Juniper is a fragrant wood used as incense: the wood and berries of the juniper, one of the oldest protective and purifying incenses, burned to cleanse the sick-room, avert evil, and consecrate tools. Solar and fiery, its clean smoke is both antiseptic and apotropaic. It has been used from ancient Egypt to the European Middle Ages and beyond.
Material and correspondence
In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under the Sun 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.
A folk plant with a household use
Juniperus communis, the common juniper of Europe, Asia and North America, supplies the berries used in gin, whose name and flavor both descend from the juniper (Dutch jenever, French genievre, from the Latin juniperus), a use entirely separate from its incense role. The folk-magic burning of juniper as household protection survived into recorded European tradition well past the medieval period, most famously in the Scottish Highland new year custom of saining, in which juniper smoke was carried through the house and byre at Hogmanay to purify them for the coming year, a documented regional continuation of the same protective use the plant carries in the wider Western correspondence system.