House of Orpheus

House of Orpheus is run by Marcus McCoy, who studied transpersonal anthropology and psychopharmacology before apprenticing for several years with a Bolivian shaman. Through that apprenticeship he was introduced to perfumerismo, an Amazonian practice of working with aromatic plants for healing and ritual purposes. He later trained as a distiller under Robert Seidel at The Essential Oil Company in Portland, Oregon, learning tincturing and soxhlet extraction and building his own stills. He now works from Olympia, Washington.

The house takes its name from Orpheus, described on the site as a musician, poet and prophet of the Orphic mysteries who composed hymns to the Greek deities accompanied by sacred incense. McCoy presents perfumery as a craft bound up with ritual and timing, with some pieces made to correspond with particular astrological periods.

According to the site, House of Orpheus does not rely on the ingredients typical of most perfumes, drawing instead on materials of plant, animal and mineral origin, including oils sourced from or made by alchemical practitioners. McCoy has described his approach as Liminal Perfuming, combining shamanic tradition with elements of Western and Eastern mystery practice.