Cedar as Ritual Incense

Cedar is a fragrant wood used as incense: the aromatic wood of cedars and junipers, burned for purification from the ancient Near East to the Indigenous traditions of North America. In Western correspondence it is often given to Jupiter.

Material and correspondence

In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under Jupiter and the element of Fire. Such planetary and elemental attributions belong to the Western esoteric tradition of correspondences, drawn from writers such as Agrippa and codified in the modern period by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the material's use as incense is far older and cuts across many cultures. It is described here within that documented tradition of ritual perfume.

Several trees under one old name

"Cedar" covers more than one tree. The true cedar of the Bible and of the ancient Near East is Cedrus libani, the cedar of Lebanon, whose timber built Solomon's Temple according to 1 Kings 5 and appears earlier still as prized building wood in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh; its dwindling ancient forests are one of the oldest documented cases of deforestation in recorded history. Much of the wood sold as "cedar" for incense and construction today, including the red cedar common in North America, is botanically a juniper (Juniperus virginiana) rather than a true Cedrus, an unrelated genus that happens to share the common name and a broadly similar resinous scent, a naming overlap that runs through the whole cedar-and-juniper family of incenses rather than being unique to any one product.