Renaissance Silver Pomander with Aromatics

Thinking Through Henri Bergson (1859-1941)’s “Creative Evolution”

The Renaissance silver pomander—an exquisitely wrought, globe-like container filled with aromatic herbs and resins—embodies an art of olfactory timekeeping. From Henri Bergson’s metaphysics, the pomander is not merely a decorative vessel for scent, but a crystallization of duration in material and aroma, a temporal flame delicately caged in silver.

This object exists between the tangible and the ephemeral, the solid and the volatile—capturing the essence of élan vital as a rhythm between permanence and dissolution. The silver latticework is crafted like the porous boundary between perception and memory: structured yet permeable. Bergson teaches that intuition is the path to truth, and the scent released from a pomander is precisely that: intuition made sensible, a vibration that bypasses intellect and penetrates directly into the soul.

To open a pomander is to invite a microcosm to unfold—not through sight or touch, but through the most temporal and affective of senses—smell. Scent does not remain fixed in space; it travels, decays, returns, invoking memory involuntarily. Thus, the pomander becomes a machine of living memory, resonant with Bergson’s idea that consciousness is a ceaseless layering of the past within the present.

In Renaissance society, such objects were both fashionable and medical, signifying wealth, sensuality, and prophylaxis. Yet beyond its socio-historical meanings, the pomander is an inner sensorium: a world within a globe, where art encases not image but invisible becoming. Its perfumed chambers are temporal spirals, each compartment a scent-encoded moment—dried rose for nostalgia, clove for alertness, amber for sacred warmth.

From Bergson’s view, the silver pomander offers a paradoxical insight: that eternity does not lie beyond sensation, but is woven into the fleeting, if we know how to dwell within it. Inhale—and you are not transported to the past, but re-embedded in duration itself.