Incense Magick (3 page)

India

One of the most widely used aromatics in the world, sandalwood, was once abundant in India and was one of its most famous exports. Many other important aromatics that are still widely used in incense also emerged from this fragrant land. Benzoin and dammar resins are potent aromatics with scents that are deep and mysterious. Vetiver, patchouli, and dragon's blood all hail from India as well. Even today the marketplaces in India are filled with exotic botanicals that are the stuff of incense makers' dreams. In the modern world we have access to even more aromatics than were available to previous generations, but one could easily spend a lifetime in India learning of new botanicals and new incense making methods.

India is currently a major producer of incense, but sadly the bulk of its market is built on low-quality incense filled with synthetic ingredients. There are still those in India who produce incense in the wonderful traditional fashion, but in an effort to capture uneducated consumers with lower prices, the present incense industry on the whole does not represent the glory of the Indian incense tradition.

Asia

Throughout Asia and the other lands they so strongly influenced, aromatic materials were sought and used in incense. While I can only brush upon a few highlights here, the incense traditions of Asia could be the study of your entire life and you'd never learn it all. Innovation and experimentation with respect for tradition characterizes the various incense cultures of Asia past and present.

Incense Pellet

This ungracious term describes a type of incense rarely seen in America. The incense pellet is in a category that I call “moist incense” and is believed to be an outgrowth of Asian medical practices. We all know that some medications are quite foul tasting, and this was just as true in an Asian medical culture that was steeped in herbal medications. As a result, Asian healers began mixing the distasteful ingredients with honey, jam, fruit, and other foods and spices to disguise the bad taste at some time in the distant past. A mixture was made in the proper proportions and then rolled into pea-sized balls small enough to swallow. Somewhere along the way, this approach was adopted into incense making traditions. Small balls of incense are made using honey or similar materials to help the balls hold their shape. Once cured and added to a hot coal, the incense pellet gives off an intense, mysterious scent that is difficult to achieve with any other form of incense.

Incense Clocks

Numerous cultures have experimented with using incense as timekeeping devices, but nowhere did this process become more sophisticated than in Asia. In the centuries before reliable mechanical clocks, many devices were used to tell time, including candles, water clocks, and incense. This has ranged from the simple process of waiting for an incense stick to completely burn, to incense trails where the scent changed as a form of alarm, to sophisticated clocks that even used bells to mark time audibly. A bell would be tied to the incense stick with a thin thread; when the incense burned through the thread, the bell would drop with a loud clang. This is useful knowledge for those of us who use incense as part of formal spells or rituals, as these setups can allow us to use incense to time particular parts of our rituals—how long to chant, when to move to the next phase, etc. As late as the twentieth century, incense was used to time a visit with a Japanese Geisha. As mentioned earlier, incense is still used as a timekeeping device in parts of Africa.

China

With the creation of the Han Empire around 200
bce
, the modern region we call China was founded (although it took its name from the later Chin dynasty). What grew to be the massive nation of modern China took centuries to unite. It was already a true empire when contact was first made with the West and arguably remains so until this very day. Still, much of the knowledge of Chinese incense making remains a guarded secret. There was a time in Chinese history, during the age of empires, when contact with Westerners was limited to conducting trade and nothing more. While Westerners could enjoy China's amazing scent, the inner secrets of those scents remained hidden. Even after the end of the nineteenth-century Opium War, when greater contact with the West was created through a terrible set of maneuvers by various European powers, incense continued to be a novelty to the Europeans while it was treasured by the Chinese.

While China's exported incense industry has fallen victim to the same forces that drive the modern incense making industry in India, high quality incense is still produced and consumed there. Thanks in great part to Buddhist practices, the art of fine incense making continues throughout China. Alongside greater trade with China has also come greater availability to Chinese botanicals. Even in the twenty-first century there is only limited access to truly high-quality Chinese incense; perhaps one day an enterprising individual will begin importing high-end Chinese incense.

Due to its vast growth throughout history, China had much the same effect on its continent as Rome did in Europe. Disparate peoples eventually became linked by Imperial roads and trade routes. This led to the exchange of many different goods from greatly distant places. One of the keys to the creation of incredible and unique incense is availability to a wide variety of materials, and China has had that type of access for more than a thousand years.

Tibet

The dangerous mountains of Tibet might seem like an unlikely place to find masters of incense making, but from the mountain tops to the valley floors, Tibet has long been known as one of the primary producers of natural incense. Much of the incense of Tibet is characterized by deep, heavy, earthy scents. The richness of Tibetan incense comes from incense often made in small batches by hand in small villages. Projects are underway to use incense to bring a measure of financial assistance to poverty-stricken villages in Tibet. Sadly there are also some low-quality incense mass produced in Tibet, so read labels carefully and use all of the information in this book to help guide you to the best that Tibet has to offer. Costus, galangal, juniper, and many other aromatics blend together to make the unique incense of Tibet worth the effort to locate. The finest frankincense sticks I have ever burned came from this land shrouded in the clouds.

Japan

In the last 750 years Japan has arguably become the center of the incense universe. There was a time when a gentleman in Japan was judged not only by his prowess in the arts of war but also by the arts of flower arranging, poetry, and incense making. Creating personal incense blends was very common in feudal Japan with the intent to create a unique fragrance as a type of olfactory signature.

The art of incense making and incense enjoyment reached its current zenith in the incense world in Japan. The oldest incense making companies in the world are in Japan, with many of them using recipes developed within their companies hundreds of years ago. Several Japanese incense companies are older than the entire United States! The center of the incense making universe is—in my opinion—in Kyoto, Japan.

The kodo ceremony encapsulates the most advanced classification system ever devised for an incense ingredient (aloeswood). Kodo will be discussed further in chapter 9. Incense makers apprentice for decades before being allowed to create their precious blends, attesting to the supremacy of the art of incense found in Japan. Japan is also home to the only major incense producer (that I am aware of) that actually lists ingredients of their incense: Shoyeido. From dissimilar ingredients as star anise, cloves, cinnamon, and kyara, Japanese incense masters create blends that can transport us to worlds never before imagined. It is my life's dream to one day visit Kyoto and experience firsthand the magick created there.

America

When most people think of incense, the New World rarely springs to mind, yet the Americas have valuable incense traditions that are more widely practiced than one might at first think. Remember that Europeans first visited the Americas in part in search for a shorter route to India for its rare spices, fabrics, and other goods for trade. I imagine none of the early explorers paid much attention to the aromatic treasures all around them in the Americas.

North America

North America has its own native incense traditions that, much to our good fortune, were not destroyed by Europeans' attempts to “civilize” the Native Americans through forced cultural changes, theft, disease, deceit, and the offering of “salvation.” Wonderful North American aromatics such as sweet grass, white sage, desert sage, piñon, western cedar, and more are still available. The modern Neopagan and New Age cleansing practice of “smudge bundling” is the direct legacy of Native American incense traditions. Any who have performed cleansing with a sage bundle know firsthand the incredible power in that herb and the wisdom of the Native Americans who first put it to use.

Central and South America

The Latinized nations of the Americas also have proud incense traditions whose origins are lost in the mists of time. From Aztecs to Mayans to Olmecs, the pre-Columbian civilizations had powerful incense customs and botanicals. Damiana, copal, tonka beans, palo santo, and more come to use from these regions. Incan priests would mix aromatics with blood, some taken directly from the scrotum, and burn the incense mixture while asking the gods for guidance.

I had the great privilege of touring a pre-Columbian exhibition a few years ago. Although all of the information and artifacts were amazing to view, I was naturally drawn to a display of ritual tools. While the energies of the artifacts made it clear that they were from different origins and separated by many years in their use, the display was still nearly overwhelming. In particular I was drawn to the ancient censers. It was very moving to stand inches from a censer that was once used in rituals that guided an empire. It was begging to be used again, so it was difficult to keep my hands to myself! However, I didn't think the curators would share my enthusiasm to burn some palo santo and copal in their archeological treasure.

Clearly this chapter is not intended to be a comprehensive history of incense use in the world—that alone would fill one or more books. Instead I want to introduce the sweeping worldwide inclusion of incense into life. It is easy to look at a single culture as the progenitor of incense, but in reality, incense has been a part of many societies on every settled continent. I hope that reading this information will encourage you to read more about the topic. You will find several interesting books in the bibliography to guide you in this discovery.

Synthetic versus Natural Incense

There is an important distinction between two basic ways of making incense: synthetic and natural. Synthetic incense is made using artificial scents (often petroleum by-products) that are laboratory versions of natural ingredients. On the other hand, we have incense made using only natural products. There are a few brands of commercial incense that are combinations of natural and synthetic, but those are very rare. Although both types of incense have their uses, it is critical to understand the differences between them.

Synthetic Incense

This is by far the most common type of commercial incense sold in the world. Even in Japan—the country best known for high-quality incense—synthetic incense is the type most frequently used. Synthetic incense can come in any form. Cones, sticks, coils, and even loose incense are commonly scented with synthetic fragrance oils.

Most synthetic incense shares certain drawbacks. First, some brands of synthetic incense are simply waste wood powder that is combined with a binder (a type of glue) with the resulting sticks or cones soaked in synthetic fragrance oils. The wood used in the powder might be sawdust from a manufacturing plant—sometimes the wood powder actually comes from the manufacturing of plywood. It could be a waste product from any number of commercial applications. As a result, the wood might have been treated with chemicals or could contain large quantities of powerful glues. I don't want to imply that all synthetic incense uses such low-quality wood powder, but unfortunately there is no way to know simply by looking at an incense package.

The synthetic fragrance oils themselves can also represent some problems. These scents are created in laboratories in an effort to reproduce natural scents at a substantially lower cost than the natural version. This is done through chemical analysis of a natural scent. When natural scents are analyzed, there are many chemical components that might not appear to contribute directly to the scent. Chemical engineers will look at the analysis of the scent and then begin to experiment to see if they can replicate it. They will do so using the simplest chemical method possible. As a result, some components of the scent might be deemed “unnecessary” to the effort to fool the nose. Generally speaking, synthetic fragrances are rarely chemical duplicates of the original. They are “just enough” of the chemical composition to mislead the rather dull human nose. (Well, usually they are just enough—I'm sure we've all encountered incense that was labeled “apple” but actually smelled like a burning house.) The bottom line is that synthetics do not truly represent their natural counterparts. At best they are a simulation of nature. At worst they are a pathetic imitation that smells nothing like the original, natural scent.

Some fragrance oils are not formulated with burning in mind. They might be created to scent soaps, body lotions, or other non-combustible products. As a result their designers never considered the health impacts of burning the chemicals involved, so you truly have no idea what the ultimate result could be.

Furthermore there is the issue of so-called “extenders.” An extender is another synthetic oil with little or no scent of its own. Extenders cost far less than scented oils, so many synthetic incense makers use them to “step on” or dilute the more expensive scented oils. This allows incense makers to lower their costs by stretching the scented oils. Without an extender, a pound of scented oil might only make 500 sticks or cones of incense. With the extender, the same amount of oil could make 1,000 or even 1,500 sticks or cones. This does dilute the scent somewhat, but synthetic oils are usually so strong that the incense still has a powerful scent. Aside from the obvious ethical question of diluting oils to lower the cost (although the retail price usually stays the same), there is also a question of safety. The chemicals used as extenders have, to the best of my knowledge, never been tested in any laboratory anywhere for their safety in incense. Most extenders are actually meant to be used in products that are not burned (such as soaps and household cleaners). Dipropylene glycol (also called DPG) is the most commonly used extender.