Aromatherapy and the Mind. Julia LawlessЧитать онлайн книгу.
practical purpose of disguising the odour of burning flesh and purifying the area of germs or infection.
It was the Romans, however, who began to use incense increasingly lavishly for this purpose, until vast sums were being squandered on it. It is reported that the whole of Arabia could not produce in a year as much incense as was burned in one day by the Emperor Nero upon the death of his consort, Poppaea. As Pliny pointed out laconically:
Arabia’s good fortune has been caused by the luxury of mankind even in the hours of death, when they burn over the departed the products which they had originally understood to have been created for the gods.8
With the Romans, incense also began to be used increasingly for secular rather than religious purposes. The Romans were renowned for their love of sweet-smelling perfumes and ‘unguents’, which they used to scent their hair, their bodies, their clothes, their beds, their baths and even the walls of their houses. Of frankincense, Ovid said, ‘If it is pleasing to the Gods, it is no less useful to mortals’9 and Plutarch observed that through scent alone, ‘imaginary worries are smoothed like a mirror’.10 Indeed, the enormous quantities of ‘foreign essences’ imported by the Romans, and the consequent pressure which incense and perfume put on the treasury, may have been a substantial factor in the final collapse of the Empire.
THE BIBLE AND THE JEWISH TRADITION
Nowhere has the ritual use of incense been more exactly prescribed than in the Jewish tradition. When the Jews left Egypt in 1240 BC, they took many Egyptian customs with them, including their use of incense. During their exodus, Moses was given a number of commandments by the Lord, including instructions on how to construct an incense altar and make a holy incense:
Take sweet spices: storax, onycha [labdanum], galbanum, sweet spices and pure frankincense in equal parts, and compound an incense, such a blend as the perfumer might make, salted, pure and holy. Crush a part of it into a fine powder, and put some of this in front of the Testimony in the Tent of Meeting, the place appointed for my meetings with you. You must regard it as most holy. You are not to make any incense of similar composition for your own use. You must hold it to be holy thing, reserved for Yahweh. Whoever copies it for use as a perfume shall be outlawed from his people.11
Incense, in this context, is regarded as something extremely precious and sacred – it is to be burned at the meeting-place of man and God. The high priests made their offerings in front of the curtains of the innermost sanctuary, but its use was forbidden to laymen. When Korah and his 250 followers rebelled against the priesthood, Moses and Aaron put them to the test by challenging them to carry censers filled with incense before the Tent of Meeting. Then the Lord appeared to the gathered crowd, destroyed the rebels with fire and ordered the bronze censers to be picked out of the ashes and hammered into sheets to cover the altar. Later, in order to protect the rest of the community, Moses said to Aaron:
Take the censer, fill it with fire from the altar, put incense in it and hurry to the community to perform the rite of atonement over them. The wrath has come down from Yahweh and the plague has begun. Aaron did as Moses said and ran among the assembly, but the plague was already at work among them. He put in the incense and performed the rite of atonement over the people. Then he stood between the living and the dead, and the plague stopped.12
Here, incense is being used for purification purposes, not only to wash away the sins of the people, but also to kill infection and prevent disease from spreading, much in the same way as it was used during the Great Plague of 1665. The priestly habit of burning aromatics between themselves and the populace during a service also served as a protective barrier against germs. Likewise, the purification rites of Hebrew women employed many aromatics. In the year before marriage, it was customary for Hebrew women to undergo a purification ritual for six months using firstly oil of myrrh, followed by a further six months using frankincense and other scented unguents. Women also generally wore a small cloth bag containing myrrh and other aromatics suspended as a necklet between their breasts. The perfume was slowly released by contact with the body. It is clear from Mesopotamian and Biblical sources that women were particularly skilled in the art of perfumery and the employment of aromatic medicaments from early times.
After the Jews’ arrival in ‘The Promised Land’, a guild of apothecaries or perfumers was set up. The most famous guild members belonged to the family of Abtinas. They acquired the monopoly of preparing the incense for temple worship and made about 370 lbs per annum (one mina for each day’s offering plus three minas for the Day of Atonement). The incense was carried from the House of Abtinas by a chosen priest in a golden vessel. Then, while the congregation waited outside in silence, the priest threw the incense into the fire on the altar, bowed towards the Holy of Holies and carefully withdrew backwards. The rising incense smoke veiled the manifest form of Yahweh from the priest and congregation and protected them from the danger of his immediate holiness. Also, perhaps it was the pervasive fragrance of the burning incense itself that brought about the imminent presence of the deity.
Around the time of Christ, the Abtinas family asked the Temple authorities for a price increase, which was turned down. When the Abtinas refused to divulge their formula, saying they feared that the incense might be used for idolatrous sacrifices, they were replaced by Egyptian apothecaries who had access to the original formula related to Moses – but who could not make the smoke ascend correctly. The Abtinas family were then reinstated at a substantially higher salary! According to Josephus, the Abtinas formula contained 13 ingredients, which, in addition to those listed in the original recipe, included myrrh, cassia, spikenard, saffron, costus, mace, cinnamon and their ‘secret herb’. This last one imparted the property of making the smoke ascend in the shape of a date palm.
According to Maimonides, the Jewish physician and philosopher, the use of incense in the worship of the Jews actually originated from the practice of using aromatics to disguise the disagreeable odours arising from the burning of sacrificial animals, although he also mentions that it must have raised the spirits of the priests as well. Later, the scent of incense came to replace the odour of burnt offerings altogether. At this time the Hebrews believed, like the Egyptians, that the gods were nourished by odours and that all ethereal beings fed on vapours, not on solid food. On Mount Sinai, the Lord revealed to Moses how he would vent his fury if the people did not listen to him by smashing their incense altars so he could no longer breathe their appeasing fragrance
Incense, of course, was already in use throughout Israel at the time of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, and was in some areas an intrinsic part of their pagan form of worship. Excavations have revealed that there were at least seven different types of incense vessels in use during this period and that incense burning went back a far as chalcolithic times (fourth millennium BC) in Palestine. It is probable that the Israelites took over the Canaanite incense vessels which they used for the expression of local cult worship. It is clear that the priestly editors of the ancient traditions erased many elements of popular religion when they set about compiling the old Jewish texts, since they did not conform to their ideal.
CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN DAY RITUALS
There can be little doubt that the scorn and revulsion with which incense was regarded in the early days of Christianity resulted from its heavy usage in pagan rituals and by the Jews. Consequently, for the first four centuries AD incense was used in Christian churches primarily as a sanitary aid rather than a religious tool. However, in the fourth century AD, Constantine the Great inaugurated the Peace of the Church which affirmed the use of incense in Christian practice in response to growing public pressure. Since then, some Christian sects have taken to using aromatics intensively as part of their ritual, while others have virtually abandoned its use altogether. The Coptic, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches still use incense extensively,