A clove in the mouth since 200 BCE
 
Around 200 BCE, court officials in Han dynasty China held cloves in their mouths before speaking to the emperor. The spice was called chicken tongue fragrance.
On TikTok right now, women place a clove under their tongue before a phone call, a date, or a meeting they keep putting off.
Same spice. Same gesture. Twenty-two centuries apart.
 01 
 
The Saturday pomander
 
A pomander is an orange studded with whole cloves. The word comes from the French pomme d’ambre. Europeans carried them from the mid-1200s as religious keepsakes.
In 1520, the Duke of Buckingham commissioned a gold pomander for Catherine of Aragon. By the 1600s, the English were pressing cloves into oranges by hand.
What you need
One orange. A jar of whole cloves, about four dollars. A plate or a windowsill.
1.Hold the orange, choose one intention — the thing you want to arrive — and say it once, out loud.
2.Push the cloves into the skin in any pattern — a spiral, a grid, your initial. One clove per breath.
3.Set the finished pomander on a shelf or windowsill where you see it every morning.
What happens after
The cloves preserve the orange. The pomander shrinks and darkens over weeks. It lasts for months.
You walk past the thing you made the night before the Hunter’s Moon.
You walk past the thing you made the night before the Hunter’s Moon.
 02 
 
What the universe is doing this week
 
The Sun entered Scorpio this morning. Tonight Venus crosses the face of the Sun at zero degrees Scorpio — the cazimi, the midpoint of the retrograde. Venus has been retrograde since October 3.
Mercury stations retrograde tomorrow, October 24, in Scorpio. It runs through November 13. Two planets retrograde in the same sign at once.
The Hunter’s Moon, the full moon in Taurus, peaks at 12:12 a.m. Eastern on Monday, October 26. It rises Sunday night.
Frost Descends, the 18th Chinese solar term and the last term of autumn, falls today.
Venus crosses the Sun tonight.
The full moon rises Sunday.
Make the pomander between them.
Your next step:
Tonight, pick up an orange and a jar of whole cloves. Tomorrow evening, push them in one at a time. Set the pomander on a shelf before the Hunter’s Moon rises Sunday night.
Remember, abundance is your birthright.