Wise guys like this – it’s so frank, it’s censered!
Happy Epiphany! Twelve days after Christmas, and it’s time for the three kings (wise men, magi, whatever) to show up. It’s been nearly two weeks since Jesus was laid in a manger (that’s an animal feed trough, in case you didn’t know), and the Bible doesn’t say he was still in there, but it doesn’t say he wasn’t. Here’s what it says (King James Version):
And when they were come into the house, they saw the young child with Mary his mother, and fell down, and worshipped him: and when they had opened their treasures, they presented unto him gifts; gold, and frankincense and myrrh.
Odds are good that if you know the word frankincense, you know it from that passage. You’ll see the incense in there and you’ll have an idea that it’s incense, and you’ll be right, but you may otherwise think it’s something completely outside of your experience. But if you belong to certain varieties of Christianity, it’s not. Frankly, if you smelled it, you’d immediately get a familiar sense from it.
What is it? Here’s the definition from the 1755 dictionary by that deity of lexicography, the good Doctor Samuel Johnson:
Frankincense is a dry resinous substance in pieces or drops, of a pale yellowish white colour; a strong smell, but not disagreeable, and a bitter, acrid, and resinous taste. It is very inflammable. The earliest histories inform us, that frankincense was used among the sacred rites and sacrifices, as it still continues to be in many different parts of the world. As well however as the world has at all times been acquainted with the drug itself, we are still uncertain as to the place whence frankincense is brought, and much more so as to the tree which produces it. It is commended against disorders in the head and breast, and against diarrhœas and dysenteries.
That definition is the Doctor’s frankincense, but what you inhale clouds of at the cathedral is frankincense’s monster: frankincense is what makes the smoke the billows from the censer at the high services in the Anglican and Catholic churches (and no doubt some others too). If you go to a service for Epiphany, or to a midnight mass for Christmas, or any other similar formal rite for the kinds of Christians who like to take their chants, you will have smelled it. It’s the resin for the season – and for many other seasons.
That’s not just cheap puns (that too, though); the point is that frankincense is produced from a resin from a tree. And it has been highly valued over the centuries and millennia, not just for its ritual value, not just for its purported purifying properties, but also for its use as a holy offering: apparently deities (or The Deity) will always be pleased to see this purified tree sap presented to them. (If they were Canadian deities, I think they might prefer another tree sap product, also highly valued: maple syrup. But as it stands, such an offering would have to be syruptitious.)
But Johnson says that “we are still uncertain as to the place whence frankincense is brought, and much more so as to the tree which produces it.” Well, that “we” carries a lot of assumptions. Obviously someone knew.
And in fact if Johnson had put his mind to the Latin name of the resin in question – or, better, its name in Greek, which was the lingua franca of the Levant at the time of the Epiphany – he would have had some suspicion of its origin. It wouldn’t have been an accurate suspicion, but it would have been better than nothing. You see, the Latin for frankincense is olibanum, and the Greek is λίβανος. The Greek word means ‘Lebanon’ and the Latin is a condensed version of ‘oil from Lebanon’. It’s not that frankincense comes from Lebanon, but it came by way of Lebanon, from southern Arabia and from the horn of Africa.
So why is it called frankincense in English? That comes from the French franc encens. As you may suspect, encens is incense. And franc? Well… the word starts with a Germanic people, the Franks, who happened to have power, prestige, and priority in the right time and the right place to have a whole country (France) and language (French) named after them, even though the country was (at the time) full of Celts and the language was descended from Latin. The word gets around so much, it even shows up in toponyms such as Frankenstein (‘Frankish stone’).
But no one thought that the incense came from France. The Franks had such good marketing, franc also came to mean ‘free’, ‘noble’, ‘brave’, and ‘honest’. When you say “to be frank,” that’s the same frank. Not that frankincense is ‘honest incense’, though; it’s (probably) ‘noble incense’.
OK, but what tree does the resin come from? It comes from several species of tree, all of the genus Boswellia. Johnson couldn’t have known this, as the genus was first named in 1807. But does the name seem familiar? It’s named in honour of the Scottish botanist John Boswell. He was – as it happens – the uncle of James Boswell… who was, famously, the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson.
Surprised? Well, you couldn’t be expected to have known this. It’s been censered.
Sesquiotica 