Events > Incense
A seminar and discussion about material religion and incense. This online event will include talks by Professor Adeline Grand-Clément and Professor Anne Katrine de Hemmer Gudme.
Register via Eventbrite to receive further details and joining instructions.
Talk titles and abstracts
Divine Scent Trails: The Ritual use of Incense in the Hebrew Bible and in Iron Age Judah - Anne Katrine de Hammer Gudme
In the Hebrew Bible, daily incense offerings to the deity Yahweh is part of the regular ritual schedule prescribed in the books of Exodus and Leviticus. Incense is also used as an accompaniment to sacrifices and as part of the ritual procedure during the annual purification ritual known as Yom Kippur. If we look to the archaeology of the Iron Age kingdom of Judah and its surroundings in the Southern Levant, the ritual use of incense is documented by incense shovels, incense burners, fumigation altars and even by residue from frankincense, resin from the boswellia plant.
This presentation follows the scent trail of incense in the Hebrew Bible's idealized descriptions of cult and ritual and in the archaeological record in order to tease out the material, sensory and cultural significance of incense in a ritual context.
What’s in a thumiaterion ? Burning aromata for the gods in Ancient Greece - Adeline Grand-Clément
The role played by burnt aromatics is not specific to Ancient religions, since incense is an olfactory marker of other religious traditions, for instance in Asia. When asking « Why does incense smell religious? » (2005), the anthropologist Margaret E. Kenna tries to understand why burnt aromatics are considered as powerful agents of communication between humans and gods in so many different cultures. She argues that incense is endowed with three main functions, which often combine during rituals: agent of purification; efficient signal intended to call and conjure up invisible entities; source of pleasure, or even 'food', for immortal beings.
In Ancient Greece, these three functions were all recognized to aromata (resins and plants) used for worshipping the gods. And among these aromata, libanôtos, incense coming from the Boswellia trees, was one of the most prestigious. Testimonies coming from literary sources show that frankincense was known by the Greeks since the Archaic period, and that its use increased significantly during the Hellenistic age, after Alexander’s conquests. However, on Greek images, the small grains of frankincense are rarely shown: the best means of suggesting the burning of this precious resin was to show a thumiaterion, an incense-burner (which was indeed frequently used in sanctuaries, as temple inventories testify). The scarcity of archaeological remains of incense to be analyzed and identified leads us to rely mainly on epigraphy: the corpus of Greek ritual norms sheds light on the different contexts in which incense-oliban was prescribed – or prohibited. The objective of my talk will be to track the use of frankincense in Greek rituals, in order to stress the sensorial aspects induced : smell, but also touch and vision fully engaged the body of the worshippers.
Image on this page from Wikimedia Commons.
