Introduction
This article is the third on a series intended to reintroduce information that has been previously lost, misunderstood, or clouded in ancient secrecy. That is quite a statement and may appear a bit ambitious. However, our author, a Coptic Egyptian Perfumer and passionate brilliant researcher, is determined to do just that. When he arrived in the United States just a few years ago, he was mystified by the American citizen's apparent lack of awareness of the sense of smell and the uses of scent of daily life. Throughout his travels all over this country--63,000 miles a year - he repeatedly observed that this lack of awareness had a drastic effect on the daily lives of people.

Soon after his arrival in this country, he and his wife were standing in a very long line at a bank awaiting their turn at the teller window. From their position, they could see the female teller was being repeatedly harassed by the male teller next to her. He was literally "all over her" and quite sexually aroused. She was obviously embarrassed and very irritated that he would not leave her alone, especially since she had so many people waiting in line to see her.

When the author and his wife arrived closer, they believed they understood the cause of the problem. The woman was wearing a perfume with a scent that was designed to arouse a man that "one only wears late at night, when alone with a partner." The male teller responded to this scent in the manner in which it was intended, but in the wrong place and at the wrong time. The female teller was completely unaware that her fragrance could have any effect at all on another person other that the fact that he or she might like the smell.

Americans would view this situation quite differently. We would blame or praise the man (depending on our gender) and find him fully responsible for his actions. For us, the scent itself would play no role in the behavior. We never consider scent at all other than we either like or don't like it. We do not realize how far-reaching the effects of smell are because we simply do not consider them to be important in any way. Far-reaching they are.

Fragrance is a fully developed language of nonverbal communication where messages are exchanged between people to carry fully developed ideas, emotions, and feelings to each other. The challenge in this global age is that some civilizations did not develop the sense of smell as fully as they developed their other senses. Some cultures developed the sense of smell, others touch and taste, and still others, such as those in the United States are primarily visual.

The Origin of Beliefs
Where did this all begin? Where do our beliefs come from that influence our thinking? So often we belief that certain things are truths, and we do not consider that all beliefs are learned and that the thought originated somewhere. Philosophers, scientists, and religious leaders have all have influence our thinking, some more recently than others.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sought examples of what he considered to be superior human beings. He thought that by totally ignoring the sense of smell, he would be able to define and specify a human ideal. He claimed that suggesting that odors might influence human emotions and behavior would be to deny human free will and the ability to have absolute control over urges. To him, being human meant being fully conscious and above the kind of gross reflex reactions that animals experience. Kant assumed that we only have one mind. That mind is conscious thinking and analytical with absolute freedom of choice. He believed that lower animals could not experience such consciousness.

Kant ignored the possibility that the brain or mind that animals use to process and react to information from their bodies and surrounding environment might persist and comfortably co-exist with the conscious brain and free will unique to humans.

In fact, the hard-wired system of the brainstem or reptilian brain ("smell brain") in all animals with internal skeletons, including human beings, and the emotional circuits of the limbic system in all animals are influenced by odors. While they operate below the level of consciousness, the reptilian brain and the limbic system control all the life sustaining reflexes of feeding, fighting, fleeing, and mating. Without such primitive triggers as touch, taste, and smell sparking our automatic, hard-wired behaviors and emotions, we would not be humans but disembodied spirits. For our very survival as humans, we need to be able to adapt to rapid changes in our environment. In emergencies, human being need to be able to make rapid decisions without wasting time in analyzing the situation and weighing different options. Therefore, human beings have two levels of consciousness--reptilian and rational. Kant claimed that humans had only the rational mind.

Kant was a philosopher. He was not a man of science who would attempt to experiment and prove his theory right or wrong, with or against reality. Today, on the other hand, we have considerable scientific research to prove the ancient Egyptian belief that odors powerfully influence human sexual development and behavior.

Sexual attraction, which we have intellectualized and romanticized, may really be a response to an invisible silent stimulus--a primal animal scent. A Frenchman, Auguste Galopin in his book Le Parfum de La Femme said:

"-the mutual interaction of odors constitutes the essences of sexual love-the purest marriage that can be contracted between a man and a woman is that engendered by olfaction and sanctioned by common assimilation in the brain of animated molecules due to the secretion and evaporation of the two bodies in contact and sympathy."

Odors of Desire
Our sense of smell and certain specific odors influence how we develop as sexual beings: how we choose our mates; how and why we bond with certain people reject others; even why bonds develop between certain children and family members and not others.

Our sexuality actually starts when we are fetuses in the womb. After birth nursing at the breast exposes the infant to maternal pheromones from apocrine and sebaceous glands in the under arms and in the dark tissue around the nipples. These pheromones may well create lasting memories of sensual pleasure, security, and love in the erotic circuits in the infant's brain. These will be stored and awakened years later with sexual maturity when the individual encounters similar pheromones in a lover. This is true for both male and female. Smells are imprinted on the limbic memory circuits, and they are associated with sexual arousal and satisfaction around the time of puberty.

We are profoundly influenced both physiologically and psychologically by the volatile secretions of others. Body odors prepare a lover to open up to the other person--to listen to what they say or to be totally close or completely distant emotionally and mentally. This goes beyond the way a person looks or the experiences that they have together. The very word for kissing in many countries means smelling--the nose being directly over the mouth so that when we kiss we also smell. Kissing is not just kissing. Dancing is not just dancing. They are both methods of communications between partners mainly to share natural body odors, which will serve as sexual lure.

Each human body has a personal odor signature as unique and distinctive as fingerprints. Havelock Ellis, in his studies on the psychology of sex, mentioned that our individual odor signature is actually the combination of several different odors. The most important were

• The general skin odor
• The smell of the hair and scalp
• The odor of the breath
• The armpit odor
• The foot odor
• The perineal odor
• In the male, the odor of smegma under the penile forskin
• In the female, the odor of the mons veneris--the smegma of the clitoris, vaginal mucus and menstrual odor.