Allison: In your occult practice, could you define the word ‘ritual’ for us, Mimi?
Mimi: A ritual is a sequence of actions performed in a fixed order, and it carries a meaning that has nothing to do with the practical function of those actions. This is what separates it from a routine. You can brush your teeth every morning at the same time with the same hand and it will remain, forever, the brushing of teeth. But perform that same action with a clear intention and invocation, within a deliberate beginning and end, with the understanding that you are in contact with something (or someone) beyond your own small busy self, and the whole thing changes character entirely. It has a before and an after now, and creates an opening or threshold you cross each time, where change can be possible.
In animist and occult understanding (including within witchcraft), ritual works because something conscious other than yourself meets you in it. You arrive with intention, and what / who you are addressing arrives, too. That might be a plant, a force, a spirit such as an ancestor, or simply a quality of attention that ordinary life rarely has the patience for. Either way, you are not in it alone. Routine is repetition. Ritual is repetition that is animated and answered.
Allison: Relating to ritual, how would you as a magic practitioner define the term ‘magic’?
Mimi: Magic is the practice of creating change through means that are not strictly material. That's the simplified version, and it's close to how Aleister Crowley defined it. In Daoist thought (Daoism being one of China's oldest philosophical-spiritual traditions, concerned with living in accordance with the natural order of the universe rather than against it), there isn't really a separate word for magic because the premise is different from the start. The Dao is the living intelligence running through all things, and a practitioner's work is to align with it rather than override it. What the West calls magic, Daoism might call working with ‘de’ life force, the inherent virtue or potency of a thing and the direction it naturally wants to move. You learn to read that, and then you work with it rather than against it. The I Ching (the ancient Chinese oracle) is a good example of this in practice.
Depending on the tradition of magic, there may be highly specific sequencing of steps, including invocations, use of symbolic features that signify a certain thing, but the degree of elaboration varies enormously. Some traditions are extraordinarily fixed, where a single mispronounced word or a candle placed an inch out of position is considered enough to collapse the whole spell. Others are far more fluid, treating the practitioner's intention and sensitivity as the primary instrument, with the external elements serving as supports rather than absolutes.
What they share, regardless of how much ceremony surrounds them, is that you are never simply acting on inert matter. You are always in conversation with something, magic operates through relationship.
Allison: How can we transform a simple daily routine into a meaningful sensory ritual that reconnects us to the earth and ourselves?
Mimi: The first thing I'd say is that ritual can range in complexity and sophistication, but at its core, it can be very simple and still work. A single action, done with full attention and a clear address, can be enough to begin. The mistake people make is thinking ritual requires fancy equipment or a dedicated evening under a blood moon or some other elaborate set of conditions. It doesn't. What it requires is a ritualized threshold, so you can consciously cross from one kind of time-space into another.
Take something as mundane as washing your hands. You've done it thousands of times without thinking about it, which is fine, that's what hands are for. But water has been understood across almost every tradition on earth as a carrier; it is an element that moves, that dissolves, that carries vibration. If you pause before you turn the tap and declare aloud, that you are washing away the unwanted energies you’ve picked up over the course of the morning, and you actually smell the soap and call on the botanicals’ spirits, and you hear the sound of water flowing water as her voice rather than background noise, you have just performed a ritual.
Scent is particularly good for this because it arrives in the body before the thinking mind has time to get in the way. A herb you love, something (or ‘someone’) with a real plant history behind it rather than a synthetic extract, can act as the signal that ordinary time has paused. And once your body learns to associate a particular scent with a particular quality of attention, it will begin to drop into that state almost on its own. You're essentially training your nervous system to recognise a doorway.
Allison: What does it mean to you that a plant has a spirit, and how does that change the way you work with botanicals?
Mimi: When I say a plant has a spirit, I mean it has an irreducible identity that exceeds its chemical composition. Lavender can be fully described as a set of compounds, linalool and linalyl acetate and so on, and those descriptions are real and useful. But they don't account for why lavender in a field in Provence at dusk feels categorically different from lavender extract in a lab. Something is present in the living thing that the analysis doesn't capture. In animism, that something is understood as personhood, loosely speaking. Not human personhood, plant personhood, which is its own order. The practical consequence is that I don't treat botanicals as raw materials. I treat them as beings. That changes how I source, how I prepare, how I use, and very much how I work with them on a physiological basis and in magical workings.
Allison: Beyond just being ingredients in a bottle, how do you view plants as "teachers" or "allies" in our personal healing journeys?
Mimi: In animist cosmology, plants are understood as having their own intelligence, their own history, their own personhood. Rose isn't just calming. Rose has a whole biography: where it grows, what conditions it favours, how it's been worked with across centuries of medicine and beauty and magic. When you bring Rose into your field, you're entering into contact with all of that. Healing, in this frame, is less about fixing yourself and more about who or what you choose to be in relationship with.
And when I say relationship, I mean it in the way that word actually demands to be meant. A responsible relationship with a plant ally looks like learning it before you use it, sourcing it carefully, not grabbing at it when you need something and ignoring it the rest of the time. It looks like reciprocity, offering something back, whether that's attention, or gratitude spoken aloud, or simply not taking more than you need. It looks like consistency, showing up to the relationship across seasons, across your own changing states, so that the contact deepens rather instead of just taking and taking.
Allison: What is the difference between a scent that smells good and a scent that actually does ‘something’?
Mimi: A scent that smells good is pleasurable, and pleasure on its own already counts as ‘something’. But a scent that does ‘something’ creates a response that moves beyond pleasure into action. The body shifts in some way, perhaps a memory surfaces, or maybe an emotion comes to your awareness, or that a decision becomes clearer for you, or the nervous system does something it wasn't doing before. You'll often recognize a working scent because the response feels slightly involuntary, and often the plant moved something in you that was already there beneath the surface. Good perfumery knows this distinction well. A scent that smells beautiful and does nothing can feel decorative. Now a scent that does something on a deeper level might not even be ‘conventionally’ beautiful. Vetiver, for example, is deeply polarizing, and it is one of the most effective grounding agents I work with.
Allison: Relating to scent doing ‘something’, how does scent help us shift our emotional state or find grounding in the modern world?
Mimi: Scent is the only sense that bypasses the thalamus and routes directly to the limbic system. Every other sense gets processed before it reaches the emotional and memory centres of the brain. Scent arrives there first, which means it can shift your state before you've consciously decided to shift.
What makes this particularly relevant in 2026 is that most of us are living in states that are quite removed from the natural world and physical sensation. The average person spends the majority of their waking hours looking at a screen, receiving information through their eyes and ears in a mediated form, processed, filtered, optimized for engagement. The body is physically present, but not somatically participating.
Scent reminds you that you have a body, that the body is animal, and that the animal is still, underneath everything, oriented toward the living world.
Allison: We’re so excited you’ll be part of our upcoming Scent Salon, offering your Magick of Tea. When you sit with someone over tea, what are you listening for?
Mimi: What I'm really doing in Magick of Tea is listening to two things at once, though we're adapting the format a little for Sangre de Fruta's Scent Salon to accommodate more attendees. I'm reading the person's field, which is something I do as a psychic medium, and I'm listening to what Tea herself is telling me about them. Those two sources of information don't always match what the person is saying out loud, and that gap is usually where the insights can be valuable.
The mediumship I practise isn't the fortune-telling kind, though it can be predictive. It's more that I'm permeable to what's present in actuality and potentiality, and Tea amplifies that. The plant has her own intelligence and her own way of responding to a person, and when I'm pouring for someone I'm paying attention to what Tea is doing, how she's opening, the subtle sensations in my own body as it can be a conduit, visions that may flicker inside my mind.
Tea is also a cultural plant for me in a way that goes beyond practice. I'm Taiwanese-Canadian, and gong fu cha, the tradition I work within, comes from lands I and my ancestors walked. Tea has been cultivated, traded, ceremonialized, and fought over for a long, long time. There is a history in her that is both beautiful and tragic, colonial trade routes, the Opium Wars, entire economies built on her back. When I pour Tea I'm aware of all of that. I'm an inheritor of this tradition, which means she already knew me before I knew her, in some sense. That depth of relationship changes what I'm able to receive from her, and what she's willing to show me about the person sitting across from me.
