The Western correspondence table files copal as a solar resin, but the phrase used across the languages of central Mexico for what it actually is comes from a different register entirely: copal is called the food of the gods, understood as something the deity actually consumes in the smoke rather than a gift left beside a request.
Nahuatl and related sources describe several grades sold and distinguished by colour and clarity, copal blanco from Bursera bipinnata prized for its pale, resinous smoke, and darker copal negro used more for everyday burning. Colonial-era chroniclers, Bernardino de Sahagun among them, recorded merchants, the pochteca, trading it across long distances alongside cacao and feathers, a sign of how commercially significant the resin was well before any Spanish demand for it existed.
Ritual use never required a temple. Domestic altars burned it daily, curanderos still use it in cleansing, limpia, ceremonies today, and church doorways in contemporary Mexico burn it beside, not instead of, Catholic incense, a pairing many parishes treat as ordinary rather than as a survival needing explanation.
The continuity is the point. Unlike several resins on this site that passed out of their originating culture's hands into a purely European or American correspondence system, copal never stopped being burned by the people who named it, and its adoption into Golden Dawn-derived planetary tables is the recent, secondary fact, not the primary one.