A few years in the past, my father would gentle agarbatti — incense sticks manufactured from low-grade charcoal and sandalwood powder — at nightfall on our porch. He would insert these skinny black sticks into burners manufactured from metal, although folks additionally use ceramic vessels, or diyas (earthenware oil lamps). Though using incense sticks in properties has decreased over time, the peculiar scent of agarbatti continues to be embedded within the olfactory reminiscences of many South Asians.
Studying Holy Smoke: Censers Throughout Cultures, I’m reminded of agarbatti once more. Edited by Beate Fricke, the guide explores the myriad roles of incense and its marvelous vessels in historic customs. Included are 10 educational essays that vary of their object-oriented, regional, and temporal emphases. With a cross-comparative method, the guide centralizes distinct qualities of censers as discovered throughout international traditions.
Fricke writes {that a} censer is a “pre-digital gadget — a small artifact able to being carried in a single pocket, intimate to the physique and so responsive to the touch.” Culturally, incense burners have been prized for creating misty atmospheres laden with aromas produced by substances like frankincense, resin, and myrrh. They’ve been well-liked in Mesoamerican mystical rituals, Christian, Buddhist, and Jewish spiritual practices, and royal Asian courts. The guide posits that censers are finest understood in relation to a wealthy community of makers, biotic substances, and data surrounding them. As an example, the Gävle censer by chance unearthed in 1943 Sweden was most probably routed to Europe by Vikings from central Islamic lands, the place it was used to fumigate mystical and occult rituals.
The guide’s beautiful visuals stoke curiosity in regards to the selection and class of censer design, from gods and nymphs to animals, utility objects, and weapons. Chinese language variations, for example, are as minimal as brightly glazed glass bowls, whereas Japanese incense burners take kinds as complicated as legendary beasts, gleaming hats, and even fabulous pistols. Mayan burners resemble grotesque deities, whereas censers originating in Greece are formed like historical temple caryatids. The make of those wondrous objects underscores their outstanding craftsmanship, supplies, and objective.
Many interdisciplinary foci may be utilized to censers — an anthropological examine of their cultural makes use of, for example, or an archaeological tackle their making throughout varied locales. Certainly, censers additionally demand artwork historic consideration. Whereas Holy Smoke charts historical past, I’m wondering if these ritual objects might need a spot in up to date artwork. Glimpses of costume-heavy and prop-laden performances by Pakistani artist Amin Gulgee come to thoughts. For performative works like “4Makers” (2019), and “Consuming El Dorado” (2021), Gulgee made fuming agarbatti censers out of readymade bottles of sulphuric acid, flower pots, and glass mosaic. Gulgee is much less invested in carrying on “historic” traditions than creating new ones: “Incense jogs my memory of start, loss of life, mourning, processions, individuality, collective energies, and ritual,” he informed me in an interview. “It’s the evocation of smoky fantasies, needs, and desires that I’m after.”
Holy Smoke: Censers Throughout Cultures (2024), edited by Beate Fricke and revealed by Hirmer Publishers, is out there for buy on-line and in bookstores.
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