Goodie Bag for Nov. 15 - Like an Evening Sacrifice: The Sacred Story of Incense
Below the fold: some process videos for a Crucifixion painting on paper
In today’s Goodie Bag post, we’ll look at some of the history of incense in Christian and other religious practices; what is it, where does it come from and what does it symbolise?
Below the fold this week, I have a series of, I hope, helpful photos and short videos showing the process I used drawing a Gothic figure for a painting - I suppose amounting to a tutorial of sorts.
One of our paid members has been working on a drawing of the crucified Christ from a download I offered a couple of weeks ago of the Dorchester altarpiece, a rare surviving Gothic fresco from a medieval monastery in England. So I said I’d do it too, and share progress.
As as study tool there’s really no better way to learn than copying, but even tracing is helpful. Any technique that focuses your visual intellect on the image, combined with the physical movement of hand on paper, really creates new neural pathways. This is how all artists have been trained since always.
If you’re feeling ambitious, once you’ve got the knack of it a bit, wouldn’t it be fun to reproduce this precious Gothic treasure as a work of devotional art for your own home? The image is clear and linear, without a lot of modelling (what we call “shading” in the biz) on the drapery. It being done in a monochrome leaves it open to either recreating it exactly the same, or to adding colours of your own.
I thought so myself and therefore, I think I’m going to have a go at it, and as a challenge, whoever wants to join me, we can compare notes when we’re done. I’ve been really stuck in my own art practice lately, and there’s nothing like a little simple drawing exercise to get things going again.
As an Evening Sacrifice: the Story of Incense
Let my prayer be set before You as incense,
The lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice.
Psalm 141:2
If you grew up in the 60s and 70s as I did, you probably associate incense with the hippies, drifting clouds of sandalwood wafting through bead-curtained or macrame doorways, accompanied by a scratchy record of sitar music, all masking the unmistakable scent of… ahem… let’s call it countercultural rebellion. But long before it became the fragrance of bell-bottomed, narcissistic pseudo-enlightenment and bohemian chic, incense was a sacred staple of religious life for thousands of years, the sweet fragrance symbolising human communication between earth and heaven.
Today burning sticks or pressed cones of incense remains popular among the vaguely “spiritual but not religious” 1st World New Age and Neo-pagan crowd, but I thought we could look at it from a historical and symbolic point of view. As Christians: what is it, where does it come from, how long have people been using it for their religious practices, and how is it still used by Christians in our time?
Boswellia - the incense trees
Incense is a simple yet extraordinary substance. The most prized varieties, frankincense and myrrh, are the dried resins of rare desert-dwelling trees from the genus Boswellia and Commiphora. These hardy shrubs grow in some of the most unforgiving environments on earth, on the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, south eastern Africa and parts of India. Harvested by making careful incisions in the bark, the tree produces a sap that hardens into beads or “tears” of resin which are gathered and used as incense.
It isn’t only used for incense. The resin of one variety of incense tree, Boswellia serrata, is known to have anti-inflammatory properties and is used in India for medicinal applications for arthritis and similar inflammatory diseases.
The incense trade was one of the most lucrative and closely guarded industries of the ancient world. The resinous tears of frankincense and myrrh were worth their weight in gold and were sought after by empires from Mesopotamia to Rome and formed the economic foundation of whole nations.
Lost incense City of Ubar, found
The incense trade is a couched in romance, legend and myth. Controlled by a handful of tribes in southern Arabia, the incense routes stretched across deserts and seas, making the Arabian peninsula, India and East Africa the global centres. Temples, tombs, and royal courts alike demanded a steady supply, ensuring the wealth and influence of those who controlled its flow.
One of those legendary Arabian incense cities was known as Ubar, or Iram of the Pillars in the Islamic scriptures. A story worthy of an Indiana Jones movie, the Lost City of Ubar remained a myth until it was rediscovered in the 1990s. In the unforgiving deserts of southern Arabia, Ubar was a vital hub along the frankincense routes that linked the resin-producing regions of modern Oman and Yemen. According to legend, Ubar was a city of immense wealth and splendour, but it was the victim of some catastrophic geological event - characterised in Islamic legend as the wrath of God in punishment for lust and greed - and was lost to history and the desert sands.
Modern research found that Ubar’s fortunes began to fade as maritime trade routes supplanted the slower and more expensive overland camel caravan trails. But the catastrophe most likely came from having exhausted its underground water supply, a large limestone cavity under the city which collapsed - Ubar died of its own success.
Incense and the gods
The Old and New Testaments have innumerable references to incense, both pragmatic and symbolic, but its use far predates even the earliest Jewish religious practice. Incense was central to Egyptian religious life, with evidence of its use as early as 3000 BC, with Plutarch making specific reference to its use in both votive and medicinal applications.
Temples used incense, called kyphi, a blend of tree resins, honey, wine, spices and other aromatic ingredients, during religious purification and sacrificial offerings to the gods. Recipes for making Egyptian incense were recorded in papyrus scrolls and temple inscriptions, and are recorded by Greek historians, including by by Dioscorides in his materia medica. Incense smoke symbolised ritual purification and communication with the divine. Frankincense and myrrh were key components in mummification and funerary ceremonies, believed to sanctify the body and guide the soul to the afterlife.
Incense was used similarly by the Sumerians, Babylonians and Assyrians, and the Indus Valley civilisation (2500 -1900 BC). Incense appears in early Vedic texts (c. 1500 BC) which mentions burning aromatic substances in fire sacrifices. Frescos and artefacts from Minoan Crete (c. 2000 - 1500 BC) depict the use of incense burners in rituals. The association of incense with goddess worship in Crete suggests its role in fertility and nature rites.
Incense made from aromatic woods was used in the far east from earliest times. The Chinese were burning incense in religious rituals honouring ancestors and deities by 2000 BC. Archaeological finds include early incense burners and evidence of aromatic woods like sandalwood. The ancient Chinese used mixtures of herbs and plant products such as cassia, cinnamon, styrax, and sandalwood. Buddhists brought incense Korea and Japan by the 6th century AD.
Incense in Jewish temple practices and in Christian prayer
Suffice to say that the use of incense in religious and medicinal applications is a human universal and has been for as long as we started writing things down. In the Old Testament, God Himself gives Moses the specific recipe for making incense for the tabernacle, making it clear that the incense was to be set apart exclusively for religious purpose and would perform a sacred function:
Take sweet spices, stacte, and onycha, and galbanum, sweet spices with pure frankincense (of each shall there be an equal part), and make an incense blended as by the perfumer, seasoned with salt, pure and holy; and you shall beat some of it very small, and put part of it before the testimony in the tent of meeting where I shall meet with you; it shall be for you most holy. And the incense which you shall make according to its composition, you shall not make for yourselves; it shall be for you holy to the LORD. Whoever makes any like it to use as perfume shall be cut off from his people.
Christianity, inheriting much from Jewish temple practices, embraced incense from its earliest days, though its use was initially symbolic rather than liturgical.
The Book of Revelation offers a vivid image of incense mingling with the prayers of the saints before the throne of God, a direct link between the material and the spiritual.
Another angel, who had a golden censer, came and stood at the altar. He was given much incense to offer, with the prayers of all God’s people, on the golden altar in front of the throne. The smoke of the incense, together with the prayers of God’s people, went up before God from the angel’s hand.
Revelation 8
As Christianity moved from house churches to basilicas, incense became a physical expression of prayer, moral purification and the sanctification of sacred places. By the end of the fourth century, it was firmly entrenched in Christian worship, used to honour the altar, venerate relics, and accompany processions. The sweet-smelling smoke symbolised the rising of prayers to heaven and the purification of sacred spaces, while its lingering fragrance created a sensory reminder of the divine presence.
The Eastern and Western traditions diverged somewhat in their use of incense. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, incense plays a central role in nearly every service, wafting through the air in intricate patterns during the chanting of hymns and prayers of the liturgy of the hours as well as the Divine Liturgy. The censer itself often becomes an object of reverence, adorned with bells that chime as it swings, representing the harmony of creation. Meanwhile, in the Western Latin rite, incense was reserved for specific solemnities and rituals, such as High Mass, Solemn Vespers, funerals, and the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.
In a recent conference for a retreat given to to the Order of Malta, Fr. Stephen Morrison, OPraem, described the meaning of incense in Christian worship:
Incense is symbolic both in its burning and in its effect; the use of frankincense – a precious commodity in the ancient world, and not cheap even today – is already a sacrifice, of a monetary kind, purchased for God, even before it is consumed by fire. Then it is burnt, that is, totally offered, by being spread over burning charcoals.
The symbols of gift and of consummation are then crowned with the symbolism of the sweet-smelling smoke – evoking ethereal, other-worldly holiness, masking all worldly or ordinary malodorous influences, seeming simultaneously to mask our vision of the holy things, and lead us to a greater vision of them; then the smoke rising upwards becomes symbolic of prayer, and its gentle settling back downwards in the air symbolises the return gift of grace descending upon us.
The Sacred Images Project is a reader-supported publication where we talk about Christian life, thought, history and culture through the lens of the first 1200 years of sacred art. It’s my full time job, but it’s still not bringing a full time income, so I can’t yet provide all the things I want to and am planning for. You can subscribe for free to get one and a half posts a week.
For $9/month you also get the second half of the weekly Friday Goodie Bag post, plus a weekly paywalled in-depth article on this great sacred patrimony. There are also occasional extras like downloadable exclusive high resolution printable images, ebooks, mini-courses, videos and eventually podcasts.
If you would prefer to set up a recurring donation in an amount of your choice, or make a one-off contribution, you can do that at my studio blog.
This helps me a lot because the patronages through the studio blog are not subject to the 10% Substack fee.
I’ve been restocking the online shop with some of the printed items for this year’s Sacred Images Project Christmas market. People tell me all the time - and I’ve found this myself - how difficult it can be to find really nice religious cards and decorations for Christmas. So I’m focusing this year on cards and tree ornaments that will bring some medieval imagery into your holidays.
You can buy one of the wood panel prints of the Virgin of the Embroidered Foliage at the shop, and lots of other nice things.
Join us below the fold:
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to The Sacred Images Project to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.