A scent of heaven and earth: from pre-Columbian times to today, copal has been burned for a wide variety of religious and secular purposes.

• Author: Werner, Louis

Man bas burned incense since time immemorial as a ritual, as a cure, or simply as an aromatic. The Sphinx at Giza has an inscription dating from 1530 B.C. attesting to the fine properties of such scented inhalations. Romans burned it in ceremonies of state, Asian religions keep their temples perpetually clouded with its smoke, and the Catholic Church turns the three wise men's gifts into an occasion for the exotic odors of the East to waft through mass wherever it is celebrated.

In Mesoamerica, the scent of choice is copal, the resin of various trees in the torchwood family, or Burseraceae. The word copal is a general term for any kind of resin incense, and it is often collected from other trees as well, including ocote, or pitchpine, locust and, among the Tarahumara in the north, the so-called copalquin tree, of the Rubiaceae family. In central Mexico, the tree bearing copalli, the Nahuatl root word for resin, is the species Bursera bipinnata, closely related to the trees in Arabia that produce frankincense and myrrh. In Maya lands, resin is called pom and most commonly comes from the Protium copal tree.

The sixteenth-century botanist Francisco Hernandez first identified the copal-bearing tree in his encyclopedic Historia de las plantas de Nueva Espana, written on the order of King Philip II. He called it according to its Nahuatl name quauhchichiantic, describing it as "a tree with purple stems, leaves like the olive but narrower and longer, feathered branches, and according to what they say, with no flower nor fruit. Its taste is aromatic, of a hot temperament, astringent, with a resinous flavor, and producing a gum that is similar to what is called copalli."

While copal is also burned medicinally and honorifically, it is most commonly used in religious ritual. The symbolic associations of copal with godly food, human blood, and rain are rife throughout pre-Columbian lore and literature. Indians say that trees "bleed" copal. The Tzotzil Maya in Chiapas call copal resin bek'tal pom, or flesh incense, and its smoke they call "cigarettes of the gods." Copal, along with posol, tortillas, and honey wine, is served to propitiate the deities.

When copal is ignited with wicks made of natural rubber and beeswax, the dark smoke is said to resemble auspicious rain clouds. During the boiled corn feast called Etzalqualiztli, celebrated in the sixth month of their calendar, Aztec priests paid tribute to the rain gods by burning cones of copal with quetzal feathers stuck into the tops, like volcanoes spewing fire, as they rowed to the center of Lake Texcoco to throw into the water the hearts of their human sacrifices.

Father Bernardino de Sahagun, the first and most complete sixteenth-century Spanish chronicler of daily life among the Aztecs, wrote of how mothers offered copal at the temples when they delivered their baby girls over as priestesses-in-training, "There are also in the temples women who from a very young age were raised there, because of the devotion of their mothers, who when they were young themselves, would promise their daughters to the service of the temple when they were twenty or forty days old. They would present them with big brooms for sweeping and a clay incense censer and white incense that is called copalli, all this...