Intoxication by Scent — A Cultural History

The Greek historian Herodotus describes, in the fifth century before our era, how the Scythians, after a burial, threw hemp seeds onto red-hot stones inside a closed tent — ‘and they enjoy the vapor,’ he writes, ‘and shout for joy.’ It is one of the earliest surviving descriptions of an intoxication produced not by drinking or smoking in the modern sense, but by simply inhaling smoke inside an enclosed space — archaeological finds of charred cannabis seeds in Scythian burial chambers have since largely confirmed Herodotus’s account.

The most famous oracle of antiquity, too, that of the Pythia at Delphi, has been linked since ancient times to intoxicating vapors: ancient authors describe a sweetish smell said to rise from a crack in the earth beneath the temple, while the Pythia, in trance, delivered her ambiguous pronouncements. Geological surveys of the site in the early twenty-first century did find evidence of ethylene-bearing gases along local fault lines — an explanation discussed among specialists but by no means conclusively proven. Regardless of the exact chemistry, the case shows how closely inhaled vapor and religious authority could be tied together in antiquity.

Egyptian kyphi, too, that layered incense blend of wine, honey and a good dozen resins, was burned, according to ancient authors such as Plutarch, not only as incense but deliberately in the evening, to promote sleep and pleasant dreams — an early, conscious use of smoke to alter consciousness, if in gentler form than among the Scythians.

Modern pharmacology confirms part of these millennia-old observations with striking directness, and for the best-known of all incense materials at that: a 2008 Israeli-American study published in The FASEB Journal identified in burning frankincense smoke a substance called incensole acetate, which, in animal testing, produced measurable anti-anxiety and mood-lifting effects, mediated through an ion channel (TRPV3) in certain brain regions — a mechanism that has nothing to do with classic intoxicants, but that could explain why frankincense smoke, across millennia and independently across so many religious contexts, was felt to be calming and uplifting.

The boundary between ‘scent’ and ‘drug’ was, historically, thus never as clean as today’s usually separate treatment of perfumery history and drug history suggests. The same plants — hemp, poppy, various resins — appear in incense ceremonies as much as in explicit intoxication practices, often in the same cultural context, sometimes even in the same ceremony, depending on the quantity burned and its concentration.

An often-told but historically much-doubted legend places a similar connection in medieval Persia and the Levant: the name of the Ismaili sect known as the ‘Assassins’ is said to derive from hashishiyya, ‘hashish users’, with the story that its followers were intoxicated with hashish before assassinations, to give them a foretaste of paradise. Modern historians now mostly regard this story as a later, largely European embellishment with no reliable contemporary evidence — an example of how easily intoxication and incense can, in hindsight too, condense into a dramatic but unreliable narrative.

An unexpected, much more recent continuation of this old blurring between scent and intoxication turned up, of all places, in the early twenty-first century: ‘herbal blends’, sold openly under names like K2 or Spice as ‘incense, not for human consumption’, actually contained synthetic cannabinoids and triggered, from around 2008 onward, a wave of regulatory bans across the US and Europe — a cynical but telling example of how the legal status of the word ‘incense’ itself was exploited to sell a substance that, by then, shared nothing with classic fragrance but the packaging.

A project like Incense of Music, which in October 2019 worked, among other things, with dragon’s blood — the deep red resin of several tropical tree species, credited with magical and healing powers since antiquity — moves, in that sense, within a tradition that has never strictly separated intoxication from ritual: wherever smoke rises, the passage between elevation and altered consciousness has historically rarely been far.