Drawn from the diminutive and fanged musk deer in Tibet, generations of Chinese and Tibetan housewives used musk to rid themselves of moths, to heal family illnesses, to strengthen the brain, the heart and the senses. Musk was used to perfume the skirts of women in the Hindu Kush (in Afghanistan and Pakistan), and was witnessed consumed as a flavoring for meat by the world’s greatest fabulist, Marco Polo. Polo believed in the stuff’s market potential, and brought a quantity of it to Venice in the late 13th century, suing a customs agent in his efforts to get it into the city.
Long before Polo’s importing venture, musk had been traded through Afghanistan, and was imbued with liturgical importance. According to Islamic scripture the Prophet’s young wife Aisha perfumed him “to the extent that you could see the shine on his blessed forehead and blessed beard,” while the Prophet himself said in a hadith: “The best scent is the perfume of musk”. With saffron, musk made up the substance of the floors of Paradise, trod by delicate nymphs made of the same: embodied musk. Eugene Rimmel writes that in the 9th century, mosque builders in Turkey mixed musk with the mortar of their religious spaces, mosques that still emitted an odor when he wrote about them in the 19th century. In Sufism, mystic poet Jalaluddin Rumi wrote: “Love bears the scent of musk.”
In 1892, Dr. George William Askinson stood at the precipice of a new way of obtaining aromatic materials. Looking to the future, he pondered this evolution: “Synthetic chemistry has […] added to the list of materials required by the perfumer, and is surely going to add many more to it hereafter. Though some of these, like the new artificial musk, are not yet in a condition to enter into serious competition with the natural products, yet it is merely a question of time when the latter need no longer be depended upon.”
Dr. Askinson’s text was published a scant four years after Albert Baur attempted to develop a better kind of TNT and – instead – created the first synthetic musk.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Image: Illustration from “Picture Natural History” – No 65 – The Musk Deer, by Mary E. C. Boutell, 1869
