Frankincense

Frankincense is the dried gum resin of trees in the genus Boswellia, principally Boswellia sacra in Oman and Yemen, Boswellia carterii in Somalia, and Boswellia papyrifera in Ethiopia and Sudan. The trees grow in arid limestone country that will support very little else, which is a large part of why the trade mattered so much: the resin was the only exportable wealth of the regions that produced it.

Harvesting is done by cutting the bark and letting the exuded resin harden into the pale lumps called tears, which are scraped off after a few weeks. A tree is tapped repeatedly through a season. The practice is old and it is not gentle; there is a documented modern problem of over-tapping suppressing seed production, and several Boswellia populations are in decline.

The English name has nothing to do with France or with any place. It comes from Old French franc encens, meaning free or pure incense, in the sense of high quality. The Latin is tus, the Greek libanos, and the Arabic luban, which is the word still used in Oman.

The resin contains boswellic acids, which have been the subject of a genuine and continuing body of pharmacological research into inflammation. That research is real; the conclusion is not yet settled, and no clinical claim should be read into the traditional use. What can be said without qualification is that the aromatic behaviour is a matter of volatile terpenes released on heating, which is why frankincense is burned rather than eaten.

Myrrh, its constant companion in the sources, is a different resin from a different genus, Commiphora, growing in the same regions. The two are routinely paired and are not the same substance: myrrh is bitter, darker, and was used in embalming and as a wound treatment, where frankincense was primarily burned.

The attribution of frankincense to the Sun is standard, and it is worth being exact about where it comes from, because the usual citation is wrong.

It is not Culpeper. The Complete Herbal of 1653 is an English book about English plants: Culpeper wrote for people who could walk out and gather what he described, and a resin imported from southern Arabia is outside that scope. Looking for a Culpeper rulership of frankincense and finding one quoted is a good sign that the quoter has not opened the book.

The solar attribution belongs instead to the older magical tradition. Agrippa lists frankincense among the suffumigations of the Sun in the Three Books of Occult Philosophy of 1533, in the section setting out which substances are burned to draw down which planetary influence. That is a Renaissance systematisation of material Agrippa had from Arabic and Hermetic sources, and it is the proper reference.

Behind Agrippa there is something older still, though it is not astrological in his sense. Frankincense was burned in temple rites across Egypt, Mesopotamia, Israel and the Greek and Roman world, in cults of deities who were solar and deities who were not. The association with the Sun in a technical planetary scheme is a later tidying of a much broader ritual fact. Both things are true, and they should not be collapsed: the incense is genuinely ancient, and the planetary label on it is sixteenth century.

There is a plain physical logic to the assignment that is worth stating. Frankincense is golden, it is costly, it rises, and it was burned in the temples of gods addressed as light. Any scheme sorting substances by planet was going to put it under the Sun; the surprise would have been anything else. That the answer is over-determined is a reason to hold the attribution loosely.

The scriptural warrant for frankincense is specific rather than general. Exodus 30 gives a formula for the sacred incense of the tabernacle and restricts it absolutely: it is to be compounded of stacte, onycha, galbanum and pure frankincense, and anyone who makes it for personal use is to be cut off from the people. Leviticus 2 requires frankincense on the grain offering. This is not incense as atmosphere; it is a regulated cultic substance.

The gifts of the Magi in Matthew 2 are gold, frankincense and myrrh. The text says nothing about three men, gives no names, and offers no interpretation of the gifts. The count of three is inferred from the count of the gifts, the names Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar first appear in Western sources several centuries later, and the reading of frankincense as signifying divinity and myrrh as signifying burial is patristic commentary rather than anything in the passage.

The trade itself is the largest fact here. The overland incense route ran up the western side of Arabia to the Mediterranean, and the cities that grew along it were built on this resin and on myrrh. Pliny the Elder complains in the Natural History about the sums draining east to pay for aromatics, and gives an account of the Arabian groves and the guarded harvest that is part observation and part traveller's tale. His irritation is good evidence of the scale.

The consumption was enormous. Herodotus records the annual frankincense tribute owed to the Persian king, and the caravan cities of the route (Petra, Palmyra, Shabwa, Timna), existed on the tolls levied on it. The collapse of that trade in late antiquity is among the causes usually given for the decline of southern Arabia's urban civilisation.