Recycled Temple Flowers

Earlier this year, I learned about ways that temple flowers are being recycled in India, ranging from using them in garment dyeing to incense. (This is the video, about 15 minutes long, from Business Insider.) One of the companies, Phool, had incense available through a US reseller, and I tried some of it today after waiting 1+ months for it to arrive. Crafting this incense has created many jobs, and the company upholds ethical standards during the incense’s production, including giving a portion of its sales back to community endeavors. It also, of course, diverts waste.

Originally, I had wondered about offering this incense at my shrine, but I decided to burn it ambiently because it is from offerings made to other Gods, and it didn’t seem right somehow to re-offer it to the household Gods. The tulsi (holy basil) scent has a delicious, uplifting fragrance, and the numinous quality is carried into the finished product.

Burning this incense reminds me of something I read in Watts’ The Final Pagan Generation on page 51, that it was impossible to tell in a pious polytheistic household whether an uplifting scent was the result of household ritual or part of the standard practices used to mask the odors of cities (and sanitize disease-bearing elements) before modern sanitation. It was part of other ritual acts, such as placing wreaths on the doors and burning fragrant lamps, and especially present during the new moon rituals that washed the cities clean as the moon triumphed waxing.

Few people cared about that distinction between secular and religious scents until Christianity, as Christians thought they could inhale malefic spirits through the perfume of offerings — Watts cites Harvey’s Scenting Salvation, which reveals that much of the source for this is Tertullian. Harvey writes in the first chapter (of an academic ebook that … lacks pagination):

But there was no escaping the world outside. What jobs could Christians hold without compromising their religious identity? Here, too, extreme care was needed, particularly in jobs at the marketplace. Tertullian insisted that there were certain professions Christians simply could not pursue without irrevocable harm to their religious integrity. Selling frankincense was one. For while Christians might insist that they themselves burned frankincense for no untoward reason (as Tertullian had noted, medicinal or hygienic use was valid), pagans would not, indeed could not, purchase frankincense without servicing their religion at the same time. How could a Christian seller of frankincense do what a Christian was required to do when encountering pagan sacrifices—spit upon the fumes, blow and spit upon the evil powers, exorcise himself—when it was his own supply of frankincense that fuelled the smoking altars? Tertullian shared the view, attested by other writers of the era both pagan and Christian, that sacrificial smoke was never harmless. It might be ineffectual in any attempt to influence the divine, as all our writers have agreed, but it was the food upon which demons fed—the sustenance that kept demons alive. Origen reminded his audience in his Exhortation to Martyrdom that performing sacrifice was not an empty gesture or “a matter of indifference.” Rather, sacrifice rendered the participants just as guilty as the demons themselves for the evils that would afflict the world, “since demons could not hold out without the rising smoke.”

But let’s leave them be, and shut the doors. Here is Harvey again, in that same chapter, pausing on the beauty of incense:

Incense was not necessarily the only offering, nor the most important or powerful one, but it was a general accompaniment to sacrificial rituals of all kinds. Its scent was a marker of the occasion, and in any context “incense” could be a term equivalent to “sacrifice.” Unlike animal sacrifice, which provided meat for the priests and community to eat, incense offerings left no usable product. Hence incense was the quintessential example of the whole burnt offering, the holocaust — a cheaper, simpler alternative to animal holocaust, and one that effectively represented the sacrificial process in larger terms. In Roman times especially, it gained exalted status for just this reason. Eunapius described the “poor and humble” house of the philosopher Julian of Cappadocia as so fragrant with incense that it resembled “a holy temple.” Apollonius of Tyana offered only frankincense, but could tell from the path of the smoke and the qualities of the fire as it burned that his prayer was accepted. Plutarch spoke with admiration of the Egyptian practice of offering incense three times daily to the sun: resin in the morning, myrrh at noon, and a compound of sixteen spices at evening. The last, he noted, was “not put together haphazardly, but whenever the unguent-makers are mixing these ingredients, sacred writings are read out to them.”

And in this case, the scent becomes one and the same, ritual and secular, despite the oceans and cultures that separate me from their origin, thanks to the perils and promise of international trade routes. May the deities to whom the fragrant plants were offered be pleased. 🙏