Storax

Storax is the incense on this site most confused with something else, and the confusion runs in both directions at once: an unrelated flowering shrub gave the true resin its common English name, and most commercial "storax" sold today is not the historical substance at all.

The resin ancient writers actually described, Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder among them, was tapped chiefly from Liquidambar orientalis of Anatolia. The English name storax, however, comes from the later genus Styrax, an unrelated group of flowering shrubs that happened to share a similar-sounding older name, and the overlap has muddled buyers and botanists for centuries; modern commercial storax is more often benzoin or another Liquidambar product than a true Anatolian Styrax gum.

Many biblical scholars identify storax with stacte, one of the four spices named for the ketoret at Exodus 30:34, the ingredient the Talmud's own commentary elsewhere singles out, alongside frankincense, as pleasant rather than merely functional. That identification is argued rather than settled: several other candidate plants have been proposed for the same word, and no botanical name in the ketoret list commands full agreement among scholars.

What is certain is narrower than either claim: a resin sold under one name, tapped from at least two unrelated plant families across two very different eras, has been read into a three-thousand-year-old temple recipe on evidence nobody can fully verify.

Storax is a gum used as incense: the fragrant balsam of the sweetgum and related trees, an ingredient of ancient temple compounds and of the holy incense of several traditions; it is attributed in Western practice to Mercury.

Material and correspondence

In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under Mercury and the element of Air. 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 name with a tangled botany

The historical resin, harvested chiefly from Liquidambar orientalis of Anatolia, was known to Greek and Roman writers, including Dioscorides and Pliny the Elder, who both describe its medicinal uses; the unrelated flowering shrub genus later named Styrax, which gave the resin its common English name, has caused persistent confusion between the two ever since, and modern commercial "storax" is more often benzoin or a Liquidambar product than a true Styrax gum. Several biblical scholars identify storax with "stacte," one of the four spices specified for the Temple's holy incense at Exodus 30:34, though the identification of several of those biblical spice names remains debated rather than certain.