Some rituals survive because we are told to preserve them. Others survive because, thousands of years later, they still make sense.
A little oil in the palm. A familiar scent. A moment set apart from the rest of the day.
Long before “self-care” became a phrase, people were using fragrant oils to mark moments of prayer, hospitality, mourning, celebration and ordinary daily care.
I became interested in anointing oils because I work with botanical fragrance. I knew frankincense and myrrh as aromatic materials, of course, but the more I read about them, the more fascinated I became by the lives they had lived before they ever reached a modern perfume bottle.
It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which scents had to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to reach us.
Frankincense and myrrh began as resins gathered from trees. Spikenard, or nard, was another highly prized aromatic. Labdanum, another ancient aromatic, is a sticky resin associated with rockrose shrubs of the Mediterranean.
These weren’t simply pleasant smells. They were valuable materials carried along ancient trade routes and used in religious observance, perfume, traditional remedies and daily life.
And then t...