Fragrant and Radiant Healing Symphony

This is an interesting little book first published in 1937 and now long out of print. We had to order a copy from England, believe it or not. The reason my avatar even knew about it at all is that Jon Anderson (the lead singer for the band Yes) told her it was the inspiration for his album, Olias of Sunhillow. She got a copy through inter-libarary loan years ago, and it felt really important for us to find a copy of this book right now.

The premise is that color, sound and fragrance are all completely interconnected. Certain hues, notes and scents are lined up in tables based on years of research and historic information. Other charts give formulas for ancient incenses and so on.

One of the first things I did was look up correspondences related to things familiar to me. Turns out, and it shouldn’t be surprising to anybody who knows me well, that the color red is associated with the fragrance of sandalwood. For those who don’t know me that well, I have a particular signature perfume/cologne scent which is about half sandalwood. This scent has been noticed over in other peoples’ homes as I’m talking to them or visiting.

We figured out what the AMICA acronym is that appears all over the book: Aquarian Master Institute of Colour Awareness. It’s an offshoot of the theosophists, so Roland Hunt (the author) and those associated with it are working from that lineage of metaphysical type stuff, the same as a lot of early 20th century groups like this. Which makes total sense if you read it, because the original publication was in 1937, and there’s a lot in there about the higher self reuniting with “God the Father,” and talking to ascended masters through channeling, and the lost wisdom of Lemuria, and so on. (My avatar, an expert in the occult, is making me aware of some of the history of this stuff, it’s very helpful.)

Aside: It’s very hard not to read the introduction in the voice of Professor Marvel from The Wizard of Oz.

Anyway, if you ignore some of the “magic of the pharaohs!” and “secrets of Atlantis!” type stuff, there seems to be a lot of interesting information in here, including the results of experiments conducted by members of this now defunct temple.

One of the main reasons for getting this was to see if there were certain things that should be used to try and help people link into their guides more strongly. For example, if you happened to know that your guide is female and favors the color green, you could glean from the charts that she might respond well to the scent of orange blossoms, the note of F just above middle C, and an incense heavy in benzoin.

The book also spends a number of chapters discussing how to use these three elements—scent, sound and color—to heal the human body. We’re still looking over some of the details in these later chapters, I’ll post separately about this section.