Читать книгу Aromatherapy and the Mind - Julia Lawless - Страница 21

The Greeks’ love of aromatics and incense is deeply rooted in their history. Ritual incense burners or censers have been excavated from Minoan graves in Crete, dated to before 1500 BC. In The Odyssey, Homer (c. 850 BC) refers to an incense altar in the temple of Aphrodite at Paphos, in Cyprus. The goddess is supposed to have hidden her nakedness with a bough of myrtle and the fragrance of myrtle plays an important role in Greek incense ceremonies up to the present day.

In ancient times, the principal means by which the Greeks honoured their gods was by making human sacrifices and later by burning domestic animals. In the course of time, only a small portion of the meat was burned, together with libations (the pouring of wine) and incense, while the rest was consumed in a festive meal. By the sixth century BC, the Greek custom of making animal sacrifices had been largely replaced by the ritual offering of incense. A Greek inscription at Didyma (about 300 BC) lists frankincense, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon and costus being offered at the temple of Apollo.

The powdered type of incense was generally kept in a special box and burned either on an incense altar in the temple or at a household shrine using a brazier. At public festivals and military triumphs, censers containing incense were borne along by the procession, while large quantities were burned in front of temples and in niches and doorways along the processional route. At celebrations connected with the oracle at Delphi, Thessalian virgins carried baskets of incense and spices at the head of the procession.

Like the Egyptians, the Greeks also used incense to induce a change of consciousness. According to Plutarch, the Pythic Oracle at Delphi used a mixture of bay leaf and barley flour as an incense to help induce a trancelike state. Likewise, when the oracle at Patras was consulted, the priestess prayed and offered incense before gazing into the sacred well to seek an answer. It is more than likely that incense also played a prominent role in the ‘miracle cures’ of the priest-doctors of Asclepius – incenses are included in recipes on marble tablets within their temples.

At funerals, the Greeks burnt incense not only to propitiate the gods, but also as a symbol of transcendence. When cremation replaced burial rites, it also served the more practical purpose of disguising the odour of burning flesh and purifying the area of germs or infection.

It was the Romans, however, who began to use incense increasingly lavishly for this purpose, until vast sums were being squandered on it. It is reported that the whole of Arabia could not produce in a year as much incense as was burned in one day by the Emperor Nero upon the death of his consort, Poppaea. As Pliny pointed out laconically:

Arabia’s good fortune has been caused by the luxury of mankind even in the hours of death, when they burn over the departed the products which they had originally understood to have been created for the gods.⁸

With the Romans, incense also began to be used increasingly for secular rather than religious purposes. The Romans were renowned for their love of sweet-smelling perfumes and ‘unguents’, which they used to scent their hair, their bodies, their clothes, their beds, their baths and even the walls of their houses. Of frankincense, Ovid said, ‘If it is pleasing to the Gods, it is no less useful to mortals’⁹ and Plutarch observed that through scent alone, ‘imaginary worries are smoothed like a mirror’.¹⁰ Indeed, the enormous quantities of ‘foreign essences’ imported by the Romans, and the consequent pressure which incense and perfume put on the treasury, may have been a substantial factor in the final collapse of the Empire.