Spice: The History of a Temptation

by Jack Turner

  The Liber contains similar records from other great churches around the empire. If the figures are genuine – and they have an air of precision about them – they suggest a complete about-face on the part of the first Christian emperor. If on the other hand they are forgeries, they at least show the assumptions a pious forger of the sixth century might harbour about the treasury of a great church. Either way these spices were evidently church equipment; they were not there to be eaten, no more than the candelabras or censers with which they are grouped. To all appearances we are very close here to customs excoriated by earlier writers, not far from the cinnamon stored in a golden dish in a pagan temple on the Palatine, or the dedication of cinnamon to Apollo at Miletus by King Seleucus. A little over a hundred years after Tertullian had railed against the sweet, demon-attracting bait, and within living memory of a time when martyrs had chosen death ahead of burning incense, God had reacquired his nostrils. Who had converted whom?

  Doubtless the new ecclesiastical receptiveness to spice can be attributed to the fact that many of the old beliefs were easily adapted to new religious circumstances. One pagan myth that lent itself to a Christian repackaging was that of the cinnamon-immolated phoenix, dying so as to be reborn into eternal life. Parallels between the careers of Christ and the phoenix were obvious. St Ambrose, the fourth-century bishop of Milan, saw the phoenix and its life-restoring cinnamon as symbols of Christ and his teachings. In a work conventionally attributed to Lactantius, the phoenix

  Builds a nest, or sepulchre,

  For she dies that she may live.

  Here she gathers juices and perfumes

  That the Assyrian, the opulent Arab gather from the riches of the

  forest;

  That the Pygmies or the Indians harvest,

  Or that the land of Sabaea grows in its tender bosom.

  Here she piles cinnamon, and the scent of far-diffusing cardamom,

  And balsam mixed with cinnamon leaf.

  On account of its pagan imagery scholars have debated whether the work is Christian or pagan in inspiration, but to some extent the question is misconstrued, for by now phoenix and spices were both. In this sense the formerly pagan phoenix, reborn in Christian plumage, was, after all, immune to death.

  However, Christians did not need to look to pagan myths to credit spices with the odours of divinity, for they had their own. Besides numerous references in the Hebrew Bible, some of the brightest images were drawn from early Christian and Jewish apocryphal literature that emerged in the ferment of the second and third centuries. Though most were later excluded from the canonical Bible, these were widely read in the Middle Ages. The apocryphal Apocalypse of Peter, dating from the first half of the second century, places the spices in paradise. Likewise the somewhat older Book of Enoch, an apocalyptic work narrating Enoch’s visionary transportation to paradise, where the winds from the flapping wings of the Cherubim waft spicy aromas:

  And in the midst of the Garden they [the winds] join together and blow from one side to the other and are perfumed with the spices of the Garden even from its remotest parts, until they separate from each other, and, filled with the scent of the pure spices, they bring the odour from the remotest parts of Eden and the spices of the Garden to the righteous and godly who in time to come shall inherit the garden of Eden and the Tree of Life.

  In the hands of medieval commentators references such as these ripened and blossomed into a rich store of metaphor. Spices transcended the terrestrial and heavenly spheres, it being something of a commonplace that in the heavenly paradise the just would be rewarded for their virtuous lives with eternal bliss and nourished on celestial seasonings. Honorius of Autun, who lived in the middle of the twelfth century, imagined paradise smelling of cinnamon and balsam while the blessed feasted in the sight of God. This was an enduring image. The English author of a fifteenth-century sermon envisaged the just eating spices on the Day of Judgement, gathered among the stars and in God’s radiance. Foods that were immensely problematic on earth – just how problematic we shall explore in a moment – were fine in heaven. In the company of saints and seraphim there would be no cabbage and mash.

  The Middle Ages read the Bible historically, allegorically, morally, and so it was with the Bible’s spices. To Maurus Magnentius Rabanus (c.776–856), abbot of the Benedictine abbey of Fulda and archbishop of Mainz, Sheba’s famous spices (pigmenta) were sublimated into symbols of rare force, signifying not mere spices, but the various ‘ornaments of the virtues’. Did not the book of Ecclesiasticus say of holy Wisdom that she smelt of cinnamon? Rabanus lived in a symbol-hungry age, and the expensive, rare and mysterious spices lent themselves to endless allegorising. To the Venerable Bede and dozens who copied him, pale, ashen-brown cinnamon was taken as a symbol of inner worth over outward display, of substance over style, redolent of inner virtue. This humble package concealed potent healing gifts within a plain exterior, invisible to the eyes, evanescent and intangible. The tree (which of course none of them had seen) was held to be short and humble, of an ashen colour: plain on the outside, but worthy within. Peter de la Celle, bishop of Chartres (?–c.1183), saw spices, and cinnamon in particular, as symbols of incomparable worth, miraculous in their effects, mysterious, sweet and effective in their healing power.

  As has already been observed, of all biblical sources touching on spices, in every sense the spiciest, and the most influential, was the Song of Songs. Quite apart from its influence on erotic poetry, there was something in the disembodied, dreamy quality of the Song that reverberated in the mystical imagination. Spices and aromatics are an integral part of the Song’s naturalistic, fertile imagery. It was, perhaps, the very elusiveness of the aroma that gave the imagery its force. Spices evoke a rapturous transport:

  Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my

  garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved

  come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits.

  A convenient solution to some awkward possibilities suggested by such spicy language was to allegorise, reading the spices in question as a metaphor for mystical ecstasy. By this reading, the poem was a declaration of a love not so much physical as spiritual, its desire shared not by two lovers but by Christ and the Church, the Church and the soul, God and the believer, or some variant thereof.

  And so spices, figuratively at least, found their way back into ecclesiastical favour. Shorn of their pagan odium, they signified the holy virtues and their effects, preserving from corruption and the contagion of sin. As Pope Gregory the Great interpreted the passage quoted immediately above: ‘What is signified by these various types of aromas if not the odour and effect of the holy virtues?’ (What indeed?) Clerical writers from one end of the Middle Ages to the other saw spices signifying spiritual manna in all manner of forms. To St Ambrose, cinnamon signified the ‘gifts of the spirit’; Pierre de la Celle, a twelfth-century bishop of Chartres, saw the Song’s cinnamon and cassia as almost Platonic in their abstraction, ideals of godliness, the more powerful for their very allusiveness. Cinnamon symbolised ‘the odour of good opinion’, diffusing its qualities far and wide. To Philip of Hainault (c.1100–1182) the Song’s unguents were confections of precious, healing spices, to be understood here as symbols of the healing gifts of God, working not on the body but on the spirit. Some efforts to allegorise the more fruity verses into innocence could be more contorted still. According to Charlemagne’s schoolmaster Alcuin, the verse ‘I would cause thee to drink of spiced wine of the juice of my pomegranate’ refers to nothing other than ‘the glorious triumph of the holy martyrs’.

  Fatuous as such efforts may seem, there is no doubting their seriousness; nor, however dimly anyone other than a medieval mystic might sense it, that spices’ sacred past infused their medieval reception. On biblical authority they were lodged somewhere between this world and the next, between paradise and the mundane here-and-now. If spices did not literally smell divine (or if divinity did not smell of s
pices), the two were at least evocative of one another. If the he of ‘his cheeks are a bed of spices, as sweet flowers’ was a symbolic representation of the divine, then here was scriptural authority that spices and holiness were in some way associated. The effect was redoubled by Jerome’s Vulgate translation of the Bible – the version most literate Europeans knew – the Latin of which had the effect of transposing the vocabulary of the present day back into the Biblical past. The spicer (pigmentarius) of the Song was the mythic forerunner of the real-world spicer who supplied the courts and clergy of medieval Europe. In spices scripture and reality intertwined. The spice routes were the aromatic threads that joined the present to a sacred past.

  In the medieval present, the most immediately apparent implication of this intertwining, and one that was central to the medieval experience of mysticism, was the odour of sanctity. Medieval holiness came perfumed and, not infrequently, spiced. By late antiquity Christ, Virgin and saints had acquired a strong note of cinnamon in particular – which was perhaps ironic, given the spice’s erotic history. To St Idelfonso, bishop of Toledo from 659 to 668, only the aroma of cinnamon came close to conveying the Virgin’s odour of sanctity, ‘more fragrant than cinnamon’. This was one of the most enduring conventions of medieval literature. In an English sermon of the fifteenth century spiced wine (piment) appears as a metaphor for Christ’s blood, shed as generously as a good host dispenses to his guests: ‘He humbly shed his piment, to make his good guests glad.’

  Underlying these figurative images were literal beliefs. From the earliest times it was a convention that the saintly one smelt of spices after his death. When the relics of St Stephen were found in 415 he came up smelling not of roses but spices: incontrovertible proof of his divinity. Early in the fourth century Eusebius, bishop of Caesarea (?–c.340), writes that the martyr Polycarp gave off a smell of fragrant spices on the pyre: a human incense stick. The hagiographers of the desert-dwelling hermits seldom fail to mention their pleasant smell. However bad these unwashed ascetics, legendarily indifferent to physical comforts in their cramped desert cells, must have smelled in real life, they invariably smelled sweet on papyrus (or posthumously). The truly divine had no need of spice – they already had it.

  With time this spiciness of God’s favoured ones became a well-worn feature of the medieval lives of the saints. St Meinrad was a celebrated Swiss hermit dwelling in a cave on the slopes of Mount Etzel, killed in a bungled robbery in 861 by thieves drawn by all the treasures left at his shrine. No sooner had the hermit been suffocated than ‘an odour of such sweetness filled the entire space of his cell, as though the odours of all the spices were diffused there’. The holy corpse could smell even sweeter than spices. William of Malmesbury (c.1090–1143) wrote of Bede that as he expired he filled the nostrils of all present with an odour ‘not of cinnamon and balsam, but paradisiacal, like the delight of spring breathing everywhere’. The Netherlandish St Lidwina (1380–1473), after a life of semi-starvation, permanently bedridden following a skating accident, smelled of ginger, cloves and cinnamon. Even a truly worthy person from secular life might be granted a whiff of spice (or better) on the way out. In the early-fourteenth-century Romance of Guy of Warwick, the dead Guy gives off a heavenly ‘sweet breath’, ‘that no spices might surpass’.

  There was something more to this convention than a pious or poetic effort to evoke the ineffable. Some scholars have attempted to account for the odour of sanctity in terms of real aromas given off by a corpse, but this is surely either too sophisticated, or too naïve, by half. (Nor does this line of reasoning easily reconcile with the progressive deodorisation of the saints from roughly the seventeenth century onwards.) Spiciness was essentially a function of faith. The vitae are not histories in any modern sense of the term; they were written by passionate believers who, convinced they would smell a sweet fragrance, duly did. There was after all an important symbolic point to be made, and it was one that medieval readers would have recognised immediately. The vitae were written and read by people with an acute feeling for the deeper symbolism of aroma. A pleasant smell was a marker, a revelation of Christian qualities; of inner, invisible virtue over outward display.

  And as sanctity and paradise were understood literally to smell of spices, so it was with the opposite. Devils were often betrayed by their horrible stink. Smell was a writer’s means of conveying a moral point. After his death-by-lamprey, as we have seen earlier, King Henry I died in the bad odour of his ill deeds, emitting a stench so foul it slew the men entrusted with watching over the corpse. The last of Henry’s many victims was the man who ‘had been hired for a great sum of money to cut off the head with an axe and extract the stinking brain … so he got no benefit from his fee’. (Readers of Dostoyevsky will recall the mixed feelings provoked by the dead Father Zossima. As his cadaver began to smell, his admirers were downcast, whereas his enemies rejoiced that his saintliness had been proven a sham.) So too the medieval hell smelled supernaturally foul. When Dante toured the underworld he saw flatterers ‘plunged in excrement’ and smelled infernal farts. He met Alessio Interminei of Lucca, ‘his head so covered in shit, I couldn’t tell if he were priest or layman’. As Chaucer’s Parson said of the damned, ‘their nostrils shall be filled with a stinking stink’. In heaven on the other hand there was sweet celestial music and a smell of spices. They were a taste of heaven on earth.

  Old Age, New Age

  For the medieval Church spices’ aroma of sanctity had several practical implications. If spices smelled divine, symbolising if not in a sense summoning a holy presence, there was a certain consistency in supposing they might counteract the malodorous influence of the devil. The use of a strong, pleasant aroma to dispel a foul-smelling, malign force was yet another direct inheritance from antiquity, albeit one with a Christian twist. In his Partheneia Sacra of 1633, Henry Hawkins cited an ancient magical tradition in claiming cinnamon was a prophylactic against devils. To Nicole d’Oresme (c.1320–1382), bishop of Lisieux and academic at the University of Paris in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, spices worked a potent white magic. Thanks to their scripturally-sanctioned powers, they might overwhelm pagan magic, such as the intoxicating fumes of the Delphic oracle. A meal of spices beforehand was all the vaccination required, although it seems unlikely that many of d’Oresme’s readers would have been at much risk of Delphic contamination.

  D’Oresme’s claim is the more striking for the fact that the same author penned trenchant attacks on occult magic. In much the same vein others claimed that spices might put diabolical forces to flight: the exact reverse of Tertullian’s claim that burning spices attracted demons. In his Romance of Sorcery, Sax Rohmer – he of the Fu Manchu books – cites a fragrant yarn told by Sinistrari of Ameno. A young nun of the seventeenth century suffered from what a modern psychologist would perhaps classify as a morbid erotic obsession, at the time explained as an incubus. Day and night the demon visited her in the form of a handsome young man tempting her to sin, resisting the concerted power of prayer, relics and exorcism. Eventually the nuns consulted a learned theologian, who tried an aromatic fumigation:

  A new vessel, made of glass-like earth, was accordingly brought in, and filled with sweet cane, cubeb seed, roots of both aristolochies, great and small cardamom, ginger, long pepper, caryophylleae [gillyflowers], cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmegs, calamite, storax, benzoin, aloes-wood and roots, one ounce of triapandalis [a mix of various types of sandalwood], and three pounds of half brandy and water; the vessel was then set on hot ashes in order to distil the fumigating vapour, and the cell was kept closed.

  This worked after a fashion, but did not quite complete the job. Still more potent spices were required:

  As soon as the fumigation was done, the Incubus came, but never dared enter the cell; only, if the maiden left it, for a walk in the garden or cloister, he appeared to her, though invisible to others, and, throwing his arms around her neck, stole or rather snatched kisses from her, to her intense disg
ust.

  At last, after a new consultation, the Theologian prescribed that she should carry about her person pills made of the most exquisite perfumes, such as musk, amber, chive, Peruvian balsam, etc. Thus provided, she went for a walk in the garden, where the Incubus suddenly appeared to her with a threatening face, and in a rage. He did not approach her, however, but, after biting his finger as if meditating revenge, disappeared, and was never more seen by her.

  To many in the Church this sort of mumbo-jumbo was precisely that: it was magic, and as such had no place in the Christian religion.

  Spices were far less problematic in incense and unguents, in which role they had reappeared shortly after the emperor Constantine’s conversion. Pope Gregory the Great, pontiff from 590 to 604, argued that the sweet spices rose heavenward with the incense, sweetening the prayers and symbolising their ascent to heaven. Elsewhere, he writes of spices used in ‘royal unguents’, by which he apparently meant the chrism, the anointing oil used for the consecration of bishops and ordination of priests. Chrism was – is – also used for the sacraments of baptism, confirmation, and Holy Orders, as well as the consecration of churches, chalices, patens, altars and altar-stones, and for the solemn blessing of bells and baptismal water. One or more of these were, in all likelihood, the destination of Constantine’s spices, since the tally of the great Roman churches’ aromatics occurs in the same passage relating Pope Sylvester’s ordinations on the composition and use of chrism. It is conceivable that the spices were used in an effort to create a paradisiacal effect. The basilica of Old St Peter’s, the church to which the emperor donated the largest amount of spices, was entered via an atrium that was itself called Paradise,* enclosing a garden with fountains: a scaled-down version of the real thing. And if the garden, waters and enclosure of paradise were imitated, why not its smell? Constantine’s spices were, after all, the same aromas that Christian writers conventionally imagined in paradise.