Myrrh

Myrrh's first article traces embalming, anointing oil and a burial spice. Beside those sits a separate, medicinal thread running through Egypt, China and the Gospels themselves, and it has almost nothing to do with the dead.

Egyptian medicine used myrrh well before its embalming role. The Ebers Papyrus, a medical compendium of roughly the sixteenth century BCE, prescribes it as a wound dressing, and Queen Hatshepsut's expedition to Punt around 1470 BCE was mounted largely to secure a direct supply of living Commiphora trees rather than depend on middlemen, a venture recorded on the walls of her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari.

Traditional Chinese medicine classifies myrrh, mo yao, as a bitter, cooling herb that moves stagnant blood, prescribed for wounds, swelling and menstrual pain, a functional category it shares with dragon's blood and one that owes nothing to embalming or to Marian symbolism.

The crucifixion narratives carry a third, separate use of the same substance. Mark 15:23 records wine mixed with myrrh offered to Jesus before the crucifixion, usually read as a rough analgesic rather than an anointing, and one he is described as refusing. Set beside the burial spices of John 19:39, the Gospels use myrrh twice in one narrative for opposite purposes, to dull pain and to preserve the dead, within a few hours of each other.

Myrrh is a resin used as incense: the reddish gum of Commiphora trees, paired with frankincense from the earliest times as an offering and an embalming spice. In the Western scheme it is attributed to the Moon and to matters of mourning, purification and the depths.

Material and correspondence

In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under the Moon 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.

Embalming, anointing and the second gift

The resin comes chiefly from Commiphora myrrha of the Horn of Africa and Arabia, and ancient Egyptian embalmers used it, with natron and other spices, in the preparation of the dead, a use the Gospel of John recalls when Nicodemus brings myrrh and aloes for the burial of Jesus (John 19:39). It is also named among the ingredients of the holy anointing oil given at Exodus 30:23, and, alongside frankincense and gold, one of the three gifts of the Magi at Matthew 2:11, so that the pair of resins now correlated with Sun and Moon in Western correspondence tables were already paired together, for offering and for the dead, well over a thousand years before that correspondence system existed.