Labdanum and the Goats

For most of its history, labdanum was harvested by goats without their consent. The Cistus shrubs it comes from exude a dark, sticky resin from their leaves in the heat of the day, and goats and sheep grazing among them would walk away with the stuff matted into their beards and the hair of their legs. Someone then had the job of combing it out — which is, historically, exactly what happened, before anyone thought to just sweep the shrubs directly.

The tool built for that second method, a rake called a lambadistrion, had a double row of leather thongs where the teeth would normally be, designed to catch and pull the resin off the plant itself without needing an intermediary goat at all — a nineteenth-century Cretan version, made of wood, was called an ergastiri.

Labdanum turns up in the Hebrew Bible too, though not always recognizably: the spice the Ishmaelite traders carry down to Egypt in Genesis, alongside balm, is lot in the original — almost certainly labdanum, though older English translations render it, confusingly, as “myrrh.” At Incense of Music 12, we burned it next to lavender, warm and slightly animalic where the lavender was clean and sedative — a pairing that, it turns out, owes something to several thousand years of goats.