Belongs To Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Gums gathers three of the atlas's gum resins used as incense, two of them ingredients of the same ancient temple recipe and one a separate tradition's staple.

Galbanum, the gum resin of Ferula species from Persia and Central Asia, is one of the four components Exodus 30 lists for the ketoret, the incense of the Jerusalem Temple, and rabbinic tradition notes that it smells bad on its own, drawing from that the lesson that a community's worship is incomplete without those it would rather exclude; the smell, described as green, bitter and resinous, keeps it in use today in perfumery as a sharp top note. Onycha is the ketoret's third ingredient, and nobody now knows what it was: the Hebrew shecheleth is rendered onycha in the Septuagint, suggesting a fingernail or claw, and the leading identification is the operculum of a marine gastropod, though benzoin, labdanum and a species of rockrose are also proposed. The uncertainty is not academic only, since a kosher reconstruction of the temple incense cannot be made without settling it, and it has not been settled.

Storax, the aromatic balsamic gum of Liquidambar or Styrax, belongs to a different tradition entirely, an old temple and magical incense used for consecration and for calling spirits, mercurial and airy in character, and a staple of ancient Near Eastern and classical rites, frequently paired with frankincense and benzoin. Two of the three gums the atlas holds under this heading are fixed by a single scriptural recipe and one, at least in part, remains unidentified; the third stands entirely outside that recipe, grouped here for what it is rather than for what it was prescribed for.