Soap Has Always Been With Us, and Longer Still
We moderns have a rather bizarre tendency to think of the past as a place of tragedy, misery, darkness, and ignorance. Our ancestors were all stupid, living in filth, squalor, and poverty, toiling away at the earth to barely eke out a living from the soil. I say “bizarre” specifically because this framing is a kind of abnormality in cultural cosmologies.
We are one of the very few civilizations that we know of which looks at the past this way, as well as the only one to have such a specific belief in time as linear progression. No doubt this sounds strange, as it often does to me. It’s very difficult to imagine another way of understanding time, and some of this difficulty derives from our language itself, or rather the linguistic limits built into our language.
To understand these sorts of limits, first consider what it might be like to speak in a language that has no past tense, that has no way of differentiating from something that happened yesterday and something that happened a century ago. Imagine how you might tell a story about your child this way, how limited you might feel with the available choice of words and how everything would seem to bleed into the present.
Many languages have no past tense. They still have ways of speaking about events which happened, but they don’t have inherent linguistic ways of describing the past as something which no longer exists. Instead, the past functions more like a place that you’re not currently in, or a direction in which you are looking rather than a moment or a time period that has passed.
While this might feel limiting, it’s only because our own linguistic framework is also limited. When you are accustomed to thinking of time as something that travels by you, or a road that you are on which only goes one direction, it’s very difficult to then conceive of a different way of perceiving time. Trapped in our linguistic prisons, we can only perceive time as discrete moments which happen once and then end, rather than an entire forest stretching out in all directions from where we stand.
But don’t despair. There’s a very simple way to escape this prison, a thing that has always been with us, and longer still: soap.
Think of the past for a little while, and imagine it the way our modern delusions tell us to imagine it. Imagine what life was like a thousand years ago, or two thousand. Imagine what daily life was like without the ability to wash yourself or your clothes. Imagine how bad people must have smelled, how dirty everything was, how wretched everything looked and how grimy your skin must have felt without the ability to wash with that daily artifact of modern life, soap.
And now realize that all these imaginings are completely wrong.
Soap has always been with us, has always been around as long as we have been around, and even longer. Soap isn’t a new thing, or even a thing humans invented. Soap is the offspring of fire, flesh, and water, born in the ashes of forest fires, cooking fires, and funeral pyres.
The “oldest” record of soap is from Babylon, some 4800 years ago as we moderns regard time. A clay tablet bears the magic formula for its creation, but only for a specific kind of soap. It’s a recipe for cleaning wool so it can be dyed better. That’s the oldest record we know of, but all that actually tells us is that it’s probably one of the first times anyone decided that a specific recipe for soap needed to be chiseled into a specific stone.
Combine wood ash with fat and water, it directs the reader. That’s how soap is born, not “created” or “invented” but rather arising out of something else.
Cook a piece of meat over a wood fire, then let it rain over the ashes afterward, and you have soap in its most raw form. Not of course the soap you might use in your shower which, if it’s a “shower gel” or “liquid soap,” is probably actually a synthetic detergent.
Those wet greasy cook fire ashes will regardless lift other greases and oils from things, which is what soap is and what soap does. In other words, every time a human cooks meat over a wood fire, and every time water touches those ashes, there is soap. Soap, then, is “as old as” cooking, but even older still.
Rain falling upon the remains of a dead animal burnt within a forest fire births soap, too.
Aleppo soap brewing in a vat
In our modern way of looking at time, we want to know when soap was first “invented.” We need to know the moment of human history before which there was no soap and after which there was soap.
Soap is older than us, though, which means we didn’t make it. We only learned its uses. Still, we might speak of these uses the way the alchemists speak of things without being trapped in our linguistic prison of linear time. Alchemists speak of “salts,” what remains of a thing after fire and water have had their way with them. Salt is what remains of the sea once the water has washed through it, and then been burned away by the heat of the sun.
A “salt” is also what remains of wood once fire has burned it to ash, then water has dissolved and purified that ash, and then fire again has dried away the water. That salt is called potash or lye. Potash is actually two words together, “pot” and “ash,” because it was the substance remaining after ashes were leeched in water and then boiled in iron pots. It’s the root of our word potassium, coined in the 1800’s to describe a substance humans had always known. The chemists say potash is an alkali, which is really to say the same thing twice: alkali is the Arabic word (al-qaliy) that means “ash.”
The other word for this alchemical salt, lye, is from an ancient Germanic word that meant “to wash.” It has the same root as the English words “lather,” “launder,” and “latrine,” and referred first to the kind of water itself (water mixed with wood ash for cleaning) rather than to the salt remaining once the water evaporated.
You can bathe in water filled with wood ash and come out less oily-feeling, because lye reacts with oils in an alchemical process called “saponification.” That is, soap, which is the transmutation of lye and oil into a substance that clings to and separates other oils and fats from each other.
That’s how soap cleans, whether it’s the more crude form of wet ashes and grease or the prettier and better smelling soaps we normally think of as soap. In water, the oils of soap bind to the oils you wish to remove, and then more water carries them all away from the skin.
We are using oil to clean away oil. As strange as this seems, it will help understand why both the Chinese and the Romans often tended to use only oil, or sometimes oil mixed with wood ashes, to clean themselves after bathing in water. In Rome, this involved the use of a strigil, a curved piece of metal (often copper or brass) which was used to scrape off the oil from the skin after being covered with it. In China, unguents made with pig pancreas (or sometimes cured fish), fat, and wood ash were applied and then scraped off.
There is a popular falsehood that our word for soap comes from the mythic Roman Mount Sapo. The story goes that clothing rinsed in the streams flowing from that mountain always came out particularly clean, because mass burnt offerings occurred at its summit. Supposedly, then, soap from that ritual slaughter flowed into the streams, and thus humans discovered soap. There actually is no such Roman myth, and the story is a much later creation. However, our word soap does come from the Romans, who themselves got the word from the Germans. We know this from Pliny the Elder, who wrote of both the Celtic Gauls and the Germans using it:
There is also soap (sapo), an invention of the Gauls for making their hair shiny. It is made from tallow and ashes, the best from beechwood ash and goat fat, and exists in two forms, solid and liquid; among the Germans both are used more by men than by women.
Along with most other Roman and Greek historians; Pliny likely never visited or met the people he wrote about and mostly rewrote other people’s accounts. Gauls and Germans alike often had fair and even red hair, and thus the “shine” from their hair might have been just that, or also that it was clean because they were using soap to wash it. In other words, at the very same that an Empire was using oil to clean, the supposedly backwards, ignorant, and superstitious indigenous people around them (the Gauls and the Germans) were lathering themselves up with soap.
“African Black Soap” or Alata Samina
The first record of soap is from Babylon, for a specific kind of soap for a specific use. It’s for cleaning wool, which cannot be dyed until the oils in sheep hair are removed. Other records later, as from Egypt, are also for specific uses, ways of making specific soaps for specific things.
Folk traditions say soap is much older, especially in Africa and the Middle East.
Alata samina, or ose dudu, called by others merely “African black soap,” is said to be thousands of years old. Crafted primarily by Yoruba women, it is a soap of plant ash, water, and shea or other “butter” oils. In the area of what is now Syria there is صابون_حلبي, also known as ghar soap, laurel soap, or more famously “Aleppo Soap.” As with African black soap, its origin story is older than the Western mindset allows a thing to be: the locals say it is at least 4000 years old, almost as old as the Babylonian recipe for wool cleansing soap.
Whether you believe them or not, Aleppo soap has a special history for all other soaps in the world. It was the recipe for Aleppo soap which formed the basis for the first two mass-manufactured soaps in Europe: Castile soap and Marseille soap. Soap was already around throughout Europe long before Spanish artisans began making Castile soap and, later, French merchants began producing savon de Marseille, but it was the Arabs who first learned how to make large amounts of it all at once.
Aleppo soap uses laurel oil along with olive oil; Marseille and Castile soap do not use laurel. All three combine the ashes of halophytes—grasses and other plants which thrive along the sea, along with boiling water (seawater in traditional Marseille and Castile soap), then allow the soap to harden. It takes a month for Marseille and Castile soaps to be ready to use, while Aleppo soap is aged for at least six months—and sometimes up to three years—in order to be considered true Aleppo soap.
Aleppo soap—and its cousin, Nabulsi soap—was the original of the three, and it became quite popular during and after the crusades. Crusading soldiers, along with merchants and priests, brought back sackfuls of the soap to trade (and perhaps also sometimes as payment). Europe already had soap—again, the Celts and Germans had been making it before the Roman Empire arose—but the Arabic soap was superior in quality, harder, and therefore much longer lasting. Also, because it was made with plant oils rather than animal fat, it felt better on the skin: soaps from animal fats are stronger and therefore more drying.
Savon de Marseille
Spanish and French merchants eventually copied Aleppo soap on very large scales, engaging in what may have been the first industrialized production scheme in Europe. Because of their military dominance, Spanish merchants spread Castile soap to England, undercutting folk soap making there.
It’s during this period, just up to the birth of capitalism and industrialization, that a strange thing happened in Europe—people stopped cleaning themselves so regularly. There are several reasons for this. First, Castile soap became associated with catholicism, and protestant leaders in England actually preached against using soap or even bathing nude at all. Our idea of “dirty,” foul-smelling peasants comes from this period in England, where bathing became seen as a sign of idolatry and lewd behavior, rather than something one might like to do. The British Crown fed into this moral reversal by heavily taxing soap many times, raising the prices so high that even the rich didn’t think it was worth the price.
In France, despite being renowned now for its Marseille soap, people also stopped bathing regularly. This wasn’t because of a moral panic, but rather “enlightenment” and “science.” Early Age of Reason doctors decided that bathing in hot water actually caused diseases, which they concluded must enter the body through open pores. Soap also opened pores and cleared the skin of its “protection” against foul airs. Thus, starting with the aristocracy, the French stopped regularly bathing or using soap. Louis XIV was said to have only ever taken two or three baths in his lifetime and did not like to be washed even with a cloth, either. Despite the relentless perfumes filling the palace of Versailles to cover over the poor hygiene of the entire court, the king’s body odor was so bad that an Austrian official complained he smelled like a wild boar. Even still in France because of this aristocratic legacy, you’ll find many people bathe or shower quite rarely, as I found living there.
All this is why moderns have a belief that soap, personal hygiene, and regular bathing is somehow a new thing and that our ancestors were dirty and smelled bad. The story goes that people had to be convinced to use soap, that soap is a new miraculous invention wrought by capitalism.
This falsehood is due to the commercialization of soap in the United States, beginning with Proctor & Gamble’s chemical soap, Ivory, in 1879. Early advertising for the soap, however, gives hints of the situation as it really was. Ivory was sold as a better version both of the home-made soaps and the Castile soap already widely available. Its purity claim was that it was purer than the soaps everyone was already using, despite using chemicals such as magnesium sulfate which were not normally part of soap.
Most of the soaps people use now are not actually soap at all, but rather detergents. Both function in similar ways, but these detergents are not created from natural ingredients, only industrial chemicals. Detergents arose during the early 20th century because of shortages of oil and tallow, which were diverted for war efforts. Residue from coal and then from petroleum were primary sources for these detergents, and now the list of chemicals used to create them is very, very long. Like much else in our supposedly modern, enlightened age, detergents are much more destructive and “dirtier” than what came before: the chemicals in most detergents do not break down over time, polluting water and damaging other parts of nature.
So it’s fair to say that, despite our belief in moderns being somehow cleaner and more hygienic than our ancestors, our civilizations are actually dirtier.
A Roman athlete scraping oil from his skin.
Soap is not the only way to get clean, of course. I’ve already mentioned the ancient practice of using oils of the Chinese and Romans. The Chinese also used fragrant wood chips, rubbing them against the skin to pick up dirt and oils. In many other cultures, especially those indigenous to the Americas, other plants and leaves were used for the same purpose after bathing in water.
In many places of the world, the water itself was enough to clean away any grime, dirt, and oil. Thermal springs and countless other springs are still used for bathing as they were for thousands and thousands of years. In many cases, the water from these springs is alkaline and often filled with minerals such as natron (sodium bi-carbonate) or washing soda (sodium carbonate), both of which clean the skin and clothing quite well. And the ocean is full of one of the most basic cleaning elements of all: salt. A swim in the sea will clean away all grime and also bacteria without one ever needing to scrub at all.
Many plants themselves produce a kind of soap, called “saponins,” and these plants have been used by countless cultures to clean. The two most well-known of these plants were named for this quality, soapwort and soap nut. Horse chestnuts, ivy, clematis, buffalo berry, bracken fern, baby’s breath, beet leaves, yucca, fenugreek, and even most beans are high in saponins and can be boiled down to create a liquid soap.
Another powerful cleaning liquid, perhaps quite surprising for most, is urine. Unless the person producing it is ill, urine is a sterile liquid that can be—and often was—used to clean wounds. More common, however, was the use of urine to clean clothing of particular deep stains, since it is high in ammonia (because of this, it’s also been used to whiten teeth). Urine was also the oldest “mordant” used in fabric dying. After soaps were used to clear the oils from wool and linen, the cloth was soaked in urine and plant or mineral dyes. The urine was how the dyes actually stayed within the cloth.
And sometimes it’s rarely even necessary to clean at all, depending on what you eat. Body odor is the result of bacterial digestion of elements from food that come out in body sweat. The more sugars and processed foods a person eats, the stronger the smell will be. Other foods, most notably alliums (onions, garlic), some brassicas (broccoli, cabbage), eggs, and many spices (turmeric, cumin, capsicum) contain sulphur which is released during bacterial digestion on the skin. Seafood can often cause a person to smell fishy, but one of the largest natural culprits of body odor is milk and cheese, which create a very sour smell on skin after digestion. In other words, diets containing these foods will cause a person to “smell dirty” more regularly than diets without them.
That being said, if everyone else around you is eating the same things and smelling the same way, no one will notice at all unless they are from somewhere else. Thus all the accounts of early merchants and travelers referring to the odor of the people they visited. It may be apocryphal, but it is said that the Chinese who encountered Marco Polo complained he smelled of rotten milk, and similar accounts from colonial ventures report the natives often complained of their smell. This is also why immigrant neighborhoods seem to smell different—it’s because the people there are often eating different foods. Don’t worry though: you smell as strange to them as they do to you.
This is all to say that “clean” is a rather relative concept, and hygiene is hardly a new idea. Soap has been around as long as humans have, and also before. So, too, have many of the plants which will clean grime and oil from skin, clothes, and tools. The sea and cleansing springs have also always been with us, and again for much longer than we’ve been here.
We moderns did not come up with soap, but are rather actually late to it. Soap is timeless, or rather a thing which reminds us that what we consider as time now is never linear, never a march from “primitive” to “progress.” Soap has always been with us, and longer still.
If you liked this essay, you’ll also like the book in which it’s published, The Secret of Crossings. Scroll down for more information.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From The Forests of Arduinna and is the director of publishing for Ritona. He is the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-enchant Your Life.
He is also the author of the upcoming collection The Secret of Crossings, which includes this essay.
See below for ordering details.
THE SECRET OF CROSSINGS
(Essays)
By Rhyd Wildermuth
Release date 1 December, 2022
Continuing the legacy of his previous collections (Your Face is a Forest, A Kindness of Ravens, and Witches in a Crumbling Empire), The Secret of Crossings collects the best prosaic and esoteric writings of Rhyd Wildermuth from 2020 to 2022.
“We can only hope perhaps there are still some secret paths that can be forded. Maybe not for all of humanity, nor even for most of us, but maybe at least the few who still look for those crossings: those who stand in awe at the larger forces of nature our false god Progress has unleashed.”
The Secret of Crossings compiles over forty essays first published for subscribers to From The Forests of Arduinna or Another World, many of them never released to the public.
About the Author
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, a theorist, and an autonomous Marxist. He writes at From The Forests of Arduinna, and is the author of six other books, including Being Pagan: A Guide To Re-enchant Your Life.
Specifications:
5.25 x 8.25 in, 245 pages, perfect bound with matte cover.
The Secret of Crossings by Rhyd Wildermuth released to the public 1 December, 2022 and retails for 17.50 US (print), 12.00 US (digital) and 9.99 US (Kindle).
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