Rose is a flower used as incense: the dried petals of the rose, burned or blended into incense for love, beauty, healing, and the opening of the heart. Venusian and watery, its scent draws affection, blessing, and peace, and consecrates workings of the emotions. It is a central ingredient of love and beauty incenses across many modern traditions.
Material and correspondence
In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under Venus and the element of Water. 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.
From Persian rosewater to attar
The rose most valued for perfumery and incense is Rosa damascena, the damask rose, grown at scale in Bulgaria's Rose Valley and in Turkey and Iran, where the essential oil, called attar or otto of rose, is extracted by steam distillation, a technique with roots in medieval Persian rosewater production; a single kilogram of the oil can require several tonnes of petals, part of why true rose otto remains one of the most expensive natural materials in perfumery. Beyond the Western correspondence system, the flower carries independent symbolic weight in both Christian Marian devotion, where the rose without thorns figures purity, and in Sufi poetry and practice, where it is a recurring image of divine beauty and longing.