Dammar is a resin used as incense: a pale, clean-burning resin of Southeast Asian Dipterocarpaceae, valued as a mild, all-purpose base and fixative rather than for a strong planetary attribution. Its neutral, resinous smoke carries and blends other aromatics. It is widely used in modern handmade incense as a binder.
Material and correspondence
It is not fixed to a single planetary correspondence in the Western tradition. 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.
Better known outside the temple
Tapped chiefly from Shorea and Hopea trees of Indonesia and Malaysia, dammar's largest modern market has little to do with ritual at all: dissolved in solvent, it is the standard varnish used by oil painters and picture conservators to protect and saturate a finished canvas, a use that has made the resin far more familiar to artists and museum conservators than to occultists. Its absence from the older Western planetary-correspondence writers, Agrippa among them, reflects this history: it entered the European incense and craft trade later and more quietly than resins such as frankincense or myrrh, without ever being folded into a fixed planetary slot.