Incense Magick Read Online Free

Benzoin and dammar resins are potent aromatics with scents that are deep and mysterious. Vetiver, patchouli, and dragon’s blood all hail from India as well. Even today the marketplaces in India are filled with exotic botanicals that are the stuff of incense makers’ dreams. In the modern world we have access to even more aromatics than were available to previous generations, but one could easily spend a lifetime in India learning of new botanicals and new incense making methods.
    India is currently a major producer of incense, but sadly the bulk of its market is built on low-quality incense filled with synthetic ingredients. There are still those in India who produce incense in the wonderful traditional fashion, but in an effort to capture uneducated consumers with lower prices, the present incense industry on the whole does not represent the glory of the Indian incense tradition.
    Asia
    Throughout Asia and the other lands they so strongly influenced, aromatic materials were sought and used in incense. While I can only brush upon a few highlights here, the incense traditions of Asia could be the study of your entire life and you’d never learn it all. Innovation and experimentation with respect for tradition characterizes the various incense cultures of Asia past and present.
    Incense Pellet
    This ungracious term describes a type of incense rarely seen in America. The incense pellet is in a category that I call “moist incense” and is believed to be an outgrowth of Asian medical practices. We all know that some medications are quite foul tasting, and this was just as true in an Asian medical culture that was steeped in herbal medications. As a result, Asian healers began mixing the distasteful ingredients with honey, jam, fruit, and other foods and spices to disguise the bad taste at some time in the distant past. A mixture was made in the proper proportions and then rolled into pea-sized balls small enough to swallow. Somewhere along the way, this approach was adopted into incense making traditions. Small balls of incense are made using honey or similar materials to help the balls hold their shape. Once cured and added to a hot coal, the incense pellet gives off an intense, mysterious scent that is difficult to achieve with any other form of incense.
    Incense Clocks
    Numerous cultures have experimented with using incense as timekeeping devices, but nowhere did this process become more sophisticated than in Asia. In the centuries before reliable mechanical clocks, many devices were used to tell time, including candles, water clocks, and incense. This has ranged from the simple process of waiting for an incense stick to completely burn, to incense trails where the scent changed as a form of alarm, to sophisticated clocks that even used bells to mark time audibly. A bell would be tied to the incense stick with a thin thread; when the incense burned through the thread, the bell would drop with a loud clang. This is useful knowledge for those of us who use incense as part of formal spells or rituals, as these setups can allow us to use incense to time particular parts of our rituals—how long to chant, when to move to the next phase, etc. As late as the twentieth century, incense was used to time a visit with a Japanese Geisha. As mentioned earlier, incense is still used as a timekeeping device in parts of Africa.
    China
    With the creation of the Han Empire around 200 bce , the modern region we call China was founded (although it took its name from the later Chin dynasty). What grew to be the massive nation of modern China took centuries to unite. It was already a true empire when contact was first made with the West and arguably remains so until this very day. Still, much of the knowledge of Chinese incense making remains a guarded secret. There was a time in Chinese history, during the age of empires, when contact with Westerners was limited to conducting trade and nothing more. While Westerners could