The Alchemy of Care: Women’s Sacred Lineage in Soapmaking

From Ancient Talisman to Modern Resistance

I didn’t learn soapmaking from any woman in my family. No grandmother showed me how to coax lye into behaving or judge the precise moment when oils surrender their separateness and become something new. Yet the first time I stirred warm olive oil under winter candlelight, I felt a strange familiarity—as if stepping into a gesture older than my body, older than memory.

There is a kitchen I have never lived in, but it lives in me. White plaster walls, curved around a hearth that smolders in Levantine heat. Herbs hang from rafters like constellations. Oil glows in a clay jug—thick, green-gold, pressed where everything tastes of sea salt and stone. Women move through that room with the ease of repetition, hands fluent in small alchemies that keep families alive.

My Vermont kitchen is nothing like theirs. Outside, the Connecticut River tightens under ice. I am alone—children at school, house muted by winter—yet as I melt butters on the stovetop, time folds. A lineage rises through my hands, unasked-for but insistent. As if soapmaking is not a craft I learned, but a memory I returned to.

The first batch felt like initiation. Candlelit recipe on loose paper, temperatures hovering at caution’s edge. I watched the batter shift from liquid brightness to something thicker, its surface tightening into that unmistakable moment of trace. Like watching weather form. That instant when matter declares its intention to become something else. People call it chemistry. But women knew this long before chemistry had a name.

This transformation—oil to soap, raw to refined—has always belonged to the hearth, to hands that cared for bodies without recognition or rest. The original laboratories were kitchens. The original scientists were women whose knowledge rose from land, necessity, intuition.

My Vermont kitchen becomes an ecotone where longing for ancestral land meets the reality of modern life. Where I buy oils instead of pressing them, work jobs to purchase what ancestors grew. It’s a fracture I feel: the dream of handmade life pressed against machinery that keeps women too tired to make anything.

Yet I keep making. Because each bar is a small refusal. A way of saying: I will not let the lineage disappear.

Before Soap Was Soap: Women as Keepers of Sacred Cleansing

Long before anyone wrote the word soap, women in my ancestral lands practiced its essence. Purification, renewal, protection—not abstract concepts but daily rituals folded into survival. Archaeologists call these gestures “domestic labor,” but women performed elemental chemistry long before chemistry existed. Acts of ritual. The creation of magical objects. Protective talismans born of love and care that offered protection, health, and well-being.

Mesopotamia & the Levant — The First Alchemists

Clay tablets from 2800 BCE record early cleansing formulas, but I imagine not scribes writing them—women scraping ash from fires, stirring rendered fat until it could lift soot from skin, bending over vessels guided by memory and scent. The tablets were almost certainly written by men, as female scribes wouldn’t appear in the historical record for several more centuries, but the gestures—the actual knowledge of soapmaking—belonged to women.

This is history’s blind spot: the first transformation humans mastered wasn’t metalworking or pottery—it was turning dirt into cleanliness. These early materials appear to have been used primarily for cleaning textiles, based on cuneiform evidence and the economic importance of Babylon’s textile industry. But they represented something profound: chemical transformation as care.

Egypt — Where Cleansing Was Ceremony

In Egypt, the line between hygiene and holiness was nearly nonexistent. Egyptian women—perfumers, priestesses, ritual specialists—crafted pastes of natron (naturally occurring sodium carbonate), oils, and resins for both living and dead. They purified bodies, offerings, temple statues. Cleansing wasn’t cosmetic—it was cosmological. To cleanse was to honor gods, to align with ma’at and drive out isfet, the chaos that threatened cosmic order.

I imagine Egyptian women when I mix oils, using scent and plant energetics to lead the way. I understand something they knew intuitively: every cleansing act carries intention. I infuse my soapmaking and all my PlantLust offerings with this understanding—spells cast in botanicals.

This is something I carry into every bath, something I practiced when bathing my own children when they were young. I set an intention to bring the highest vibrations, to banish sorrow, illness, pain, suffering. To imbue each bath or shower with love, joy—a radiance that leaves the bather refreshed, renewed, and protected.

I think of those Egyptian women when I work: their alabaster vessels, their myrrh and lotus and cedar—scents still recognizable thousands of years later. Continuity of scent is its own kind of time travel, volatile molecules carrying forward not just fragrance, but the sacred intention behind the act of cleansing itself.

The Mediterranean — Wisdom in Hands, Not Texts

Across Greece, Rome, Cyprus, women crafted olive-oil cleansers and herbal balms before men recorded recipes. Knowledge moved through proximity: daughters watching mothers’ hands, recognizing the sound of mixing, distinguishing scents. Watching her mother hand-pick herbs from mountainsides, gather sea-salt from tide pools where noon-sun evaporated seawater into crystalline crusts. Seeing her mother crush botanicals and transform them not just into medicine or food, but into adornment—kohl for eyes, ochre for lips, florals distilled into perfumes.

This is women’s wisdom: lived, not authored. Embodied, not archived. Living in us like an ancestral knowing we invoke.

When I work, I imagine that lineage at my back—Syrian women stirring laurel oil, Cypriot women rinsing olives in seawater, Egyptian women crushing herbs in stone mortars. I light a candle and burn incense, setting intention before beginning. They weren’t making “history.” They were keeping people alive. Connected to Earth’s wisdom. This is the invocation I carry into everything I make in my kitchen—for PlantLust, for my family, for every bar of soap that touches our skin.

The Birth of True Soap: Domestic Alchemy in the Levant

The Levant birthed the first true soap—not crude mixtures but refined bars with structure and permanence. No coincidence this emerged in kitchens, not laboratories; in women’s spaces, not men’s guilds.

Aleppo: Where Women Turned Light Into Form

Aleppo invented hard soap: olive oil with laurel berry oil, transformed by lye through saponification, poured into molds, then cured into green bricks. This 3,000-year-old craft earned UNESCO recognition in 2024. Scholars emphasize trade and empire, but the technology was born in women’s hands.

The lye came from local plant ashes—traditionally palm trees and other regional plants whose burned remains yielded the alkali necessary for saponification. This plant-based lye enabled the hard bars that traveled trade routes without dissolving into softness.

Laurel oil doesn’t behave unless coaxed. Olive oil thickens differently by harvest and temperature. Timing the pour requires negotiation with materials that respond to humidity, season, the maker’s touch. Not calculation—conversation.

Those Syrian women—aprons dusted with ash, children underfoot—practiced holy anonymity. During the recent Syrian war, women again became the backbone of the industry, with cooperatives of refugee women keeping the ancient craft alive through networks that smuggled soap across borders and maintained production against all odds. They understood which local plants held alkaline power, that fire could release what earth had stored. Their domestic alchemy shaped the world, inspiring Marseille soap, Castile soap, the entire European lineage that followed.

Legend suggests women first discovered soap-making in Aleppo over 2,000 years ago, though like many ancient crafts, control eventually shifted toward male-dominated guilds and family businesses. The technology was born from domestic knowledge—understanding which local plants held alkaline power when burned for lye—though the specific plants used in early Aleppo production remain unclear in historical records.

Medieval Europe: Women as Village Alchemists

Medieval women adapted soap to harsher climates and abundant animal fats. But this period marked a crucial shift: the rise of guilds. Recipes appear in 14th-century manuscripts, often in male urban contexts. Women’s embodied knowledge competed with growing masculine authority.

By the 13th century, prominent soapmaking centers emerged across the European Mediterranean—Marseilles, Genoa, Venice, Castilla—regions rich in olive oil and barilla plants, coastal succulents whose salt-soaked ashes yielded sodium carbonate far superior to inland wood ash. Spanish barilla, containing up to 30% alkali, enabled the hard, white soaps that became Europe’s standard. Barilla ash transformed soap from household craft to trade commodity, shifting power from women’s kitchens to male-dominated guilds.

The Seasonal Ceremony

Soap was traditionally produced twice a year: spring and fall. Settlers who raised and slaughtered animals typically made soap in autumn. Soap smelled better if fats were fresh, and most slaughtering occurred in fall. Rendering—the cleaning of fats—was the smelliest part of the soapmaking operation. The smell was too strong to keep in anyone’s house. Soapmaking was an outside activity.

A barrel of soap took a full day: over 20 pounds of rendered fat, bushels of ash, six to eight hours of boiling. Women gathered around outdoor fires with wooden paddles, stirring and tending. Seasons determined the craft: winter’s ash, autumn’s fat, spring’s renewal.

Where Chemistry Met Craft

These women practiced early chemistry without naming it. They tested lye strength with the egg float test: if “a quarter of the shell shows,” the solution is laundry strength. Or the feather test: a chicken feather dissolves when the lye is right.

They distinguished strengths—laundry lye that floats an egg horizontally, shampoo lye where the egg suspends in the middle. Calibration was knowledge. Knowledge was survival.

Urban soapmakers elevated the craft with scented balls and specialty soaps, but the root remained: women’s experimentation, women’s intuition.

Sacred and Practical Boundaries

Medieval women working with fire, plants, transformation occupied complex social positions. Soap was primarily medicinal and hygienic—not for laundry. Powerful soap dissolved dirt, killed pathogens (though they didn’t know what pathogens were). Cleanliness was health.

But lye-based soap was harsh. It could clean or burn. Women understood both edges of the blade.

Their knowledge was revered, needed, feared.

The Great Extraction: How Women’s Knowledge Became Men’s Profit

By the 18th century, soap became profitable at scale. Companies extracted techniques refined by women and industrialized them. England outlawed small-scale production—requiring one-ton batches. Soap pans were locked at night by tax collectors to prevent “after-hours” production. Women’s knowledge became “manufacture.” Their alchemy became “science.” Their craft became corporate profit.

The deepest cut: women were told they were unqualified to practice what they had invented.

Revival & Reclamation: Women Restore the Lineage

After centuries of erasure, the lineage regenerated—not in factories but in kitchens and gardens. The back-to-the-land movement rekindled ancestral skills. Soapmaking returned as craft, ritual, resistance.

Women asked:What if I made my own medicine?My own food?My own cleansers?

Handmade soap became a refusal of toxins, exploitation, ecological amnesia. For women carrying ancestral wounds, stirring oils became sovereignty.

In my Vermont kitchen, my bars cure like emissaries of knowledge my children don’t yet recognize. They bathe in memory without knowing it—mine, but also the craft’s deeper memory.

I’m practicing ecological restoration at daily scale. Regeneration isn’t only about land; it’s about memory.

Alchemy of Care

Some crafts belong to museums, preserved behind glass. Soapmaking belongs to the body.

Saponification mirrors the alchemy of care: breaking down what harms, recombining what nourishes. Oil becomes structure. Caustic lye becomes gentleness. What was dangerous becomes medicine.

Even now, soapmaking retains ceremony—candlelight, gathered oils, precise lye, stirring until trace. Fire, water, earth, air united. Ritual recognizes itself across millennia.

My craft isn’t nostalgia—it’s future-building. A reclamation of technologies that predate industrial science. I do what my lineage has always done: protect the body, the household, the future—one small transformation at a time.

The Continuing Spell

After cutting bars, when they cure on shelves and the house fills with scent, I feel: you are not beginning this story; you are continuing it.

Lineage gathers behind my hands—Aleppo, Cyprus, medieval Europe. Anonymous, persistent, unbroken. Perhaps there were songs, rhythms born of soapmaking, though none survive. The work itself was the song.

Soapmaking is remembrance. When oil turns to soap, three elements create a fourth—cleansing. Alchemy is care made visible.

My children use my soaps without knowing the lineage they carry. One day, they may return to gestures their hands never learned but somehow remember. The body holds what the mind forgets.

Lineage is a tide. It always comes back.

So I keep making soap—slowly—deliberately—like tending a hearth burning across centuries. The bars cure. My children wash their hands. Time folds. The lineage continues.

This is how everyday work becomes alchemy. How alchemy becomes memory. How memory becomes a future worth living in.

Today: Hot Process, Present Tense

While researching this essay, I became inspired to try a different way of making soap—not the slow, translucent patience of cold process, but an older method: hot process. The kind that asks you to stay with it. To stand at the stove and keep stirring while the mixture goes through its strange, pudding-like phases, ugly and beautiful, until it finally comes through to the other side.

I set up my tools like a small, modern shrine to convenience: a crockpot with a lid, a digital scale, a digital thermometer. Plastic safety goggles instead of inherited instinct. I know exactly how much these innovations spare me. And still, as I stir, I find myself thinking of women hunched over open fires, watching smoke, reading bubbles, learning from burns.

I dedicate this pot to them. To the nameless stewards of knowledge whose hands never appeared in ledgers. To the women who never had the luxury of calling this “craft” because it was simply the work that stood between their families and illness.

In that ceramic pot with its tidy ON/OFF switch, I feel the old magic anyway. The batter thickening, the lye cooking out, the oils transforming. It is not metaphor when I say there is magic in every pot—that’s just another word for the moment matter stops being what it was and becomes what it needs to be.

I almost never document my soapmaking. Every time I reach for my phone, something in me resists. The process feels shy. Alive. It does not want to be flattened into content.

Stopping to frame a shot, to find the good angle, to clean a drip for the camera—that is a different ritual, one that serves the gaze more than the craft. Soapmaking, for me, is a kind of listening. To temperature. To texture. To the faint shift in scent when the lye is nearly spent. Interrupting that to perform for a screen feels like walking out of a conversation mid-sentence.

So there are no videos. No overhead tripod shots. No sped-up reels of batter reaching trace. There is just my body in a room, stirring. There is just a pot of transforming matter, and my attention as the only witness.

If I want to share this lineage, I have to do it the way it’s always been shared: in person, over a table, sleeves rolled up, eyes watching the same mixture thicken. That’s why I teach soapmaking at CraftStudies in White River Junction. The next class is on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2026—a good day to talk about what care actually looks like in practice.

If you come, you won’t just leave with a few bars of soap. You’ll leave with a gesture in your body: the feel of the spoon at trace, the weight of the oils, the nerve of working with lye and learning it is not something to fear but something to respect. You’ll leave having joined the line of people who know how to turn fat and ash and time into something that cleans without harm.

It’s not a big thing, in the way the world counts “big things.” But it is a quiet entry into an older contract: to keep, in your own hands, at least one small technology of care.

Also, you can get my soaps at the plantLust Botanicals Shop!

~Blair