The Visceral Knowledge of Self - Varanasi meo fusciuni Guiseppe Imprezzabile 2020

**Ganesha - Southern India 1997 - Danu Seith-Fyr**

To physically voyage in India is to begin to unravel the innermost secrets, often hidden in the westerner’s life of our innermost nature, beings of spirit manifest in a physical form. Everyone’s journey in this land of contrasts is unique for it tears at the flesh of reality like a bird of prey to strip us clean of masks and illusions. It is visceral and profound, a paradox of all the senses, India rushes at you headlong and is a plethora of contradictions yet it subtley etches upon us tattoed marks of our tranformations. Varanasi, meo fusciuni, is a perfume created by Giuseppe Imprezzabile to give form to this inner most path he trod, a personal journey in 2017, whilst in the city of the burning ghats, the city that sends spirit laden smoke into the sky, day and night carrying the souls of the dead aloft, their ashes to be scattered upon the waters of Mother Ganges. Varanasi is the first perfume of ‘The Timeless Trilogy’.

Perfume has always been associated with the transmutation alchemy of the physical body to spiritual gold, used for thousands of years in rites of purification and for the passage from life through death to rebirth. meo fusciuni - Varanasi encompasses the journey in dual realms, conjuring the land that inspired it but more than that, gifting us the scent of divinity, the holy in the most simple of gestures, the scent of humankind when the detritus of the physical and the superfluous is removed, akin to the written accounts of the scent of saints, holy men and women of all religious beliefs who through their devotions eradicted the scent of their human form and acquired the scent of grace.

We travel via' Varanasi’ in all aspects of India, confronting, brutal, archaic, nature and man at their most raw, ritual, divinity, beauty and …….. yet there is written in coded form within Varanasi, the scent of the essence of the spirit. On my skin it traverses from the purely animalic to the profoundly spiritual. Varnasi is not purely a perfume about place, it delivers to us a scent of the transmutation of the human spirit once liberated from the corpus, eternally rising on wings of incense. An intricate woven complexity as ethereal and changing as a kolum traced in rice flour on a dusty threshold.

Initially there is an explosion of corporeality, the almost overwhelming first encounters, spices laden with incense, surging on the unrelenting stream of the Ganges and unusally Varanasi evolves with the base notes in a continuum from the very first, it is the mass of humanity going about the business of survival, that edge of unfamiliarity in the contact of feet on an unknown soil. In the woven intricacy of Meo’s formulation, your first walk in a crowded Indian street.. the intimacy of the streetlife, a thousand scents in one moment, yet swirling beneath and around, divine observances, the sacred and profane intertwined, oud, vetiver, animalic notes and incense are as constant in this composition as the cycles of life and death.

What happens to us when we encounter this overload, we breathe, we observe, and as in all travel we find our senses are acute and more finely tuned. Feeling as a stranger in a strange land…. yet home.

Not for long as our privileged eyes become accustomed to the exposed intensity of life, the cacophony begins to yield up its mysteries, the beauty in the chaos, so it is with Varanasi.

Collage of the work of Christian Martin Weiss.
Liquidinous emotions like the lapping rhythm of waters at the steps of the departing place, ash merges with water in an ambergris infusion so that each droplet of the ‘Mother’ contains lives lived intermingled with thousands of others. The river garners all, gathers them close to her breast, swept along with the myriad petals, of scattered offerings.

The cocoon of our existence is fractured, divested of unecessary layers, voyaging along the waters of life after life, the floral heart of Varanasi shines strong, the scent of ritual garlands, and holy anointings, Rose and Jasmine imbuded with mystic incantations, the simple transformed into the miraculous. We become one with the chaos and the stillness all in one breath, even at the last, which is merely another begining.

Essence - Christian Martin Weiss and 3. Danu Seith-Fyr

Varanasi is an honour to wear for it whispers into my flesh of truer nature encapsulated in a city, in a culture, in a river and is the music of the dance on the edges of reality, the fall into the void of self and the rediscovery of the untainted heart.

Meo Fuscuini - Varanasi

Base Notes - Nard Jatamansi, Vetiver, Oud, Gurjum, Leather, Animalic Notes.

Heart Notes - Ambergris, Jasmine, Rose, Ambrette, Cypriol.

Top Notes - Saffron, Nutmeg, Cardamom, Incense.

My deep thanks as ever to my friend, Meo for creating such a profoundly beautiful journey and for providing my sample of Varanasi. My thoughts are always my own.

Varanasi can be discovered on meo fusciuni website along with worldwide stockists - https://www.meofusciuni.com/collection

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