhalation, it typically includes smell. Second, since breath keeps us alive, it connects us with the divine, which is the spark of life. Third, the brain detects air molecules containing essential oils differently than it does those that do not. Fourth, ancient religious groups used fragrance and essential oils for spiritual enhancement, as evidenced by their allusions in sacred texts such as the Rig and Artharva Veda, the Qur'an, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Bible.Footnote ⁵⁰ These myriad logics draw on different forms of authority––metaphysical, biological, and sacred-textual. Godfrey invites her readers to use these diverse forms of evidence to both understand the universality of the sacred-scent-breath trifecta and to learn how to amplify the effects of meditation using essential oils.

Candice Covington, an aromatherapist in Oregon City, Oregon, and founder of the small essential oils company Divine Archetypes, takes a capacious approach to using essential oils for spiritual means in her book Essential Oils in Spiritual Practice. Covington's logic rests on two metaphysical concepts. The first is that human bodies are composed of fields of energy, and energy moves vertically along the spine, passing through centers known as chakras. In the Ayurvedic tradition, wellness is associated with having a balance of energy among the seven chakras. The second concept is also based on intrinsic energy.Footnote ⁵¹ Covington, like many other essential oil devotees and New Age–informed healers, views the body metaphysically. This includes incorporating Asian concepts of vital energy flow prominent in Ayurvedic healing and traditional Chinese medicine and mixing them with cursory discussions of quantum physics.Footnote ⁵² Focusing specifically on balancing the chakras, Covington argues, “Essential oils are key to keeping these wheels of energy open and flowing smoothly. We can use their vibrational energy to fine-tune our chakral system, bringing the gift aspects of each center forward and shifting the shadow aspects into their positive state.”Footnote ⁵³ Covington's statements, then, imply a belief in essential oils’ strong essential energies, and she argues for the usefulness of this type of energetic movement and manipulation for healing and balancing the chakras.

Some essential oils companies cater to essential oils–enhanced yoga, meditation, and chakra-balancing practices by creating products that address these particular uses.Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, dōTERRA tapped Elena Brower, a nationally prominent yoga and meditation instructor and Blue Diamond–level dōTERRA Wellness Advocate, to help formulate the dōTERRA Yoga Collection of three oil blends: Anchor, Align, and Arise, which debuted in 2017. In marketing materials, each blend is associated with an adjective. Anchor is “enlightening,” Align is “steadying,” and Arise is “centering.” Customers are instructed to use one or many of these blends as they practice yoga. For example, dōTERRA tells us that Align is ideally used for more active asanas, or poses, such as Warrior Two, Triangle, or Gate wherein mental and physical energies are pushed downward through the legs to maintain a steady, balanced stance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Here we see the imbrication of spiritual practice, practitioner, and corporate marketing in two distinct ways. First, Brower's yogi persona authenticates the products she helped to create––and profits from. Second, a multinational corporation is the formulator and seller of a spiritual ware that contains charismatic properties, when used correctly. In effect, dōTERRA's marketing materials serve as spiritual guides.

Other essential oil manufacturers have embraced chakra balancing. Companies including Rocky Mountain Oils, headquartered in Orem, Utah, and Aura Cacia, based in Norway, Iowa, sell essential oils explicitly branded as “chakra blends,” with seven oil blends either packaged together or sold individually, each named after one chakra.Footnote ⁵⁶ Rocky Mountain Oils’ chakra blends are packaged in roller-ball containers––slim glass bottles with spherical tops for application directly to the skin. Instead of the typical plastic roller ball, Rocky Mountain uses a different gemstone at the top of each of its chakra blends. This pairing is based in the belief that crystals and gemstones have charismatic properties. In short, using Taves's definition discussed at the beginning of the article, they have agency and meaning-making abilities. Similar to essential oils, crystals are believed by many devotees to contain high vibrational frequencies that translate to spiritual, healing, and other energetic powers. Rocky Mountain describes the use and composition of its Solar Plexus Chakra Blend as such:

Here, Rocky Mountain combines numerous sensory experiences into one product. It is marketed with promises for improving spiritual health and balancing one's vital energy with material, nonmedical practices. According to product logic, the essential oils provide enhancements targeted to the solar plexus chakra––they enter the body through the senses of both smell and touch. Notably, these oils are used in other contexts having nothing to do with chakras. Yet, here they are employed as having special powers to affect the solar plexus chakra. In use, the tiger's eye stone graces the skin of the abdomen, promising a transference of spiritually enhancing properties from the multifaceted, multisensory product to the physical location of the chakra itself. Essential oils companies’ chakra blends rely on a considerable level of practitioner knowledge. Not just any essential oils customer knows what the chakras are, for instance, nor how to diagnose which ones they might want to balance. Yet, in combination with a guidebook or social media posts by oilers who are “in the know,” customers are empowered to purchase products that promise a combination of spiritual, multisensory, and vital energetic powers.

Scenting Christian Prayer, Reading, and Anointing

Protestants have historically eschewed scented liturgies, and American evangelical Christians do not traditionally associate aromas with either worship or communication with the divine through prayer.Footnote ⁵⁸ Beginning in the 1990s, however, with Young Living's overtly Christian founder and messaging, evangelical Christians became a substantial market for essential oils.Footnote ⁵⁹ Young Living made its case for oils on biblical grounds. Scents associated with plants, such as frankincense, and practices, such as anointing, mentioned in the Bible could enhance an individual's devotional life, they argued. Companies of all sizes produced biblically inspired––and branded––oil blends using scents or plants named in scripture. Examples of these blends include Young Living's “Exodus II,” “3 Wise Men,” and “The Oils of Ancient Scripture” set of ten oils; Rocky Mountain Oils’ “Blend of Sacred Frankincense” and “Oils of the Bible”; and Butterfly Expression's “Le Benediction.”

In the 2010s, a new subgenre of explicitly Christian essential oil guidebooks emerged.Footnote ⁶⁰ Alongside these guides––part aromatherapy manual, part flora-focused biblical exegesis––were workbooks and assorted paraphernalia emblazoned with mottos such as “This Girl Runs on Jesus and Essential Oils.” There are cross-shaped diffuser necklaces and bracelets and Jesus-adorned bottles for at-home blends. These consumer products serve as technologies for sacred smelling, modes of connecting contemporary Christians with their ancient religious forebears using sensory symbols that serve as links in a chain of memory with the biblical world.Footnote ⁶¹ As essential oils became popular with American Christians, some Christian naysayers claimed that there were too many aspects of oiler culture that overlapped with the New Age culture, that oils could not be “essential,” or that oil practices dabbled in the occult.Footnote ⁶² While these arguments caused schisms in church and online evangelical communities, the commercial and spiritual value of essential oils for the “good Christian” did not decrease. Christian oilers imbue essential oils with religious meaning in numerous embodied and practical ways, foremost by reading them into—and extrapolating them out of––early Christian history and scripture. Christian oilers view themselves as lucky inheritors of ancient wisdom and undertake opportunities to enhance their religious lives by incorporating essential oils and their aromatic and agentic properties into prayer, Bible reading, and anointing.

While Christian oilers do not typically ask readers, customers, or followers to pray, they do provide do-it-yourself materials, firsthand accounts, and recommendations that signal that they are prayerful themselves and that essential oils are compatible with Christian prayer. They argue, either explicitly or implicitly, that essential oils are Christian and can strengthen a Christian's spiritual abilities. Roseann Dennerlein, the founder of Oils of Shakan, a small Christian oil company based in Torrington, Connecticut, writes of her personal experiences with essential oils and prayer on the blog for her store, citing the Exodus 30 story of Aaron burning “fragrant incense” in the tabernacle as biblical reasoning for using essential oils to aid in prayer. Dennerlein notes that because there is no longer a tabernacle or temple, Christians themselves serve as temples:

Dennerlein also recommends rubbing a few drops of her “Bible Oil Blend” on one's hands before prayer or diffusing frankincense or myrrh oils prior to worship. Other Christian oilers focus more on embodied practices that incorporate essential oils––and their scents––into prayer as a means of fostering connection with the divine and physiologically improving concentration. Christians tout many of the same essential oils’ mental benefits for fostering concentration and mindfulness as yogis and meditators do. From these similarities it is clear that essential oils’ canonical therapeutic uses are shared across spiritual groups as well as spiritualized in similar ways.

Jennifer McGahan, a freelance writer, aromatherapist, and masseuse based in Austin, Texas, illustrates an embodied prayer practice in a blog post titled “How to Combine Essential Oils with Prayer for Divine Connection.”Footnote ⁶⁴ After citing Exodus 30, McGahan describes a multistep process of placing one drop of Young Living Gathering oil in her palms, rubbing it from one temple across her forehead to the other, up and down her neck, and then moving her hands across each other over her chest so that each hand reaches the opposite shoulder. The last part of this embodied prayer ritual involves deeply inhaling a drop of Young Living Gratitude oil because “the oils in the blends, Gathering and Gratitude, applied one right after the other, help your body, mind and spirit achieve focus, calm, and clarity, as well as a divine connection.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This practice, at least in the way McGahan describes it, is partially an advertisement for her piece of Young Living business, given that she names trademarked blends. The logical implication is that this prayer, replete with intentionality, methodical self-anointment, and olfactory bliss, requires Young Living products to serve as spiritual aides. And yet, because oilers are steeped in background knowledge about essential oils’ substantive or charismatic properties, readers of McGahan's post can also take her account at face value––as a collection of tried-and-true, biblically sanctioned technologies custom-designed to deepen prayerfulness, and delivered in the form of personal testimony. The overlap between customer and seller allows more interpretive license here. There is no doubt that the oils are not exclusively Christian; yet, they can be used in very Christian ways, ostensibly to great spiritual effects.

For evangelical Christians, reading the Bible––and professing to interpret it literally as God's word––is a meaningful individual and collective practice. Christian oilers commonly discuss Bible reading using terms that evoke aromatic emplacement. In other words, oilers are encouraged to scent the room where they read the Bible with the smells of plants mentioned in the passages they are reading. In doing so, Bible readers inhale a vital sensory aspect of the biblical world, deepening their connection to the words on the page. In Essential Oils of the Bible, author Randi Minetor laments that many Christians have faith in God, but they “feel less connected to the Bible and its many teachings.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Minetor first sets up a Christian problem––not an oils-usage problem––and then argues that working with essential oils can help readers of the Bible to forge a connection to the text itself:

Here, Minetor makes a two-pronged argument. First, she argues that breathing in the scents of the biblical world helps Christians come closer to the Bible itself. Second, she claims that the oils used by biblical figures and communities contained powers that transcend time and space. Putting them to similar use today actualizes “God's word” in the here and now.

Direct sellers, influencers, and other practitioners who have prominent social media presences illustrate the concept of aromatic emplacement and Bible reading in their Instagram posts. In August 2020, Brooke Magee, a Young Living consultant, posted a photo to her Instagram feed of an essential oil roller bottle depicting Jesus on its label laying in the crease of a Bible open to the Epistle of James. The caption of this post included lyrics from a Christian worship song, a statement of desire to help a friend in need, and the recipe for a blend, which Magee referred to as “Jesus Roller.” Magee writes in the caption, “I woke up with a heavy heart so I decided to whip up a roller this morning with all the oils that have been resonating with me lately.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Magee is in need of spiritual strength, so she turns to the Bible and essential oils, together. Magee's visual composition, replete with an oil dispenser depicting the visage of Jesus and an open Bible, implies that the scents in the Jesus Roller blend are evocative of the passage she is reading, or of the Bible more generally. In short, reading the Bible is best accomplished with essential oils because it authenticates the biblical text, making its truths more self-evident, in much the same way that a pilgrimage to the Holy Land may strengthen a believer's faith. In her ethnography of contemporary Christian vacations to Israel, religious studies scholar Hillary Kaell has argued that “consciously undertaking to ‘walk where Jesus walked’ raises existential dilemmas provoked by comparing the present with an idealized Christian past.”Footnote ⁶⁹ For Christian oilers, inhaling scents “from the Bible” negates the need to compare an idealized past with the irksome present. It allows them an at-home end-around of the realities of current-day Palestine, focusing their attentions on an essentialized ancient Israel using new-old technologies of smell.

Perhaps the most popular Christian use for essential oils is anointing. As historian of religion Colleen McDannell has argued about the material culture of American Christianity, Catholic and Mormon anointing oil is used for healing and ritual purposes––but it is imbued with sacred properties through rituals of consecration performed by institutional authorities.Footnote ⁷⁰ Protestants have a long history of eschewing charismatic objects such as devotional oils, whether consecrated by an authority or not.Footnote ⁷¹ For evangelical Protestant oilers, the adoption of essential oils for anointing is individualized and conducted without the aid of an authority figure other than the self. It is notable, though, that Christian oiler authorities––authors, bloggers, top sellers—do use the language of “anointment” and provide instructions or suggestions for how to anoint effectively. Evangelical oilers then, demonstrate how practitioners can take connection with the divine into their own hands when they use essential oils for spiritual purposes. Today, Christian oilers are taught to consecrate their own oils without the help of a religious institution or priestly figure. Minetor, for example, instructs readers, “Say a prayer over the oil. The prayer is of your own choosing––there is no set text for this––but it should ask for God's blessing or purity of the oil.”Footnote ⁷² Minetor provides the suggestion for self-consecration, but she is clear that God is ultimately the source of the consecration. She encourages a direct divine connection. The intention is to foster a more efficacious anointment of bodies and possessions.

In oilers’ firsthand accounts, we see that anointing with essential oils is also used to create or protect a sacred space or object. For example, Hannah Crews, a Young Living consultant from Fort Worth, Texas, posted on Instagram about anointing her house with frankincense oil to create a shield of protection against enemies––literal and spiritual. Crews's caption read:

This evocative description of prayer and anointment illustrates how an essential oil can be imbued with charismatic properties that give it agency. Crews describes a physically active, joint intercessory prayer on behalf of her home and family, as well as a tactile application of essential oil to the house itself. For Crews, the frankincense oil has an amplifying effect on her prayers and is the conduit for anointing her house––the combination of these practices with the oil makes the home a sacred space. Accordingly, Crews understands the oil to be recognizable to “the angels of the Lord” as a sign of goodness. By invoking both the “blood of Jesus” and the frankincense oil, Crews implies that the two have similar properties. In this example of anointing, essential oils have the charismatic abilities to make a person or place sacred, to ensure protection from assorted divinities. While Minetor's and Crews's language is definitively Christian and invokes clear theological concepts through embodied practices, the oils as material substances for purchase from multinational corporations remain the same commodities they always were. In the next case study, we see how witches use essential oils for many of the same practices, albeit overlaid with different traditions and intentions.

Scenting Witchcraft and Divination

During the 2010s, witchcraft––as a spiritual or cultural practice and a sign of feminist identity politics––became newly popular among millennial and Generation-Z women.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to religion journalist Tara Isabella Burton, “As a spiritual practice, witchcraft may be the biggest thing since yoga. . . . Social media platforms, particularly Instagram, have transformed the visual witch aesthetic into a culturally resonant identity marker.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In Burton's characterization, witches––and the practice of witchcraft––represent one cohort of the capacious context of American “Remixed Religion,” which is characterized by spiritual and religious hybridity, progressive politics, and New Age–inspired beliefs and practices.Footnote ⁷⁶ Among these practices are spellcasting; creating herbal potions for health and beauty; and divination, including tarot card reading and astrology.

For many contemporary witches, essential oils are powerful ingredients in elaborate toolkits. Toolkits often contain fresh or dried herbs and flowers; spell books; candles; crystals or gemstones; astrology, numerology, or element guides; descriptions of mythical archetypes; and divination card decks. Learning how to use such ingredients allows witches to increase and harness their own energies and direct them toward connecting with the sacred, which is often found in nature. Witchcraft author Mary Greer explains in The Essence of Magic:

Greer's personification of essential oils as “guides and teachers” exemplifies a technique of contemporary witchcraft, which is to harness natural powers as aides for accomplishing a goal. Personifying individual essential oils based on their scents’ characteristics or traits––both the olfactory experience of an aroma as “spicy” or “citrusy,” as well as the oil's own agentic effect on the body, mind, or spirit––is a common practice for all oilers.Footnote ⁷⁸ Witch oilers often add to these descriptions by associating particular oils with divine or mythological archetypes or characters, often goddesses from ancient Greco-Roman mythology.Footnote ⁷⁹

For witches, essential oils are powerful for many of the same reasons they are employed by New Agers and Christians. They are the souls of plants, they vibrate with therapeutic energy, they are the purest of botanical extracts, and they have personalities that correspond with physical, emotional, and spiritual states. Amy Blackthorn, a witchcraft author, describes the paradox of the oils being both independent agents as well as aides powered by human intention:

Blackthorn acknowledges that essential oils as material objects are powerful in their own right. However, she poses a caveat. Powers can be harnessed by individual users, but these users must have the “right” intentions as well as the wisdom and knowledge to guide the oils to work magic. In short, the individual is empowered through her use of oils, but she cannot actually act entirely alone and expect efficacy.

Information about oils and magic is transferred between fellow witches within metaphysical or occult supply shops, in groups of witches known as covens, or on social media platforms. It can also be obtained by reading guidebooks or blogs.Footnote ⁸¹ Just as some New Agers pair certain essential oils with particular chakras in the body, witches discuss correlations between essential oils and a broad range of natural phenomena. For example, Maya Heath writes, “Oil blends can be used to evoke a particular celestial body that carries with it a range of properties—useful for when you are looking to bring about a change in energy.”Footnote ⁸² In her book, Heath provides detailed charts that list particular essential oils and their corresponding deities, colors, planets, phases of the moon, charms, and gems, along with recipes curated and designed to “create unity between individual spirit and Divine Spirit using oils.”Footnote ⁸³ According to this paradigm, essential oils’ magical properties and their innate correspondences to natural occurrences and elements create spiritual or energetic avenues for amplifying divine connection.

Witches employ essential oils in spells and potions, which are used in self-care practices, including elaborate bathing rituals, candle meditations, and the “charging,” or energizing, of crystals. For witches, oils themselves are agents for energy cultivation and are viewed as valued ingredients in spellcasting. In Witchery, Juliet Diaz provides spell recipes tailored to a range of embodied and emotional states or life changes. For example, she offers a “Bath Spell for Coming Back to Self,” which she describes as “perfect for those needing to balance, unwind, and clear negativity. It's like a hug for your energy.”Footnote ⁸⁴ The ingredients for this bath include Epsom salts; pink Himalayan salt; one sliced orange; one-half cup each of three different dried herbs and flowers (lavender, rose petals, jasmine, basil, lemon balm, calendula, or hyssop); one sliced lemon; three drops of essential oils (choose from bergamot, rose, or lavender); a white, pink, or red candle; a small bowl of crystals (carnelian, rose quartz, or smoky quartz); one tablespoon of cinnamon; and incense (cedar, dragon's blood, palo santo, lavender, or rose).Footnote ⁸⁵ Diaz proceeds with step-by-step instructions for conducting the spell, which hinges on writing a note of intention to be placed into the bowl of crystals, sprinkled with cinnamon, and concentrated on while your body is enveloped in the perfumed water. Taking a bath like the one Diaz describes transforms a mundane personal hygiene routine into a sacred ritual. Diaz's recipe offers readers an opportunity to connect not only with their inner spirits, but also to the divine, since essential oils are the souls or spirits of plants, and nature is the epitome of the divine. The embodied practice of submerging oneself in warm water that is infused with pungent aromatics and other natural components after setting an intention to “connect with the self” is effectively ritualized.

Heath, Diaz, and others use essential oils to anoint magical objects, layering a charismatic substance on top of a charismatic item such as a candle or crystal to multiply the power of each. Heath recommends learning how to “compose” scent blends with a top note, heart note, and base note, using the language of perfumers to illustrate how to create a balanced but personalized mixture for spell work.Footnote ⁸⁶ Explaining the various uses of essential oils in magical practice, Heath writes:

Oils operate in a multiplicity of important roles here. Most importantly, they bind ingredients together. As Heath argues, a witch's blend is composed of both material oil substances––and their powerful scents––and her intention and intuition. Using both is the key to creating effective essential oil blends and effective magic. In short, witchcraft authors argue that essential oils are charismatic. Their scents serve as somatic enhancements and magical agents. They uniquely enliven a witch's creativity and clarify her desired outcomes.

Tarot cards, deriving from card games developed in France and Italy during the sixteenth century, have been used for cartomancy and divination since the mid-eighteenth century. Traditionally associated with the occult or esotericism, these cards are popular among witches and other spiritual types, and they are often components of the witch's toolkit.Footnote ⁸⁸ The common seventy-eight card deck is filled with archetypal imagery, suits, and numbers. Reading tarot cards can be an individual or interactive practice. It requires a combination of acquired wisdom about the meanings of individual cards and combinations, as well as intuitive and analytical skills to interpret or narrate the messages the cards hold. When conducted interactively, tarot card reading is often a fee-for-service transaction in which a customer engages a trained reader to divine the future or intuit hidden meanings about an individual and her life circumstances or emotional states.Footnote ⁸⁹ In witchcraft and tarot guidebooks, authors claim that oils increase the fertility of readings in two ways. First, they are said to clear the mind of the reader in much the same way that meditators or praying types use oils to build mental focus. Second, they are said to amplify the meanings of the cards themselves because of the similarities that tarot card readers find between the symbols depicted on cards and the characteristics of particular essential oil scents. Similar to “biblical oils,” tarot oils link the presence of a plant in a sacred text or divinatory image with a tangible essential oil scent. The perceived ancient connection between symbol and oil conveys authority onto the modern-day product.

According to some oilers, prominent floral imagery illustrated on many tarot decks evokes meanings associated with the divinity present in nature, and this can be further elicited through smell.Footnote ⁹⁰ For Greer, cards that depict particular flora, such as roses, contain the energy of their corresponding real-life plants. This is particularly so for the essential oil of the plant that is represented. Consequently, Greer advocates using a combination of essential oils and tarot cards: “Using both Aroma and Tarot together magically . . . gives us an incredibly powerful tool for personal growth, self-understanding, and . . . aligning ourselves with elemental forces that manifest in both the physical and metaphysical planes.”Footnote ⁹¹

Greer's book even instructs readers to blend “Tarot Oils” linked to each of the twenty-two Major Arcana cards in a deck.Footnote ⁹² During a ritual dedication ceremony, a practitioner might anoint themselves with these oils in order to harness the energy they contain. Again, this practice hinges on an understanding of essential oils as containers of meaningful energy accessible through bodily application or inhalation. It echoes similar practices and beliefs about the therapeutic value of essential oils held by yogis, Christians, and other witches.

Essentialism: The Real Thing?

Scholars of religion, capitalism, and postmodernity have helpfully shown how the things we buy dialectically craft and represent aspects of our identities.Footnote ⁹³ There are cultural, socioeconomic, and gendered dynamics at play in these transactions, surely, and it is the work of corporations and marketers to help dictate what people with disposable incomes want, or even what they will find indispensable. Steve Jobs, as CEO of Apple, famously proclaimed, “People don't know what they want until you show it to them.” While this maxim caused legions of market researchers to recoil, Jobs's assertion exemplifies the influence that corporations and brands can have on consuming publics. Yet, consumers do make choices, and as we examine the performance of American religion in the contemporary neoliberal marketplace, essential oils present an interesting case study—a blurring of the lines between the binaries of perennialism and sectarianism, commodity and brand.

People who frequently purchase and use essential oils do not see themselves as “oils consumers.” They call themselves oilers. They speak in a language that appears, at the surface, similar to that of the connoisseur of fine wines or the collector of coins. However, oilers’ beliefs, practices, and rhetoric are ontologically different from those of other groups. Yes, oilers discriminate with care between the provenances of their oils, and many can recite from memory the varied traits of Roman versus German chamomile. If they are very knowledgeable, they know the Latin names of the plants from which their oils are extracted. But what truly differentiates oilers from general consumers, connoisseurs, or collectors is their belief that they are bringing ancient spiritual wisdom and resources into the contemporary age. This wisdom is conveyed not through sight and words and book, as in Aldous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, but through the olfactory and tactile senses. Oilers do not just believe that essential oils carry the powers of universally sacred properties.Footnote ⁹⁴ They experience that power, which oilers, despite coming out of diverse traditions, know in their bones (and their noses), as shared. Of course, they adapt each oil's traits and benefits to their own contexts, allowing the ancient power and wisdom of their oils to benefit them personally here and now.

Claiming the best access to the sacred has long been the stock-in-trade of those in the spiritual marketplace. At what shrine should I leave my votive? Which pilgrimage should I embark upon? Who is listening to my prayers or confessions? Which church does God visit on Sundays? Which guru is the real deal, and who is selling snake oil? Different religious traditions offer different techniques of discernment, and individuals act on the stories or value propositions that resonate or the cultural and familial obligations that guide them.Footnote ⁹⁵ Each shrine, church, or guru offers compelling promises. In the world of consumer products, Coca-Cola's 1969 debut of the “It's the real thing” slogan perfectly encapsulates the transition from brandless commodity to brand sect. It serves up the ultimate value proposition: authenticity.Footnote ⁹⁶ Oilers also want “the real thing,” but they are emboldened to discern it themselves, with the help of branding, social media influencers, and guidebooks, of course. They know when they have the “the real thing” because, with essential oils, authenticity equals efficacy. Simply, the oils take the actions intended for them. An authentic oil acts upon the body, mind, and spirit, and it is leveraged to create magic––meditation with better concentration, prayer with more conviction, spellcasting that accomplishes goals, card readings that speak truth.

Spiritual oilers, like consumers of other lifestyle and wellness brands, join religious communities through their purchases.Footnote ⁹⁷ Crystallizing oilers’ induction into these religious communities of purchase are experiences with fellow sellers, interactions with influencers on social media, and consumption of blogs and guidebooks. Being together in vivo is no longer the requisite for a “church” in the Durkheimian sense. The community is virtual, or even imagined.Footnote ⁹⁸ Communities are made through clicks and likes on Instagram or Facebook, reading groups akin to Bible studies, and sharing oil blend recipes or remedies with family or friends. The instructions and testimonies cited in this article create an archive not only for scholars of religion but also for these communities of oilers.

This archive of oiler perennialism is enshrined in essential oil and aromatherapy guidebooks and touted by companies, sellers, and many practitioners as a universal myth. Oiler authors recount a shared essential oil tale in similar form in virtually every guidebook. Ancient, sometimes prehistoric, cultures used natural scents for religious purposes in rituals meant to connect human to divine. The scents, often emitted through smoke, facilitated external contact or internal connection with deities or sacred powers. While authors acknowledge that these scents were not “essential oils” in the technical terms of the modern marketplace, they insist that these time-honored uses of scent for religious purposes were ancient analogues to contemporary oiler practices. Their precedents waft across time and space to make today's essential oils practices “the real thing.” New Agers, evangelical Christians, and witches all delight in the perennial character of their oils’ histories. Curiously, New Agers and witches express no qualms about the scented rituals of ancient Christians. Evangelical Christians seem equally unperturbed about finding common cause with ancient Hebraic, Babylonian, Chinese, or Vedic cultures, or even with medieval European witches or alchemists. These examples unfold without fail in oiler literature. To be an oiler is to tap into ancient and universal wisdom. It is to mythologize a past that is both shared and sacred, grounded in the power of scent and the sense of smell to make contact with divine power.