Juniper

Juniper's first article calls its protective burning ancient and widespread. One specific, named version of that practice survived in written record well enough to be reconstructed in detail, and it shows how a broad folk habit can also be a precise local rite with its own vocabulary.

Saining is the Scottish Highland new year custom, most fully recorded around Hogmanay, in which juniper smoke was carried by hand through the house and the byre, room by room and stall by stall, to purify both the family's living space and their livestock for the coming year. The rite had its own name, its own calendar date and its own understood purpose, distinguishing it from a vaguer, undocumented sense that "people used to burn juniper for luck."

Beyond Scotland, juniper's purifying role runs through documented use from ancient Egypt onward, but saining is unusual for how late and how precisely it was recorded: nineteenth and early twentieth century folklorists collected first-hand accounts of the custom from people who had performed it, rather than reconstructing it from archaeology or from a passing classical reference.

The berries carry an entirely separate modern life. Juniperus communis flavours gin, and both the drink's name and its flavour descend from the same word, Dutch jenever tracing to Latin juniperus, a use of the plant that shares nothing with saining beyond the tree it comes from.

Juniper is a fragrant wood used as incense: the wood and berries of the juniper, one of the oldest protective and purifying incenses, burned to cleanse the sick-room, avert evil, and consecrate tools. Solar and fiery, its clean smoke is both antiseptic and apotropaic. It has been used from ancient Egypt to the European Middle Ages and beyond.

Material and correspondence

In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under the Sun and the element of Fire. Such planetary and elemental attributions belong to the Western esoteric tradition of correspondences, drawn from writers such as Agrippa and codified in the modern period by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the material's use as incense is far older and cuts across many cultures. It is described here within that documented tradition of ritual perfume.

A folk plant with a household use

Juniperus communis, the common juniper of Europe, Asia and North America, supplies the berries used in gin, whose name and flavor both descend from the juniper (Dutch jenever, French genievre, from the Latin juniperus), a use entirely separate from its incense role. The folk-magic burning of juniper as household protection survived into recorded European tradition well past the medieval period, most famously in the Scottish Highland new year custom of saining, in which juniper smoke was carried through the house and byre at Hogmanay to purify them for the coming year, a documented regional continuation of the same protective use the plant carries in the wider Western correspondence system.