Incense in Magic

One of the most important instruments, used almost everywhere across the fields of Magic, is smoke and incense.

Common notions about the role of incense in “spiritual” practice most often reduce it to an olfactory effect — that is, an influence on the operator’s mind via the organs of smell, the nasal mucosa, and so on. Occasionally, people refer to its “cleansing” influence, without going deeply into the details or mechanisms of that effect.

Both of the influences mentioned above, of course, do take place and are important within the complex role that incense plays in both contemplative and realizational practices. Yet that role is far broader than simply creating an appropriate “atmosphere” or affecting the practitioner’s mood or state.

Beyond their direct effect on the practitioner’s mind, properly chosen and burned incense in a Ritual also performs an energetic role, in effect complementing and intensifying the action of amulets, sigils and other sigil-forms that “redeem” the energetic possibility of creating a body of manifestation.

In other words, incense simultaneously and coherently affects both the subject of the Ritual — the Magus — and the environment in which the operation takes place, and in this sense, it is as indispensable an instrument as the Symbols of Authority and Signs of Power. Even the aforementioned “cleansing” effect of smoking and incense, so widely used today in the form of “aromatherapy,” contains both of these aspects of influence.

And while the mechanism of the incense’s olfactory influence is, broadly speaking, relatively obvious — encompassing effects on mood and, in some cases (when the smoking substance is psychotropic), a direct physiological impact on the practitioner’s nervous system — its energetic influence is often less well described and clearly apprehended.

The sigil-like effect of scents is based on the interaction of the ascending activity of fire (in the form of igniting smoking materials or the evaporation of incense) with the substance of the incense itself, which most often includes plant components, less often mineral, and still more rarely animal substances. Burning plant components activates the substance’s inherent capacities for “growth” and expansion; burning mineral components provides stability to the realization; and burning animal products imparts vitality to it. In practice, the stability of a manifestation most often rests on the unyieldingness of the practitioner’s will, while its vitality is provided by the fire of his desire — so plant-based incense/smokes, which enable multiplication and the enlargement of these manifestations, are the most commonly used instruments for such influence.

The most widely used incense, of course, is frankincense. This is the principal solar incense. The effect of frankincense on the practitioner can be reduced to bringing the mind into a state of “active ascent” in the fullest sense, while energetically, frankincense is the most powerful “descending” instrument: on the one hand, it opposes the “ascending” demonic currents (hence its cleansing action), and on the other, it helps the “descending” angelic/divine influences to manifest.

Equally widespread is sandalwood. This incense is primarily an activator of growth in every sense and belongs to lunar influences. In this key, sandalwood fosters creative manifestation and emotional depth and energetically serves as a reliable support for emotionally charged realizational impulses.

Among other important incenses widely used in rituals, note anise — a Jupiterian incense, widely employed in commanding, evocative rituals; wormwood — an incense containing elements of Earth and Venus, used as a purifying/solidifying agent; ferula (asafoetida) — one of the principal Saturnian, banishing incenses; basil — a Martian, fiery, aggressive incense; hawthorn — likewise widely used in active banishing operations; mistletoe — one of the most powerful threshold smokes, conducive to the thinning of the threshold between worlds and spaces; verbena — one of the most powerful Venerian incenses, carrying Jupiterian notes as well, conducive to the Magic of union in every sense; laurel — a solar, victorious incense.

In any case, a clear understanding of the character of an incense’s influence on the operator and on the environment of the operation, as well as consideration of the incense’s planetary, elemental and other specific qualities, is of course an important condition for the success of a magical operation, whatever its orientation.