Democratic Sentinel, Volume 18, Number 35, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 September 1894 — Why Incense Was Used. [ARTICLE]

Why Incense Was Used.

The sense of smell, which at the dawn of civilization was a declining one, and since then has tended to become less and less of value, would appear to have little chance of gaining an important position in any branch of human culture. And yet it came about that one characteristic of the exciting cause of odors brought them into prominence in the service of religion, and this prominence has continued in that connection up to the present day. Far back in the history of our race, at any rate long before the dawn of history, the apparently immaterial and, so to speak, ghostly nature of the exciting ause of the sensation of smell, led, it would seem, step by step, to the use of incense in the service of the gods. When it began to be felt .that the ancestral or other spirit that had to he appeased was hardly of a nature to consume the material food or drink offered to it to appease its wrath or to gain its favor, an easy stqp of reasoning suggested that this food or liquid wouid be more acceptable in the form of smoke or vapor. The gods had become of too spiritual a nature actually to eat the food, but they would still require some form of nourishment, and what could be more suitable to theip than the furans of burned flesh? This is the conception that is prominent, or, at all events, survives, in the descriptions of sacrifices in the “Illiad,” where the thick clouds from the burning thighs of the slaughtered oxen, and from the fat in which they were wrapped, ascend to Olympus and cheer the assembled gods. It was

but a step from this to the burning of fragrant woods and rosin to provide a Jess gross gratification. Moreover, by the consumption in their honor of these precious spices and fragrant gums, obtained at so much cost and trouble, another motive of sacrifice was satisfied. The Egyptians in the preparation of their mummies had need of a vast store of spices and aromatics. This need, no doubt, was the origin of their trade with Southern Arabia—the land of Punt—a trade which attained to great importance under the eighteenth knd nineteenth dynasties. That, in search of aromatics, there was also a more northern trade route, which must in early days have brought them into contact with the Hebrews, we have good proof. The Egyptians in this respect were far in advance of the Greeks of Homer. They burned their incense in a conser, using it in a similar way to the Buddhists and Christian* of later days.