Why does incense smell religious?

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Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 2005 ISSN: 1016-3476 Vol. 15, No. 1: 00–00

WHY DOES INCENSE SMELL RELIGIOUS?:

GREEK ORTHODOXY AND THE
ANTHROPOLOGY OF SMELL

MARGARET E. KENNA
University of Wales Swansea

Smells are both metonymical and metaphorical, operating both as clues to the existence
of their source and as hints of a wider significance for this point of origin. Incense,
when analysed from an ‘etic’ perspective, appears to act as a marker of transition between
the profane and the sacred. Its constituents symbolise incorruptibility and immortality,
and release an olfactory and visible sign of a connection between the human and superhuman
realms. Drawing on ‘emic’ understandings within Greek Orthodoxy, incense is interpreted
as a performative sign of a transcendent world, one among many sensory indicators that
worshippers are securely within the world of the sacred.

Introduction
Incense is a substance consisting of resins and gums which, when burnt,
emit a smoke which has a distinctive aroma. Within the Judaeo-Christian
tradition incense is associated primarily with holy places, settings and activities,
and its smell so powerfully evokes these contexts that it has become a
signifier of religious contexts. Why is it that incense smells religious? The
question first occurred to me over a decade ago in connection with research
I was carrying out on the cult of Panayia Kalamiotissa. This is the name
that the islanders of Anafi, the Cycladic island where I have carried out
fieldwork since 1966, give to the Virgin Mary in a particular manifestation
unique to their island, the Virgin of the Reed (Kenna 1992, 2001, Ch. 6).
So, although this is a general paper about incense, its origin lies in the
study of Greek Orthodox ritual practice.
The author of the New Catholic Encyclopedia article on incense states
‘fragrant resins are most satisfactory for liturgical use because their odor is
in no way reminiscent of the secular perfume industry’ (McCance 1967,
Vol. 7: 418). Is this a straightforward contrast between perfume and incense
that can be taken to stand for the contrast between profane and sacred?

Copyright © 2005 Mediterranean Institute, University of Malta.

2 Margaret E. Kenna

Why should it be so important that incense should not smell like perfume?
Is it that the writer associates perfume with women, and therefore, perhaps,
with sexuality and the world of the body, and incense with spirituality?
Why is it that incense is assumed not to smell ‘secular’ but to smell ‘religious’?
Common-sense responses to this question might be: ‘because we are used
to smelling it in churches’ or ‘because it is socially and culturally defined
that way’. As Sperber says, specifically referring to incense: ‘Certain smells
. . . belong . . . to what semiologists call a cultural code’ (1975: 118).
What is the cultural code to which incense belongs?

The Anthropology of Smell, and of the Senses

The anthropology of smell was until recently a very unresearched and
under-theorised segment of the study of the senses in our own and other
cultures. As public and business interests in so-called alternative medicine
have grown, and aromatherapy items are readily available in the Body
Shop and variously fragranced incense sticks can be bought in any Oxfam
shop, there is a great deal more evidence to draw on. In this paper I am
particularly indebted, theoretically, to the work of the Canadian trio: Constance
Classen, David Howes, and Anthony Synnott and the members of their
Concordia University Sensoria Research Group founded in 1988. Howes’s
edited collection The Varieties of Sensory Experience: a Sourcebook in the
Anthropology of the Senses is both source book and manual to this new
area of anthropological investigation (see Howes [ed.] 1991, see also Classen
1993, Classen et al. 1994, Synnott 1993).
The anthropology of the senses investigates cultures according to their
individual patterning of the relationship between the senses. Rather than
looking for a world view, and thus privileging sight which tends to be
western culture’s primary organising metaphor, the anthropologists of the
senses redefine our interest as investigating the ways in which cultures
sense the world. More accurately, they investigate how people in those
cultures think they sense it (Howes 1991b: 175). That there are different
ways of sensing the world would seem to be obvious. Indeed, we do not
have to go to other cultures to know that for the blind and partially sighted
in most societies the senses of touch and smell are powerful media of
comprehension. There is also the experience called synaesthesia, the
transposition of input to one sense into the terms of another: to see sounds
(‘a bright yellow trumpet fanfare’) and hear smells (‘the meat was so rotten
it hummed’), for example. Synaesthesia can also be used to describe a
combination of sensory stimuli, when sound, smell, sight, touch and taste
 Why does incense smell religious? 3

all give the same message in their different ways, what Lévi-Strauss would
call different transformations (Lévi-Strauss 1977: 18).
Indeed, the very definition of the senses themselves is at issue here.
Western culture has a classification of five: sight, sound, smell, taste and
touch; other cultures categorize differently, and cultures differ as to how
tastes, or sounds are themselves classified. The anthropology of the senses
is a fairly new area of investigation, although quite a lot of anthropological
work has been carried out earlier on the different cultural perceptions of
colour. If we turn to the categorizations of smell, it is one of the more
problematic senses to put into words, except in terms of other smells, and
in terms of the memories evoked. Within western culture, some experts
classify smells into seven categories, others into six. The Linnaean classi-
fication (which might be argued to be hardly relevant in the twentieth
century, as it predates chemical analysis) has seven categories: aromatic,
fragrant, ambrosial (musky), alliaceous (garlicky), hircine (goaty), foul,
and nauseating (1756). A more recent classification is: ethereal, floral,
musky, pepperminty, camphoraceous, pungent, putrid (Amoore 1970). The
perfume industry categorizes perfumes into four major divisions: fresh and
floral, flowery and aldehydic (that is, creating the illusion of oxygen or
ozone), spicy and exotic (often designated ‘oriental’, and including musk,
amber, frankincense, sandalwood), and woody and fruity (Irvine 1995).
The anthropology of the senses has uncovered a great deal of ethno-
graphic evidence that people in some cultures are socialized to think in
aural, tactile, olfactory ways rather than in verbal or visual terms. They
define the senses differently from the western model (which has itself
changed over time), and arrange them in a different order. We might find
that the dominant or articulating sense in another culture may be smell, or
touch, or taste. Each culture, as well as different historical periods of those
and our own culture, has its own sensorium. The term ‘sensorium’ is used
in this new generation of studies not in its dictionary sense of the ‘seat of
sensation in the brain; the centre to which all sense impressions are transmitted’
(OED) but rather to mean the way in which the senses are ordered, ‘the
entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex’ (Ong 1967 reprinted in
Howes [ed.] 1991: 28). ‘We are socialized into what our culture considers
fragrant or foul’ (Synnott 1993: 188). In studying the sensorium of a culture
we should attend carefully to what may seem at first like metaphors, for
these may be ways for us to get to understand their sensorium (Howes
1991b). An intractable problem here is that the anthropologist is relying on
words to elicit these correspondences, and the whole point about using
different senses to apprehend different things is that some of these sense-
4 Margaret E. Kenna

experiences cannot be put into words: as Isadora Duncan is reported to

have said when someone ‘asked her the meaning of a dance she had just
performed, “If I could tell you what it meant there would be no point in
dancing it”’ (Forge 1970: 289).

Smell and Gender

In western society, certain body smells associated with men and women are
interpreted as ‘natural’ and given a positive or negative (and sometimes
neutral) evaluation. Body smells associated with women, for example,
may be culturally defined as marine, even fishy.1 The Dior perfume ‘Dune’
subtly plays on this association in its smell, name, and advertising (a photo
of a gently curved sand dune fringed with beach grasses suggestive of a
breast and even hinting at the pubic region). Male sweat is often said to
smell like leather. The suppression of ‘natural’ body smells (‘natural’ as
culturally defined), through washing and deodorizing, or the enhancement
of certain of them, through perfumes, after-shaves, body lotions, etc. is too
complex a topic to go into here (but see, for example, Brant 2004). Some
scholars draw our attention to the fact that in Western Europe there was a
historical juxtaposition between the development of the germ theory of
disease, ideas of hygiene and the notion of the person: our individual smells
[i.e. body odours] should not intrude on others.
Moving from the association of the natural smells of the human body
(as culturally defined) with the smells of the natural world (again as culturally
defined), let us consider the gender dimension of manufactured smells. In
our own culture, some perfumes and scents are considered feminine (many
flower scents or synthetic versions of flowers such as rose and jasmine, for
example) and others masculine (mostly scents deriving from trees such as
cedarwood), and sometimes these perfumes are, as it were, acceptable,
manufactured versions of ‘natural’ smells such as musk, which in turn
contain pheromones. We have recently witnessed the introduction of perfumes
marketed as being appropriate for either men or women (but aimed at the
youth end of the consumer range). We know that the popularity of perfumes,
and their gender association, varies across the map of Europe and the
Middle East, let alone over the world.2
As well as the association and attribution of natural and manufactured
smells with particular genders, there is the attribution of good and bad
odours to members of different occupations, class and ethnic groups (Classen
1992, Largey & Watson 1972: 1023). Superiors in such schemes attribute
bad smells to, for example, black people, or Jews, or the working classes,
 Why does incense smell religious? 5

and relationships between groups and categories are often mediated by

smell.3 For example, the Dassanetch, pastoralists of Southwest Ethiopia,
describe their relationship with the fishermen of Lake Turkana in terms of
their respective smells (Almagor 1987). For the pastoralists, everything
associated with cattle smells good; men smear manure on their bodies and
women smear liquid butter on their upper bodies and heads to ensure
fertility and this smell is said to attract men, being ‘perfume’ (Almagor
1987: 109). Other pastoralists and agriculturalists are said to smell different
but tolerable, but the smell of those who fish for a living is said to be bad
to the point of revulsion. When passing a fishing village, the Dassanetch
will hold their noses not only because they consider the smell disgusting
but also because the bad smell of fish is believed to be contagious and will
affect the fertility of cattle.4
A similar type of association occurs within what we might call Christian
folklore in which good smells are associated with sanctity and bad smells
with sin (is this not a tautology? What sort of holiness would smell un-
pleasant?). Saints in their lifetimes and after death were known by their
‘odour of sanctity’ (Classen 1990, Iossifides 1991: 153–154), although
medical materialists may give explanations for this in terms of the smells
produced by people who are fasting, or eat a sparse and mainly vegetable
diet, or who are diabetes sufferers. Conversely, sinners and demons are
recognized by the foul stench of their sins. When used in exorcism, incense
as a demonifuge (Atchley 1909) is surely the smell of holiness driving out
the devil and all his works.

A Historical Dimension
Historically, it is clear that there have been changes in European cultural
attitudes to incense. Incense was part of Jewish temple worship, and the
book of Exodus gives the instructions not only for the construction of the
altar in the Temple on which incense was to be burnt, but also the exact
proportions of the ingredients, none of which were to be used for any other
purpose or for private use (Exodus 30: vv 23–34). The earliest Christians
rejected the use of incense because it was part of pagan worship and the
imperial cult. When Constantine was converted to Christianity and moved
the capital of the Roman Empire to Constantinople, many of the adjuncts
of the imperial cult were transferred to Christian Orthodoxy and incense
began to be used by Christians in the 4th century. In the book of Revela-
tions, there is a golden altar before God’s throne on which incense, associated
with the prayers of the saints, is burned by an angel (Revelations 8: v 3).
6 Margaret E. Kenna

With the Reformation, incense was associated with all the aspects of Popery
(indulgences, etc.) which Protestantism wanted to be rid of. With the Oxford
movement in Britain in the 1830s, incense came back into what is now
called High Anglicanism, with the accompaniments which ‘Low’ Anglicans
dismissively designate as ‘smells and bells’. Incense is nowadays a marker
of churches associated with a high degree of ritualism and adherence to
tradition such as the Orthodox, Catholic and High Anglican churches, and
is used both in services and private devotions. Why has it managed to
survive within these Christian denominations? One possibility is that incense
use, among other things, marks off different attitudes to ritual as between
the more ‘conservative’ Christian groupings and so-called Low Church
members, with the former being incense users (and referring to tradition to
validate their position), the latter not (and referring to the early church to
validate theirs). However, there are unexpected twists in these associations:
some fundamentalist churches refer to biblical authority (usually the Old
Testament) to confirm what in most people’s view would be High Church
ritualism. For example, an article in the New Christian Herald in November
1996 on the use of ‘High Church’ forms of worship in evangelical and
other ‘low Church’ services quotes a reformed evangelical vicar in Southall,
whose church uses many High Church elements, as saying ‘the symbols we
use . . . are profoundly biblical. Take the incense. It evokes worship before
the throne in heaven, and it’s a symbol of the prayers of the saints ascending
to God. The incense can also help us get a sense of mystery and “otherness”
of God. That’s a side of his nature which is there in the Bible but is often
neglected in evangelical churches’ (New Christian Herald 9 Nov 1996: 10).

Medical Materialism
An attempt to explain the use of incense in the present day might start by
taking a ‘medical materialist’ position and looking at it as a survival from
the days when people believed that disease was caused by airs and vapours
and bad smells. An explanation of this kind sees incense use in the past as
a superstitious kind of disinfectant, an early and ineffective form of fumigation
which supposedly acted, as Corbin says in The foul and the fragrant, ‘against
the putridity of the assembled worshippers’ (1986: 65). This kind of
‘deliberately prosaic’ explanation is typical of medical materialism, says
Mary Douglas, for it tries to find a rational basis (or what is supposed to be
rational) for the most exotic of rituals and practices. Like Corbin, Douglas
characterises the medical materialist explanation of incense use as one of
smell against smell. ‘The importance of incense is not that it symbolises
 Why does incense smell religious? 7

the ascending smoke of sacrifice, but it is a means of making tolerable the

smells of unwashed humanity’ (Douglas 1966: 30).
In the 1880s, there was a debate in the United Kingdom, within the
established church (the Church of England) about the use of incense and
candles.5 This was part of the Church of England’s attempt to distance
itself from Roman Catholicism (at the time when the Oxford Movement
seemed threatening to the distinction between the two). A treatise on incense
written at this time offers a straightforward medical materialist conclusion,
seemingly as a way of persuading the anti-incense faction of the Church of
England that incense was not ‘Romish’ and did not smack of ‘Popery’.
‘The ultimate basis of incense in the church is its pleasant odour; that is, it
is fumigatory’. It continues in a similar vein: ‘when the Church appeals to
us through our senses, it is not right that the sense of smell should be
rudely neglected or offended; for the congregating of many human persons
together is as productive of offence to the sense of smell in this twentieth
century as it was in the days of St. Thomas Aquinas’ (Atchley 1909: 372).
The medical materialist explanation would say that now that the disease-
combatting function of incense is discredited, incense use is kept going
simply by the inertia of tradition. Such a position would continue that
reference to symbolic meanings by believers and ritual experts are attempts
at justification by obfuscation and should be ignored as unprovable and
over-elaborate. A similar kind of ‘Occam’s razor’ reaction was generated
by Douglas’s attempts to explain the Abominations of Leviticus in terms of
the place of exceptions to basic categories within the Judaic system of
classification. It may well be that congregations of worshippers before the
age of deodorants, toothpaste and easily washable garments, washed rarely
and smelt strongly. If some members of the congregation found the smell
emanating from their fellow worshippers distracting (and here we may be
imposing a twentieth century sensibility on the past), this sounds remark-
ably like an issue of class or rank. Are the medical materialists missing (or
concealing) the point that incense was used so that the rich could go to
church without being offended by the smell of the poor?
If this was the case, why were not easily available substances used for
domestic fumigation such as juniper and lavender adapted for church use?
Why did incense (whose ingredients were imported at considerable expense)
have to perform this fumigatory function? Surely its costliness played an
important role, too? Atchley’s remarks, like those of Douglas’s hypothetical
medical materialists, also seem to contain implicit assumptions about body
odours and status or class and to miss the symbolic aspect of both use and
cost. However, it is possible to invert the idea that incense disguises the
8 Margaret E. Kenna

bad smell of some members of the congregation by asserting that incense

makes everyone smell the same. What I mean by this is that the use of
incense gives everyone the same smell to breathe in, and also obscures
everyone’s individual body smell, whether they are rich or poor, high status
or low. It creates ‘unity with others’ (Largey & Watson 1972: 1031).

Symbolic Meanings
Taking up the point that incense masks the unpleasant smells emanating
from the bodies of the congregation both by covering up each person’s
individual smell and giving everyone the same smell to inhale allows a
move from medical materialist explanations to those which attribute symbolic
meanings to incense. Members of the congregation in a Greek Orthodox
Christian church are censed by the priest and by deacons. Some individuals
wave the smoke towards themselves in fanning hand-movements. Incense
surrounds and suffuses everything in its vicinity, it symbolically de-
individualises members of the congregation and makes them ‘members one
of another’, transforming them into a congregation of worshippers (as many
other aspects of liturgical action do). This congregation is believed also to
be made up of an invisible company of angels, saints, and souls of the
blessed.6 The smoke of incense drifts upwards, interpreted as ascending
from human beings on Earth below who are ‘a little lower than the angels’
in the hierarchy of the great chain of being, to God above in Heaven. So it
symbolizes communication between human beings and God, of which one
example is prayer, public or private. Incense is particularly ‘a sign of the
practice of intercessionary prayer’ (Hunt 1995: 194). In western European
imagery the smoke of incense also symbolizes breath and hence life, and
by extention, the soul. It also indicates oblation, worship, veneration, and
purification and refers to the burnt sacrifices in the Temple (which had to
be of animals without blemish, and/or the firstborn) and to the fulfilment
of the Old Testament prophecies in the crucifixion (Christ as the Lamb of
God).
The products which make up incense (gums, resins) do not grow mouldy
or putrefy and hence incense, like gold, is an apt symbol for incorruptibility
and immortality and for representing the presence of God.7 The barks and
resins used in incense can also be taken to refer to the Cross. The shape
and colours of some of the resins exuded can be likened to blood, or to
tears. There have been attempts to relate the main ingredients of incense to
the four elements (stacte, water; onycha, earth; galbanum, air; frankin-
cense, fire, see Stoddart 1990: 195).
 Why does incense smell religious? 9

All these substances, the resins and gums in different kinds of combinations,
have to have something done to them (they are put on top of burning
blocks of charcoal) to release their odour. The bread and wine used as the
materials through which the body and blood of Christ are believed to be
manifested are themselves composed of substances which have been trans-
formed through the action of yeast, and, of course, by human agency. Flour
and water with yeast become dough and are baked to become bread, grape
juice is fermented to become wine. The yeasts which transform flour and
grape-juice, and the fire which releases the ‘savour’ of incense, are likened
to the actions of the Holy Spirit which similarly produces a transformation
in fallen humanity. Incense requires a spark to release its smoke, a similarly
symbolic transformation.

Incense and Perfume

The writer of the article on ‘incense’ in Eliade’s Encyclopedia of Religion
defines it as the aroma given off by the smoke when odoriferous substances
such as wood, bark, seed, resin, and gum are burned (Rahim 1987: 161).
The Oxford English Dictionary gives the word’s derivation from the Latin
incendere (to set on fire), so incense is literally something ‘set on fire’, in
practice the ‘something’ is limited to ‘an aromatic gum or vegetable product,
or a mixture of fragrant gums and spices, used for producing a sweet smell
when burned’ (note, incidentally, the adjective ‘sweet’ here). The word
also refers to ‘the smoke or perfume of incense, especially when burnt as
an oblation or in religious ceremonial’. In other words, incense is both a
substance, or mixture of substances, and what those substances produce
when burned: in other words, smoke and smell. In the Judaeo-Christian
tradition, Moses was given the recipe for the incense which was to be burnt
in the temple (Exodus 30: v 34). ‘Take unto thee sweet spices, stacte [the
finest kind of myrrh] and onycha [a resinous secretion from a number of
species of rock-rose (see Stoddart 1990: 190–191)], and galbanum [gum
resin from a Persian tree]; these sweet spices with pure frankincense: of
each shall there be a like weight’. Moses and the Children of Israel were
forbidden to make anything ‘according to the composition thereof’ for
their private use, the penalty being to ‘be cut off from his people’ (presumably
banishment or ostracism). All the items in the sanctuary, and the priests
were to be anointed with ‘an holy anointing oil’ made of myrrh and cassia
[similar to cinnamon bark] in equal parts with half quantities of cinnamon
and sweet calamus [possibly a sweet-scented lemon-grass] mixed with olive
oil; this oil was not to be used for any other purpose (v 23–33).
10 Margaret E. Kenna

One of the main ingredients of incense as used in Catholic, High Anglican

and Orthodox churches is frankincense, also known as olibanum (Latin,
libanus, Greek livanos also thimiama),8 high quality incense (the ‘frank’
part of the word means ‘of superior quality’). Frankincense is the aromatic
gum resin of trees native to North Africa and southern Arabia, boswellia.
When the bark of these trees cracks naturally, or is cut deliberately, it
exudes drops of resin, sometimes referred to as ‘tears’, which are colour-
less or pale yellow.9 Amber is, of course, fossilized resin, and can also be
burned to produce an odour. Another ingredient of incense, myrrh, comes
from a tree related to boswellia (the commiphora myrrha, which grows in
N E Africa, Libya, Iran, and along the Red Sea). The resin of the myrrh
tree is brownish-red and sets in lumps.10 Myrrh is used in perfumery as
well as in incense so here we have an apparent contradiction with the
comment in the Catholic Encyclopedia, although most probably what is at
issue is the ‘mix’ which produces a particular smell over all. Some of the
ingredients of incense today, such as copal from Mexico, were not known
to the Byzantines because these substances come from parts of the world
not then discovered or exploited. Are these ingredients not used by the
Orthodox monks and nuns who make incense? Stoddart (1990: 194) says
that Catholic priests in the New World were given Papal dispensation to
use incense from local sources rather than importing it from the Old World
at enormous expense).
Many of the ingredients of incense actually do have antiseptic proper-
ties. Cedarwood, frankincense, myrrh (Davis 1991: 79, 135, 232) are used
in both conventional and so-called alternative medicine, and a number of
the ingredients of incense are also used in perfumery. Aromatherapists cite
the work of physiologists and psychologists which shows that incense affects
certain physiological activities and influences mental faculties. For example,
one of the properties of frankincense is ‘to slow down and deepen the
breath’, hence it is used by aromatherapists to treat asthma, catarrh and
chronic bronchitis (Davis 1991: 135)11 and to induce feelings of calm. If
this is the case, then medical materialists might argue that there are func-
tional reasons why frankincense is used in religious contexts as an aid to
prayer and meditation.12

Perfume and Incense

The word ‘perfume’ itself gives a clue that there is an overlap with incense:
the word’s derivation, perfumare, means to perfuse with smoke, and the
noun’s original meaning was ‘the odorous fumes given off by burning any
 Why does incense smell religious? 11

substance’, almost the same definition as of incense. Perfumes familiar to

those in western societies are made from substances including musk, ambergris,
and civet, and from flower essences, as well as including some of the
ingredients of incense. Musk comes from a gland in the musk-ox, ambergris
(grey amber) from the intestines of the sperm-whale (it used to be thought
that it was actually the sperm), and civet from the anal pouch of the civet-
cat. All these substances are strongly associated with sexuality and / or with
bodily secretions and functions. There seems to me to be a clear connection
here between human and animal sexuality and with the physicality of the
human body. Flowers may smell beautiful but they also fade, decay, wither
and rot. However, while the animal and flower-based ingredients of perfume
remind us of physicality and mortality, the tree-based gums, barks and
resins remind us of longevity, and suggest immortality, and incorruptibility
(possibly the reason behind the New Catholic Encyclopedia’s insistence on
‘fragrant resins’ as ‘most satisfactory for liturgical use’. Conceptually then,
what Corbin calls ‘the confusion between pharmacy and perfumery’ (1986: 70),
and the overlap of these two with incense as an indicator of an ecclesiastical
context, is not so much a confusion as an overlap of spheres.

Incense in Greek Orthodoxy

Just as there are different styles or mixes of incense, there are different
occasions of incense use within and between Christian denominations, different
styles of censing and of censer. Eastern censers are usually smaller than
western ones, the chains are shorter, and they can be held in one hand only
and are swung outwards with a long throw (Atchley 1909: 321, 322).
Incense is used in Orthodox church services. It is also used out-of-doors
when the ikons are brought out of a church in procession, an extension of
its use in church. Incense is also used in the home in the cult of the
household ikons, usually when the little oil lamp on the ikon shelf is lit on
a Saturday evening, and in a house where someone has died when a wake
is held. The headstones of graves usually contain an incense burner, charcoal
and small packets of incense and these are used by the mourners who visit
the grave. The incense smoke rises, and the mourners also sprinkle water
on the grave (wine is often poured over exhumed bones), whispering to the
dead person.
To a Greek Orthodox believer, Christian Orthodox services give human
beings a glimpse of what heaven is like. Another way of putting it is to say
that this is what earth would be like if the Fall had not taken place, or what
it could be like if everyone lived ‘a life in Christ’ and the senses were
12 Margaret E. Kenna

‘deified’. The architecture of Orthodox churches and chapels suggests a

deified world. The building itself is a microcosm of the universe, with the
dome and vault representing the heaven set over the earth. The wall paint-
ings and icons depict the events and personages which demonstrate God’s
plan for the world and its realisation in historical time in the person of the
Christ and the saints (Kenna 1985). Within the church-as-transformed-world,
all the senses are offered input. The eyes see icons and candlelight (see
Galavaris 1978), the ears hear the chanting of the priest and the singing of
hymns and chants (without the accompaniment of any musical instruments),
the chanting of prayers, the ringing of bells adorning the chains of the
censer; the nose smells incense; and while only a few experience taste
through taking communion, most members of the congregation will eat
prosforo (the blessed but unconsecrated bread) after the service. Lips press
kisses onto the surface of icons, fingers grasp the wax of candles and trace
the sign of the cross from forehead to chest, shoulder to shoulder. As Ware
writes, ‘Worship, for the Orthodox Church, is nothing less than “heaven on
earth” ’ (Ware 1963: 270). So, an Orthodox church service is a synaesthetic
experience: every sense is conveying the same message.

I was told by many Kalymnians [residents of the Greek island of Kalymnos]

that sensory experience was central to Greek Orthodoxy: the sound of the
singing of the liturgy, the omnipresence of icons and paintings, and the over-
whelming smell of incense . . . Kalymnians insisted that it was in these superior
sensory experiences that the difference of Orthodoxy lay, when compared to
what they felt was the ‘coldness’ of western Christianity. (Sutton 1998: 73)

On this point, the Orthodox world-view would agree with Marx, that
the senses are alienated in modern life, but believers would go on to say
that it is only in the Orthodox church service that the senses are re-constituted.
Cavafy’s poem (Cavafy 1984: 34) sums up the ‘multisensory’, synaesthetic,
aspects of Orthodoxy:

I love the church: its labara13

its silver vessels and candleholders
the lights, the ikons, the pulpit.

When I go there, into a church of the Greeks, with its aroma of incense
Its liturgical chanting and harmony,
The majestic presence of the priests, dazzling in their ornate vestments,
The solemn rhythm of their gestures – my thoughts turn to the great glories of our race,
To the splendours of our Byzantine heritage.
 Why does incense smell religious? 13

In contrast to Catholicism and Protestantism, Christian Orthodoxy has

not experienced anything like the examination of its fundamental tenets
brought upon Western Christianity by the Reformation and the Enlighten-
ment. It emphasizes ‘traditionalism and liturgy rather than formal dogma in
the Western sense’ (Maloney 1967: 794). It is not a religion in which logic
and rationalism, or western-style individualization of the person, are
predominant, but speaking ‘only to those for whom spiritualism remains
the essence of life’, its essence is rather ‘a transcendent spiritual mysticism’
(Pollis 1993: 354, 341). In its own terms, Orthodoxy represents tradition
and the heart as against logic and reason: ‘a “way” to perfection, and the
possibility of a form of “deification” through a type of spiritual knowledge,
or “gnosis”, accessible to initiated Christians through the cultivation of the
heart rather than of the mind. Latin Christianity on the other hand came to
be more rational in form, and to attach greater importance to the logical
working of the human mind in the pursuit of divine knowledge . . .’ (Campbell
& Sherrard 1965: 75–76; see also Kenna 1995). Some Orthodox believers
would take issue with Campbell and Sherrard, saying that their distinction
only works if ‘mind’ is used in the sense of a purely rational faculty. In
Orthodoxy the mind, or rather the intellect, the sense of intelligence, is
used in harmony with the heart and not in contrast or opposition to it.

Smell and the Transcendent World

If what Pollis, writing from a critical position, and Ware, writing from an
apologist’s perspective, say about Orthodoxy as a mystically based form of
Christianity, can be accepted as a correct depiction, then we might be wise
to look at incense in the context of what might be called a religious or
mystical world: ‘founded on the proposition that the relation between
experience and the totality of the cosmos can be mediated by signs’ (Gell
1974: 21). For such societies, this world, the world of the senses, is only a
fragment of a much larger, transcendent world which is difficult, if not
impossible to represent, because there is nothing in the everyday world
which corresponds to it. On the one hand is ‘the inexpressible beauty of
God’ and on the other is the whole of creation which is an expression of
that beauty. So God is both inexpressible and expressed. And yet, in ‘emic’
terms, our world is part of it (the beauty of God), that is, part of God, part
of the Kingdom of Heaven. And it (that beauty) is part of our world.14 We
can only try to gain access to it, and thus to God, through signs and to give
it an oblique expression through inadequate symbols. Indeed, some of these
signs and symbols emphasize rather than conceal their inadequacy of expression
14 Margaret E. Kenna

precisely to get us to realise how inexpressible this larger world is: ‘a stone
is the sun; a fragment of wood is the tree of the world’ (Gell 1974: 22).
This is more than metaphor: the stone represents, re-presents (presents
again) the sun. There are levels of correspondence according to which
material objects are true symbols of a greater reality. Human beings in this
type of society characterise the transcendent world as one pervaded by a
principle of meaningfulness and we can glimpse the transcendent world
when things happen in daily life (not necessarily strange and unusual things)
which we can perceive as this principle of meaningfulness at work.15 The
human mind takes contingent events16 and interprets them as meaningful,
and as revealing that there is a fundamental principle at work in the universe
(in Christian terms, that they are part of God’s plan: ‘there is providence in
the fall of a sparrow’). ‘External contingency is made relative to the
synthesising activity of the mind’ (Gell 1974: 25).
From an outsider’s perspective we could describe this as follows: the
way in which the mind is ordered is projected onto phenomena and events,
and these are reflected back to the mind as images of the larger transcendent
world. Another way of putting this is to say that human beings try to make
sense of events, and then say that the sense they make is there in the events
themselves. As Gell puts it: ‘The synchronicity of their juxtaposition is a
manifestation of this larger world’ (Gell 1974: 26). If this is so, then when
human beings use symbolic devices such as metonym (part for whole) and
metaphor (this stands for that), these are not merely rhetorical devices in
ritual but are modes of aligning what is done in the ritual with the inner
structure of this larger world.

Olfaction and Transition

It has been argued by David Howes that smell is especially appropriate for
marking transition from one state to another: ‘the sense of smell is the
liminal sense par excellence’ (Howes 1987: 401). Howes takes his inspi-
ration from the work of Rodney Needham, who argued twenty years ear-
lier in ‘Percussion and Transition’ (1967) that there is a connection be-
tween the use of percussive noise makers such as bells, gongs, fireworks,
and transition. Usually this is a change in status for a person (for example,
from unmarried to married) but could also be a change for everyone in a
society (such as from one season or year to another). Howes argues in
parallel with respect to smell. First of all, it is logical to use smell to mark
transition because smells (like sounds) do not have clear boundaries, we
can smell something at a distance from the source of the smell itself (the
 Why does incense smell religious? 15

smell of something cooking; the smell of the sea; the smell of a person on
their discarded clothes or on bedlinen). Smells cross the boundaries of
place and of time. In addition, smells are both part of what they convey
(the smell of food comes from real food) but in addition, they also convey
the idea of what they come from, the idea of eating, of a meal, of
commensality. They are in the logical space between ‘the stimulus and the
sign, the substance and the idea’ (Gell 1977: 26). It is precisely because
smells are disembodied that they are good for expressing an ideal or abso-
lute truth which hovers on the edge of actualization (the incense smoke
drifting upwards hints at the ideal order).
There are also good psychological reasons why smell should be used to
mark situations of transition; smell evokes powerful emotional memories
(because olfactory signals go to the part of the brain concerned with memory
and emotion) and can carry us away in space and time, back to our child-
hood (the smell of cabbage may take us back to school corridors) or across
the world (fresh basil may transport us instantly to Greece). In these examples,
smell is a metonym, a part standing for the whole: the smell of cabbage
evoking the whole ‘sensorium’ of the school. But in other cases smell acts
as a metaphor, the smell of Chanel no 5, or ‘Joy’, which used to be advertised
as the most expensive perfume in the world, stands for the life of the rich
and famous, the supposed good life (Gell 1977: 31).
In trying to summarise how the world of transcendence might be under-
stood, I have been working towards the argument that, for Greek Orthodox
believers, when incense is used in an Orthodox church or chapel, it is being
used within a total context, what I will call, in shorthand, the context of the
sacred, of life in Heaven. Within this context, incense is ‘at home’, there is
nothing which is not sacred. So I would argue, against Howes, that incense
does not mark a transition from profane to sacred; although it may be that the
use of incense marks out certain moments of the service as special. On these
occasions incense is used to sharpen the believers’ attention and indicate that
they are going to get in touch now, this particular moment, with something
which is always there, such as at the moment of consecration (when the bell
and censer are used). Outside the church, however, believers are back in a
fallen world, where there is a distinction between sacred and profane, and
(here I am in agreement with Howes) it is in this everyday, profane, world
that incense does indeed mark transition.17 Generalising from the example of
Greek Orthodoxy, my argument is that incense, or any other fragrant smoke,
is both a medium of inter-connectedness with the transcendent world and a
symbol of it, a symbol of the underlying unity of what westerners would
separate as the natural and the supernatural worlds.
16 Margaret E. Kenna

Notes
* I would like to thank Dr. Paul Clough and Dr. Juliet du Boulay for helpful
comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
1. In the opera Don Giovanni the Don smells Donna Elvira before he sees her,
remarking: ‘mi pare sentire odor di femmina’ [ I can sense the smell of a
woman] to which Leporello comments ‘cospetto che odorato perfetto!’ [what
a perfect sense of smell]).
2. Mental properties, skills, and tastes are assigned to the two genders as inherent
and ‘given’: men in some cultures are said to be more logical, women more
emotional, or to have different kinds of reasoning powers. Men’s are said to
be ‘more direct’, women’s ‘lateral. In Greece men are said to ‘naturally’
enjoy salty foods and dry wine, while women are assumed to like sweet
foods and wines (Cowan 1990: 67). The traditional offering of hospitality is
a home-made spoon-sweet demonstrating the housewifely skills of the women
of the house.
3. The Viet-Cong are said to have been able to smell US soldiers at a distance,
apparently because of ‘their cheesy odour, product of a high consumption of
milk derivatives’ (Porteous 1990: 27); the Zulu liken the smell of perspiring
Europeans to that of a billy-goat (Loudon 1977: 162).
4. However, the Dassanatech visit and eat with fisherfolk, enter into co-operative
exchange relationships with them and Dassanetch men will marry the daughters
of fishermen. Almagor does not tell us what the fisherfolk think of the pastoralists.
5. One of the arguments of the anti-incense camp was that as God was incorpo-
real and therefore had no nostrils, incense was inappropriate as an oblation.
The preface of Atchley’s book refers to this debate and to a book edited by
J. S. Franey called The case against incense, 1899.
6. ‘For we are unto God a sweet savour of Christ’ (II Corinthians 2 v 15).
7. ‘Incense defied time by virtue of its resistance to decay’ (Corbin 1986: 203).
8. Note that dendrolivano = rosemary, literally ‘tree-incense’. In legend it is
associated with the Virgin Mary, whose blue cloak thrown over a rosemary
bush changed the flowers from white to blue.
9. The ancient Greek myth of the origin of frankincense (Detienne 1994: 37–
38) concerns the revenge of King Orchamos, king of the Land of Spices,
whose daughter Leucothoë was loved by the Sun. Orchamos buried his daughter
alive in a trench covered with sand; when the Sun was unable to revive her,
he covered her with nectar and she turned into a frankincense bush. Now
incorruptible, she was re-united with the Sun each time incense is burnt,
through its aroma and smoke.
10. The biblical scholar and early anthropologist William Robertson Smith thought
that incense might owe ‘its original virtue to the belief that it was the blood
of an animate and divine tree’ (Atchley 1909: 67). There is some evidence
that this blood was not equated with the life blood of the tree (as it were), but
with the menstrual blood of women (balls of resin likened to clots of menstrual
 Why does incense smell religious? 17

blood). The gum or resin of trees has, depending on its colour, been likened
not only to blood, but to tears, breast milk and semen (Turner 1962: 171).
Extrapolating general concepts from these human exudations suggests to Turner:
grief and repentance; the mother-child relationship and the organising princi-
ple of matrilineal descent; the sexual relationship between man and woman
and the parental relationship between begetter and offspring.
11. Aromatherapy is now being used in business to alter employees’ behaviour,
with scents pumped through through the ventilation system. Citrus stimu-
lates, floral smells aid concentration, woody smells relieve tiredness. Lemon
or cedar was found to give more than a 10% increase in computer keyboard
typists' strike-rate (Synnott 1993: 203).
12. Smell memory is longer-lasting than visual memory . . . researchers suggest
that ‘olfactory receptors are plugged directly into the brain's limbic system,
the seat of emotion, and that this direct connection between smell and emotion
had strategic evolutionary value for our ancestors’ (Porteous 1990: 37).
13. eksapteriga = literally ‘six winged things’, here ‘ikons of cherubs’.
14. Francis Thompson: ‘O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we
touch thee . . .’ (1967: 424).
15. Gell, drawing on both Fortes and Jung, called these ‘acausal synchronicity
relations’ (Gell 1977:19). The inner articulation of this world is ‘an acausal
connecting principle’ (Jung, cited Gell 1977: 23), that is, synchronicity. Gell
also noted (1974:26 n1) that he intended to undertake ‘a study of the nature
of God’. Unfortunately he never published on this topic.
16. What westeners might call natural phenomena, such as storms, are interpreted
as indices of the moral condition of society. Gell’s example is that among the
Umeda, the New Guinea people among whom he carried out research, violent
squalls are said to be caused by the aggressive feelings of men who have had
bad luck in hunting, or are suffering the illness or death of a kinsman. Another
example, from the Navajo, is that droughts, or thunderstorms, might indicate
a lack of balance within the world order, such as young men cutting their
hair short, ‘Anglo’ style, instead of wearing in according to the custom of
Dineh, the people.
17. For example, in a Greek house when the ikon shelf is ‘operationalized’ with
the lighting of a oil lamp to mark the hours leading to the Sunday morning
service or a saint’s day, and hence the transition to sacred time.

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