Frankincense
The Rainbow Bridge
The Scent of Civilizations
The Medicinal Herb & Oil
The Neuroendocrine Essential Oil
Frankincense's Energetic & Spiritual Functions
The Source of Frankincense Resin & Essential Oil
The Scent of Civilizations
The
slow-moving, ceremonial procession is headed by two-hundred girls in
white gowns bearing golden pitchers of aromatic waters, followed by
two-hundred youths in purple tunics bearing bowls of incense. The girls
manually sprinkle the fragrant waters over the crowd; the young men in
turn smudge the crowd with billows of fragrant precious resins. The
youths are followed by two huge smoldering braziers of incense carried
by litter-bearers, and finally a golden altar supporting a large statue
of a serene god, around whose feet burn frankincense, myrrh and saffron.
This is
not an opening scene from a Cecil B. de Mille movie. This is just the
typical start of a holy day from any one of the ancient Western cultures
- Sumeria, Babylon, Egypt, Assyria, Greece and Rome. Frankincense, the
precious resin from Saudi Arabia and East Africa, is the ubiquitous
fragrance in these cultures. Like a Rainbow Bridge, it is the olfactory
link that binds the long history of the West into a single tapestry.
Frankincense is an important archetypal soul scent of almost all Western
cultures and religions, right up to modern Judaic and Christian
societies.
More specifically, frankincense is the timeless incense of the
Western sun-gods of the Sumerians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians,
Hebrews and Greeks. It is the most consistently used scent in Western
religious practices, both ceremonial and meditational, and is virtually
synonymous with incense. The resin was censed on one hand to create an
aromatic human connection to these divines in an desire for
transcendental union. Frankincense operates by inducing the state of
focused contemplation necessary for aspiration to the divine, to the
spirit. On the other hand, the resin was burnt to bless and inspire
humans with the very fragrance of divinity. Its divine power would
effectively disperse the forces of evil or negative energy that were
responsible for disease and bad karma among humans. It was the scent of
purification.
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Moreover,
at different times and places, the resin was also an important product
in perfumery, skin care and medicine. It's important to recognize that
most of the natural fragrance materials commonly used in perfumery and
aromatherapy today were also used in a similar way then: for personal
perfuming and hygienic aromatherapy practices. Then as now, many ancient
Western cultures in one way or another exhibited the division between
the sacred and the secular. Resins like frankincense, myrrh and galbanum
therefore also saw extensive secular applications in addition to sacred
applications. The main difference between then and now is that ancient
peoples made more extensive use of fragrance for individual perfumery
than we do today. Likewise, because their daily hygienic practices were
often intimately connected with the employment of fragrances, their
day-to-day aromatherapy applications went far beyond today's
aromatherapy in terms of quantity, diversity and ingenuity.
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The ancient concept of hygiene was different from modern hygiene as a
specific concept of bacterio-logical asepsis or aseptic sanitation.
Hygiene involved the promotion of good, pleasing smells on the body and
in the daily environment, as disease and negative energy was thought to
spread on the back of nasty odors: bad smells were synonymous with
disease itself (this barring diseases arising from spiritual causes).
Despite nineteenth-century germ theory, today this makes complete sense,
as pleasing scents exert a positive neuroendocrine-immunologic effect
on individual health and well-being (psychoneuroimmunology). Traditional
hygiene therefore simply meant keeping the house, the streets and, most
importantly, the body, always fragrant. Natural resins like
frankincense and other plant extracts thus played a crucial twofold
role. First, in hygienic topical and environmental aromatherapy for
keeping illness and negative energy at bay. Second, in personal
perfumery for the enjoyment of the fragrance itself. Some cultures, such
as the Egyptian and Roman, emphasized the perfumery aspect of natural
aromas, whereas Jewish and Arab cultures, for instance, laid much
importance on their hygienic aspect. Clearly, the notion that the
ancients used fragrance merely as an aesthetic blanket for bad smells is
an impoverished one.
Somalis,
Arabs and Bedouins have collected frankincense resin from the small
desert trees of Saudi Arabia and Somalia for many a millennia. They
traded the various grades of resin with a relay of Arab traders who
ferried them along the overland spice road. Frankincense thereby
eventually reached the major cultural centers of Mesopotamia to the
northeast and Egypt to the northwest, where it was an extremely precious
commodity, sometimes worth more than silver or gold. The Sumerians, for
instance, incorporated Frankincense in their extensive use of botanical
aromatics, most of which were cultivated in what is thought to be the
original biblical Garden of Eden. Skincare and perfumery uses for the
resin, which survive to this day, date back to the third or fourth
millennium B.C. in the highly-developed Sumerian civilization. According
to Greek historian Heredotus, the Babylonians used to burn vast amounts
of resins in their sacred rites to their vast pantheon of gods, for
example to the sun god Bael. They also developed the science of aromatic
astrology to unprecedented heights, as interpretive astronomy was a
core science of their civilization. We may assume that frankincense was
also an important aromatic in ceremonies in which the king consummated
his sacred marriage with the Goddess at the summit of the ziggurat, the
pyramidal temple palace that represented the sacred point of contact
between heaven and earth (more on this below).
The
Egyptians continued the time-worn tradition of bringing down the divine
favors of the sun-gods with the use of frankincense. Specific incense
blends were burnt at dawn, midday and dusk throughout the kingdom.
Frankincense was a component of kyphi, the temple incense burnt
in Heliopolis every sunset to honor the setting of the sun-god Rê. Queen
Hatshepsut was a big-scale importer of resins from the land of Punt,
Somaliland, such as myrrh, frankincense and opopanax, and began her own
cultivation of boswellia plants in the Nile river delta, where they
still grow today. Her tomb of 1480 B.C. contains large murals of
frankincense plants. Although for most of Egyptian civilisation the
sacred resins and plant oils were in the domain of the priests, in the
reign of Ramses III the latter started making them available to the
upper classes. Eventually, like the Sumerians before them, the Egyptians
incorporated most aromatics into everyday life. Late-dynasty queen
Cleopatra's extravagant use of fragrance is well-documented - her
encounter, for example, with Mark Anthony - from the aromatic billows of
the reception boat to the seductive scents of her bed-chamber.
Cosmetic
applications of frankincense dating to ancient times include the use of
kohl, which consisted of several resins ground and charred, for a black
eyeliner that originally served to ward off the evil eye; the use of a
multi-ingredient paste to perfume the hands; the use of molten
frankincense for a depilatory paste (Heredotus). Just as in Arabic
society to the present day, frankincense in Jewish culture was
originally considered the most effective scent for attracting divine
blessings and dispersing evil spirits. It was (and sometimes still is)
censed to purify living and work quarters as well as synagogues and
mosques, with the optional addition of some benzoin and aloeswood. Ever
since the edict of the prophet Moses to the Hebrews around 1500 B.C. to
make sacred aromatic offerings, levonah, frankincense, was burnt
in braziers on the incense altar morning and evening - eventually in the
main Temple sanctuary in Jerusalem, and in outlying synagogues. The
precious resin was kept in a great chamber within the Temple, together
with other spices. Its use according to the prescribed proportions,
together with other ingredients composing the sacred incense, was
forbidden for secular purposes. Later sacred incense recipes from the
Talmud also include frankincense, along with about sixteen other
ingredients. However, note that frankincense was not used in any
anointing oil recipes, such as the one found in the Book of Wisdom:
anointing oils have associations with the sensuous biblical Song of
Songs and the visit to Solomon of the beguiling queen of Sheeba.
Frankincense was also traditionally offered on its own as a supplement
to sacrifice for firstfruits, for the meal offering and the Shabbat
showbread.
The oldest Temple incense recipe, according to the Book of Exodus, was stacte (possibly myrrh), onycha (musk), galbanum and frankincense.
Christian church incense has always used frankincense as the
predominant component, with optional secondary amounts of benzoin and/or
myrrh. The Russian orthodox church, in contrast, utilizes mainly
benzoin with optional myrrh, frankincense and others.
Frankincense
saw restrained use in Greece, being offered mainly to the sun-god
Apollo in his various temples. The same was true in early Rome, when the
physicians Celsus and Gelenus discussed the resin Olibanum or Mascula
thura (as it was known) in their many textbooks on remedies and
aromatics. In imperial Rome, however, this was no longer true.
Benefitting from both the silk road from Central Asia and the spice road
from Saudi Arabia, Rome imported ever-increasing amounts of aromatics
from all corners of the globe, spending them on endless prodigal social
banquets and ceremonies, both secular and sacred. To the emperor Nero
belongs the dubious distinction of once spending four million sestertii
(about $115,000 or £70,000 in today's currency) to fragrance a single
party. Rome's lavish expenditure on frankincense alone rivaled that of
any previous culture: during the first century A.D., Rome managed to
burn up almost 3,000 tons of the costly resin. And surpassing even
himself, on the death of his wife Poppaea, the emperor Nero decided to
burn at her funeral more than the entire annual output of Arabian
frankincense. We can understand why, in return, the Romans privileged
Saudi Arabia with the name Arabia felix, Arabia the Blessed.
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