by Jack Turner
Others took Pliny’s complaint further. After all, Pliny was a pagan who, however parsimonious, at least believed in the gods’ existence. But for those for whom those same gods were demons, the money spent on spices rankled more on account of idolatry than profligacy. Theoretically if not always in practice, there was no room for spice in the holy places of a single and incorporeal Yahweh, God or Allah. In the religious ferment of late antiquity, as a waning paganism collapsed in the face of the monotheistic challenge of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this was an issue worthy of impassioned debate, alongside which Pliny’s lament seems a trifle. As Rome’s energies ebbed and the new lone gods spread across the empire it was, for a time, a matter of life and death.
The implications of the rejection of spices by the monotheists are considerably clearer than its origins. The older books of the Bible contain numerous references to spices in a sacramental context. The God of Genesis, we have seen, had nose enough to appreciate a fragrant offering from Noah, just as he appreciated ‘pleasing odours’ from his followers. Genesis tells of Joseph sold into slavery to Ishmaelite spice merchants en route from Gilead to Egypt. In all likelihood the spices the Queen of Sheba brought Solomon were destined for a similar use.
There are several biblical allusions to the early, long-distance trade in aromatics, in which Solomon was involved, apparently for largely religious reasons. In cooperation with his ally Hiram the Phoenician, Solomon dispatched an expedition to the land of Ophir for the sake of its gold, peacocks and an unidentified aromatic wood with which to build ‘the rails of the house of the Lord’. As with Punt, Ophir’s location remains the subject of scholarly wrangling. One of the more tantalising possibilities is suggested by the Hebrew word for the peacock included among Ophir’s exotica, which seems to derive from the ancient Tamil name of the bird. The peacock is native to India, and since the word does not occur elsewhere in the Bible it seems conceivable that Hiram sailed there. But wherever Ophir was to be found, it is clear that like the polytheist Egyptians the ancient Israelites were prepared to go to extraordinary lengths for the sake of the sacred aromatics, warranting the admiring comment of the scribe: ‘Never again were so many spices brought in as those the queen of Sheba gave to King Solomon.’ This was one of the achievements of his reign.*
Things had apparently changed, or were beginning to change, by the time of the prophet Jeremiah, late in the seventh century BC. Yahweh was no longer interested: ‘What do I care about incense from Sheba or sweet calamus from a distant land? Your burnt offerings are not acceptable; your sacrifices do not please me,’ thundered the vengeful god of the prophet. To Isaiah, ‘bringing offerings is futile; incense is an abomination to me’. This change of tone was apparently the consequence of a fundamental doctrinal development, marking a shift away from the external act of sacrifice towards an emphasis on personal purity and obedience. God would no longer be appeased by burnt offerings, but by the sacrifice of a contrite heart. In theological terms, the reasoning is clear – at least after the event. God himself was evolving. By the later books of the Hebrew Bible the more physical God of Genesis, coming and going in the garden, has withdrawn into a more remote, truly metaphysical being. As a consequence, the whole notion of sacrifice had to be reappraised, since physical offerings to a god lacking physical form made no sense – why offer material goods to an immaterial being?
And yet, as we have seen, the clarity of the theology rests uneasily with the older archaeological and textual evidence. Prophetic choler apparently belies, indeed, may be explained by, a more muddled past. That the God of the older books appreciated a sweet savour has led some scholars to argue that the deodorisation of the Hebrew religion was a relatively late development, written into the holy books by later generations of scribes and editors; that is, by those responsible for the Bible as we now know it. In his study of the use of incense in ancient Israel, Kjeld Nielsen has argued that the widespread early use of aromatics is only dimly remembered in the surviving Bible, thanks to later rewriting by the so-called ‘Reform Movement’, a body of scribes and editors responsible for imposing their own contemporary views on any parts of the ancient texts that showed alarming discrepancies from current (or their own) religious practice. The most striking of several references occurs in the older book of Exodus, where Yahweh demands of Moses a ‘holy anointing oil’ made with cinnamon and cassia. The oil is to be applied to the tabernacle of the congregation, for the temple fittings, ‘that they may be most holy … for a sweet savour before the Lord’. So esteemed was the oil that its use was reserved for the priest. It could not be employed for any secular purpose, upon pain of excommunication: ‘Upon man’s flesh shall it not be poured, neither shall ye make any other like it, after the composition of it: it is holy, and it shall be holy unto you. Whosoever compoundeth any like it, or whosoever putteth any of it upon a stranger, shall even be cut off from his people.’
To all intents and purposes we have here a reverence for aromatics much the same as that shown by the Egyptians and Assyrians: a deity-delighting savour; aromas whose use outside the temple was sacrilege. And indeed it may well have been precisely this shared tradition with the polytheists that accounts for the subsequent exclusion of spices and incense from Hebrew religion. For a priestly class acutely conscious of its uniqueness and jealous of its prerogatives, and one moreover that was increasingly coming to conceive of its faith in terms of opposition to polytheist idolatry, spices were a troubling reminder of a past when the lines were less clear. This thesis fits with other idolatrous lapses of the preexilic kings outlined by the different biblical scribal traditions. The Book of Kings relates that in later life Solomon – who was, after all, the pharaoh’s son-in-law – dabbled in idolatry: ‘On a hill east of Jerusalem, Solomon built a high place for Chemosh the detestable god of Moab, and for Molech the detestable god of the Ammonites. He did the same for all his foreign wives, who burned incense and offered sacrifices to their gods.’ Passages such as this appear to reflect a more fluid religious reality, one that accommodated the extensive use of aromas in worship but rested uneasily with the theology of later generations and was duly excised from the holy books.
The exclusion of aromas would therefore seem to have been a process more evolutionary than revolutionary. During the second temple period (536 BC–AD 70), spices were still burned on the golden altar of the Temple. The spice mixtures were prepared in the Temple itself in the Avtinus Chamber, so named after the family of perfumers who supplied the ingredients. The family claimed to know of a secret ingredient that made the smoke rise straight up in a column; they refused to divulge the secret lest it be used in the worship of idols.
Elsewhere certain aromatics lingered on. Dating from the second half of the third century AD, the mosaic floor of the synagogue of Severus at Hammath Tiberias features an incense shovel, apparently still a part of everyday worship. Dating from much the same time is the text known as the Revelation of Moses, an early Christian composition based on Jewish sources, in which Adam asks of God, immediately before he is expelled from paradise: ‘I beseech you, allow me to take sweet odours out of paradise, in order that, after I go out, I may offer sacrifice to God, that God may listen to me.’ In the time of the historian Josephus, writing around AD 93, the High Priest was still anointed with cinnamon. The most explicit reference occurs in the late-fourth-century account of the sack of Jerusalem by the author known as the Pseudo-Hegesippus, which tells of a priest handing over the sacred vessels and vestments of the Temple to the conquering Romans, among which were ‘cinnamon, cassia, many spices, incense and many sacred vessels of the sacraments’. The context makes clear that these were reserved for religious use, and were numbered among the Temple’s most precious furnishings.
Even to this day Judaism may still retain a faint reminder of spices’ sacral past. Spices are still used in the Havdalah ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath, during the course of which the speaker blesses the wine and spices with the words, ‘Blessed art tho
u, O Lord, our God, creator of the universe, creator of all the kinds of spices.’ The precise origins of the custom are impossibly obscure, however it is at least clear that the practice was current by the early third century AD, perhaps as early as the first, since it is mentioned in the Mishnah, or commentaries. Modern scholars are inclined to see the custom as an outgrowth of an unknown food ritual of the Greco-Roman period, but it seems equally likely that the spice box is an ancient mutation of a much more ancient religious practice, when spices themselves served as offerings. One of the more tantalising possibilities is suggested in the apocryphal apocalyptic text known as 3 Baruch, composed by a Jewish author some fifty or so years after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70, surviving antiquity only in a modified Greek version. During the course of a vision an angel escorts Baruch on a tour of the heavens, where he sees the phoenix. The bird ‘excretes a worm, and the excrement of the worm is cinnamon, which kings and princes use’. One scholar has seen in the ‘kings and princes’ of the apocalypse a reference to the mystical sages of the Jewish community who used cinnamon in their rites.
On the whole, however, it is clear that among the Jews spices were slowly but surely shorn of their magical aura, progressively downgraded to offerings regarded as more symbolic than sacred. It was a pattern followed by the other faiths that followed the Jews in positing a single and immaterial God, but most thoroughly by Islam. Like Judaism, Islam emerged in conflict with a pagan universe, and the aromas that had once played such a part in pagan worship were expunged. So Surah 51 of the Koran: ‘I have not created genii and men for an other end than that they should serve me. I require not sustenance from them; neither will it that they feed me.’ Allah’s Prophet was well placed to comment on such matters. His native Mecca was an ancient cultic centre whose commercial vitality owed much to its commanding position as an entrepôt astride the Arabian caravan routes – along which, among other things, travelled the incenses and spices of the Yemen. As a former camel-driver Mohammed surely knew the trade as well as anyone. His first wife, Khadija, was herself the widow of a wealthy spice trader and presumably a supplier to the smoking altars and idols that Mohammed would soon set about destroying. Within the Prophet’s lifetime spices effectively disappear from Arabian religion. No other major religion is so thoroughly devoid of aromatics or physical offerings.*
With Christianity, like Judaism, the picture is considerably more confused. The inherited books of the Hebrew Old Testament, we have seen, contain numerous references to spices; however the writings of the Church Fathers show a remarkable clarity and unity on the subject: aromas were out. The most serious objection was simply that pagans used them. From the time of the first preaching of the Gospels until the final suppression of pagan religions in the fifth century, early Christians lived cheek-by-jowl with polytheists and their fuming altars. Like a form of religious air pollution, these were daily and intrusive reminders of the pagan associations of spice. In his Exhortation to the Martyrs, the great theologian Origen (185–c.253) claims that the chief outward sign distinguishing a pagan from a Christian is the telltale presence of incense at the domestic altar. No devout Christian would offer incense, for demons were drawn to the sweet-smelling smoke. And if demons could be fed, it followed they could be starved: the best way of deterring unwanted infernal visitors was to deprive them of the incense on which they fed. For this reason Tertullian thought that Christians who bought spices for ‘solace at funerals’ were complicit in idolatry, aiding and abetting the demons that fed off the smoke: ‘The work of idolatry is perpetrated … without the idol, by the burning of odours.’
If anything, the odium intensified with the passage of time. To veterans of the persecutions, spices reeked not only of demons but of bitter personal experience. During the persecutions of the emperors Decius (249–251) and Diocletian (303–304), believers were identified and offered a chance to recant, either by sacrificing, offering a libation or burning incense before an image of the emperor. On doing so, they were granted the appropriate certificate; if they refused, they were promptly executed (many Christians seem to have survived the persecutions by bribing corrupt officials). Those who elected for idolatry over martyrdom were sneeringly called the ‘Turificati’, the incense-burners. To St Jerome (c.347–419/420) the tag was a form of shorthand for the weak or vacillating Christian, unwilling to die for his faith.
To pagan Romans, Christians’ refusal to offer incense to the emperor was, in strictly religious terms, as puzzling as it was perverse, but scarcely threatening. Far more important, refusal to sacrifice to the emperor amounted to an act of political dissidence, an overt rejection of the imperial cult which, in an age when emperors were regularly murdered by their own soldiers, was becoming an increasingly significant prop of imperial legitimacy (and to which, ironically, the Christian emperors were the heirs). But to a devout Christian, offering was an act of spiritual suicide, recognition of an evil demon; to a Roman, it was revolt. Hence the periodic insistence by the emperors of the third century on the necessity of sacrifice in front of witnesses, at once a litmus test of allegiance and a convenient way of identifying the rebels. During one such phase, recorded in the document known as the Martyrdom of Habib the Deacon, composed late in the third century or early in the fourth, the emperor Diocletian commanded libations and sacrifices, ‘and that the altars in every place should be restored, and that they might burn sweet spices and frankincense before Zeus’. Habib disagreed, preached the scriptures, and promptly went to a martyr’s death.
Not all Christians, of course, came to such a dramatic end. Yet the influence of the martyrs was out of all proportion to their relatively small numbers, their salutary deaths adding pungency to what must have seemed to many as more or less abstract theological debates. Like the Hebrew prophets before them, Christians had a sense that the offering of material spices to an immaterial god was misconceived; why offer perishable spices to an immortal being? The second-century philosopher Athenagoras was perhaps the first to state the anti-incense line in terms pagans could understand, arguing that God did not need sweet incense, although his own reasoning has more than a whiff of paganism – since ‘He is Himself perfect fragrance.’ So too the Christian apologist Lactantius (240-c.320) argued that ‘whatever is … perishable … is inconsistent with the whole subject of immortality’.
In liturgical terms, the implications of the position were clear. Isaiah had said it first: ‘Incense is an abomination unto me,’ a line reiterated by the God of the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions. Likewise a commentary on the same passage, attributed to St Basil (c.329–379): ‘For truly it is an execrable thing to think that God values the pleasures of the sense of smell … and not to understand that the hallowing of the body, effected by the sobriety of the soul, is the incense unto the Lord … Corporeal incense that affects the nostrils and moves the sense is by a necessary consequence regarded as an abomination to a Being that is incorporeal.’ St John Chrysostomos (c.347–407) was still more succinct: ‘God has no nostrils.’
Food of the Gods
Odours of Sanctity
With sweet-smelling cinnamon.
You are, Our Lady, to be compared;
To myrrh of the Orient,
That distant aroma.
Pero López de Ayala,
Rimado de Palacio, c.1385
Some Christians, however, were not so sure. If the fathers of the Church had little room for doubt about their deity’s receptiveness to fragrant offerings, their flock was apparently more muddled. For on the tangled question of aroma and worship, spices and incense were more durable, and apparently more convincing, than doctrine. Long after the temples and altars of the pagan gods were reduced to ruins, the spiced aromas that had once graced the altars of Apollo and Aphrodite lingered on in the holy places of the West.
In the liturgy and literature of the early medieval Church, spices reappear to all intents and purposes in much the same role as they had formerly served the pagans. This return to r
eligious orthodoxy occurred very early. The sixth-century Scythian Christian writer Dionysius Exiguus wrote of the head of John the Baptist, severed by Herod but honoured by multitudes of monks and angels, sprinkled with the aromas of ‘nard, saffron, cinnamon and all spices’. We have already seen that by this stage paradise had acquired a strong smell of spice. Marius, a Christian grammarian born in Africa around 300, located cinnamon in the Garden of Eden. Saints Jerome and Chrysostomos situated India and its spiced exotica next to paradise. Spices were at home once more in heaven.
As they were, apparently, in church. The earliest unambiguous reference is the late-fourth-century Testament of Ephraim the Syrian, who explicitly stipulates that his fellow Christians should ‘burn sweet spices in the Holy Place’. Some of the earliest references occur in the Liber Pontificalis, a farrago of papal records and pious forgeries composed, in its present form, from roughly the first half of the sixth century on. Many of the oldest records in the Liber are based on older documentary records of the papal treasury (vestiarum), apparently dating from the fourth century and consisting for the most part of an unadorned record of Church decrees and events, church furniture, reliquaries, treasures and liturgical equipment. Included in the latter are several huge stockpiles of spice dating from early in the fourth century, in the time of Pope Sylvester, the pontiff traditionally credited with baptising Constantine. Of the Basilica of Constantine (built, as it happens, on the site of the horrea piperataria, or spice stores) the Liber records an annual gift from the emperor of 150 pounds of unspecified aromatics accompanied by a golden censer. On the site where St Peter’s Basilica now stands, then occupied by an older church built by Constantine and his mother Helena, the emperor donated a small tonnage of sacred equipment: gold, bronze and porphyry, candelabra and gifts from the Eastern Church consisting of 225 pounds of balsam, eight hundred pounds of oil of nard, 650 pounds of unspecified aromatics, fifty corn-measures of pepper, fifty pounds of cloves, a hundred pounds of saffron and a hundred pounds of fine linen, ‘obtained by Constantine Augustus for Saint Peter’. In total, the emperor donated a staggering 150 pounds of cloves to various churches.
