Εὐωδία: The Use and Meaning of Fragrances in the Ancient World and Their Christianization (100-900 AD)

341 Pages·1994·21.053 MB·English

by  Caseau, Béatrice

EuooSia
The Use and Meaning of Fragrances in the Ancient World
_______ and their Christianization (100-900 AD)________
Beatrice Caseau
A Dissertation
Presented To The Faculty
Of Princeton University
In Candidacy For The Degree
Of Doctor Of Philosophy
Recommended For Acceptance
By The Department Of History
NOVEMBER 1994
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UMI Number: 9433011
Copyright 1994 by
Caseau, Beatrice Agnes
All rights reserved.
___ ®
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Copyright by Beatrice Caseau, 1994. All rights reserved.
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Abstract 1
Abstract
In this dissertation, I study the meanings of odors in the Ancient and early Medieval world
and I propose an explanation to the questions that arise concerning the introduction of
incense in the Christian churches. I also reflect on the meaning of the perfume added to the
myron or holy chrism. I assumed that, in order to undersand the symbolic significance of
odors, it was essential to give full attention to the different moments and places where
odors, especially sweet-smelling scents, were present, thus tracking archaeological data
and economic facts.
Chapter one is devoted to understanding the religious use of incense in the concurrent
religions and the repulsion that Christians developed towards idolatrous incense. Chapter
two explains why it was very difficult for Christian Apologists to speak against incense,
since it belonged to the world of fragrances and, as such, was used to create safe and
pleasurable spaces as well as to honor the living and the dead. Because the Christians
adopted regional burial practices, they often used incense and other perfumes for the care of
their dead. Chapter three explains the fear that stench, and particularly the odor of death,
inspired to all. Consequently, the practice of embalming the dead, even if only externally,
was widespread. The properties of fragrant spices to restrain the process of putrefaction
were well known. Those same qualities were used in medicine to heal wounds. Also, since
danger was thought to come from stench, incense was commended for its capacity to
protect those who inhaled it. Chapter four studies how this medical knowledge came to be
part of Christian rhetoric and practices. Chapter five is devoted to the use of incense and
other perfumes in Late Antique and early Byzantine churches.
The process of Christianization of aromatic substances, as well as the role that these
substances played in the life of men and women of the Ancient and early Medieval periods,
are the central themes of this dissertation.
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Table of Contents
Preface................................................................................................................iv
Introduction.......................................................................................................1
1. The Question of the introduction of incense into the Christian
Church...........................................................................................................1
2. Incense, Unguents and their Containers..............................................11
a. Perfumes to Rub or Pour on Oneself.............11
b. Perfumes to Bum.......................................19
3. Luxury Products ? Prices and Availability.........................................29
a. Where to Find Spices and Perfumes: Regions of Production
and Trade...............................................................29
b. Markets and Merchants..................................34
c. Prices and Affordability..................................40
I. Christians' Refusal of Incense and Perfumes.................................. 48
1. Incense and Perfumes in Concurrent Religions...........................53
a. Incense in Polytheist Rituals......................53
b. Incense in Judaism...........................................82
c. Rejection of Incense by Christians: the Turning Point 90
2. Incense and Persecutions...............................................................92
a. How to Put Christians to the Test..............92
b. Turificati and the Problem of Their Forgiveness 95
3. Christian Texts in Opposition to Cultic Uses of Incense...................99
a. The Development of Theories Against Idolatrous Incense
100
b. God's Nature Requires Spiritual Worship... 102
c. Work on the Scriptures....................................105
4. Conclusion : Are the Apologists Giving an Accurate Picture ?........109
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n . Honor and Pleasure..................................................................................117
1. To Create a Pleasurable Atmosphere...........................................117
a. In the House...............................................117
b. Care of the Body and Eroticism....................123
c. Bath and Gymnasium.......................................133
d. Spectacles.........................................................142
2. Sign of Honor and Joy.........................................................................145
a. Banquets............................................................145
b. Celebrations : Rejoicing and Honoring 155
c. Incense and Imperial Power...........................163
d. Death as Adventus...........................................168
3. Honor the Dead..............................................................................172
a. Social Aspects of Funerals..............................172
b. Funerary Gifts and Care of the Tomb............185
III. Powers of fragrances.................................................................194
1. The apotropaic and salutoiy powers of fragrances..........................194
a. the Dangers of Foetid Smell...........................194
b. Aromatherapy: Fragrances as Medicine 204
2. Wholesome protective powers............................................................210
3. Odor of the Divine................................................................................218
a. Fragrant Divine Beings....................................218
b. The Significance of Embalment....................221
TV. Fragrances and Christian Salvation..................................................227
1. Odor of the Body, Odor of the Soul...................................................227
a. Healing Christ, Healing Saints.......................227
b. Images of Fragrance and Stench....................242
c. Fragrant Sanctity..............................................246
2. Sweet smelling Paradise.......................................................................252
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a. Visions of Paradise...................................252
b. Mythology of Spices.................................257
3. Consecration to God Through Fragrances.........................................261
a. Healing Powers of the Myron.......................261
b. Sanctification by Incense: entrance of a Bishop 270
c. Incense and the Funeral of the Saints...........272
V. Fragrant Christian basilicas...................................................................279
1. Incense and fragrant oils in the churches...........................................279
a. Fragrant Offerings to the Saints and Scented Sacred Spaces
...............................................................................279
b. The Question of the Use of Incense in Early Christian
Churches................................................................282
c. Censers and Incense Burners.........................292
2. Incense in Christian Liturgies: The Meanings of Incense in the
Chaldean Mass.............................................................................................307
a. During the Beginning Procession.................308
b. Censing of the Gospel....................................312
c. The Censing of the Offerings...................314
Conclusion..................................................................................................318
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PREFACE
In this dissertation, I study the meanings of odors in the Ancient and
early Medieval world. I began this work after reading the Lives of the
Stylites, Symeon the Elder and Symeon the Younger. Stench and wonderful
perfumes were obviously two important categories in the thought-world of the
writers of these Lives. The real suffering of infected stinking wounds was
juxtaposed to the stench of demons. The perfume of incense offered to God
by the saintly stylite was answered by the wonderful fragrances God sent as a
comforting presence at the end of his life. The reader is invited to understand
the continuity between the real odors of this world and the supernatural odors
of the other world, to perceive the significance of odors in terms of a divine
Creation fallen yet redeemed. As a result of the Fall, sickness, death,
putrefaction and its escort of unpleasant odors are part of human lives - and
the obscure forces of evil naturally belong to this stench. On the other hand,
since the Creation is divine, traces of its first wonderful paradisiacal state still
remain, particularly in sweet-smelling fragrances. The saints - those open
windows on Paradise - manifest their belonging to the other world by the
scented halo that surrounds them, either during their life or after their death.
In the words of Denys the Areopagite, they disclose "their beautiful and
fragrant similarities to the hidden God in the matter of virtue."4 This
dissertation could have been a poetic story of the Creation, Fall and
Redemption, as followed by the nose, through these early Christian texts.
However, being an historian, I wanted to know more about the material world
which gave birth to such powerful imageries.
My intention was to keep a balance between this material world of
fragrances and its religious and literary expression in a rhetoric of fragrances.
My presupposition is that such a wealth of poetic images finds its sources in a
4 Dionysius the Pseudo- Areopagite, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, tr. Th. L. Campbell,
P-52.
i
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PREFACE ii
rich olfactory environment. As such, I tried to draw a scented map of the
Ancient world. Some of the pages have still the ingenuousness of my
surprised discoveries. Reading Classical texts, I found traces of incense and
other perfumes in so many occasions, that I was overwhelmed at how much
my first intuitions concerning the importance of scent in these Ancient
societies were right. I assumed that, in order to understand the symbolic
significance of odors, it was essential to give full attention to the different
moments and places where odors, especially sweet-smelling scents were
present, tracking archaeological data and economic facts. I chased perfumes
from bedrooms to temples, from market-places to closets, in veterinarian
treatises as well as in love poems. The lion's share, however, was given to
medical works. My goal was to build a clear graph with particular fragrant
substances used to cure specific illnesses. Instead of a rational clear-cut use of
spices and aromatics, I found frankincense or myrrh in so many medicines
that I had to realize that my notions concerning ancient therapy were
anachronistic. It came as a surprise to me that medicines were fragrant not
because the ingredients had an odor that could not be reduced, but because
their power to cure was precisely granted to their odor. Far from suppressing
the scent of the plants and resins used in pharmaceutical preparations, doctors
prescribed those plants and resins for their odor. In that sense, we can say
that Ancient medicine was based on aromatherapy. After centuries of such
practices, what identified a medicine was the odor of those fragrant aromatics
frequently prescribed by doctors. In the same way that we identify our
modem pills as medicine by their shape and coating, the Ancient could tell a
medicine by its odor.
The difficulty encountered with medical texts and their close friends,
magical spells, was revealed, nevertheless, to be very fruitful in
understanding the significance of perfumes and incense. If odors had powers,
even domestic daily use suddenly changed in significance. The wholesome
protective influence of sweet smelling fragrances was the reason for the
success of perfumes and incenses in the Roman and early Byzantine Empires.
It explains why I had encountered fragrances in so many texts concerned with
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PREFACE iii
all aspects of life, private and public, religious and mundane. However, this
meant that their understanding of perfumes, the mental images and the
subliminal messages associated with perfumes, were not the same for them
and for us. Up to that time, I had assumed that what we smell, when we
smell perfume or incense, was the same for these people and for us. I had
also presumed that the main difference lay in changing tastes - theirs and ours
were bound to be different Although the significance and layers of meanings
associated with specific odors belong to the longue dureey there is no real
continuity between the Ancient world and the modem world. If we take the
odor of incense, for example, even if the same kind of ingredients that were
used to bum are burned, the world of images connected to it was very
different for them and for us. When we smell incense in a contemporary
church, we do not think of "medicine". The fragrant incense wafting in
Byzantine churches, the scented myron or holy chrism, were products whose
perfume was immediately associated with powers to cure and to protect, as
well as with an array of images including the divine world and Paradise on
the one hand, wealth and honor, on the other. I strongly believe that in order
to understand the introduction of incense in Christian churches and the
perfume added to the consecratory oil, it is necessary to acknowledge the role
of perfumes, in general, in the general lives of Christians. This includes
whatever common ideas they shared with their pagan or Jewish neighbors, as
well as the images they cherished from their favorite poets. What I intend to
reconstruct is what it meant to them to smell specific odors. This includes not
only some notions concerning the actual perfumes - and I have devoted a part
of the introduction to this aspect- but also, if possible, their particular
existential understanding about odors. I have no illusion that this is tentative.
Social differences evidently played a role in the access to perfumes, and here
again, I have set apart in the introduction a section on economics. I have also
tried to pinpoint the effects of regional differences. The individual
experiences from which I have generalized can never totally be recreated. But
I have wished to transmit some of their particularity by citing their own words
and by placing scenes in their spatial environment. Smells do not have a
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