#incense making

1 - You

2 - Your art

3 - A place

4 - A hobby

My biggest project this month was making several batches of Kyphi-type incense. One was a traditional recipe based on historical sources for my sister (not a part of this post), one to sell and another one to preserve the contents of my herbal cabinet by processing them and not letting them sit around loosing potency. 

^Final results, please notice my Slavic roots showing!

Generally, to define a Kyphi-type incense, we can say that this type of incense features a wet part consisting of wine, raisins, dates/figs, honey and a dry part, which are mixed and dried to form pellets. 

In general, to form the wet part of the incense dough, you need cca 4 raisins per tablespoon of dry material and one cup of dried dates/figs per 50 raisins, a tablespoon of honey and enough wine to cover it all and have left over to add, after the raisins and dates soak it up. Optionally, you can add some essential oils to the mix as well. 

You chop the raisins and dates finely, or if you are lazy like me, put both in the final jar, add wine and chop it using a hand blender. 

Leave the wet mixture (raisins, dates/figs, honey, wine and essential oil) to sit for 1-2 weeks, stir daily and add any blessings and incantations you may like. 

^From right to left: Wet ingredients jar, dry ingredients jar, misc tictures

Use these two weeks to finely grind your chosen dry ingredients. This incense type works best with a lot of resins and woods.

You can decide the final number of dry ingredients based on the intended purpose of the incense (planetary numbers etc.), or by what you have available in the necessary amounts. 

My dry materials consisted of among others:

Frankincense

Elemi

Myrrh

Damara

Lavender

Propolis

Pollen 

Mace

Mastix

Copal

Pine

When your wet materials have steeped enough, it is time to boil them down. 

Over a low heat, just enough to warm the mixture without boiling it, simmer it while stirring often for a couple of hours, until it forms a gooey batter. Ventilate you kitchen well!

Place your dry materials into a large bowl and once a little cooled, add the wet portion in slowly, while working it in. Don’t add everything at once, you are aiming to knead a firm dough that no longer sticks to the sides of the bowl and you may have more wet ingredients than needed. 

When you are done, break the dough into small pellets and place in on a drying rack. If you are fortunate like me to have an electric herb dryer, the process of drying the incense at 35°C takes about a week. If you are drying it in room temperature, it may take up to 3-4 weeks. Either way, the place where the drying will happen will smell absolutely lovely. 

The goal is to dry the pellets so they are firm to the touch. 

Afterwards, after removing the dried incense from the dryer, I like to coat it with ground Benzoin resin to work as a preservative, since the incense still contains organic materials and may also contain water. I also added Dragon’s blood to the coating for an added kick of scent and color.  

Store in an airtight jar and voilá, your own Kyphi-type incense:

Ready to make stick incense!

My extruder came today and my hubs printed me a custom tip (using the christmas present he got himself...) This was made because the metal tips that come with the extruder leaves the sticks with rough edges making them brittle, and all plastic extruders are to weak and crack when making sticks. Others have suggested cutting the tip off an oral syringe to have the best of both worlds type deal using it in a similar fashion but I didn’t have one and this saves on plastic waste anyway. This will be fun to experiment with and make different thickness of dhoop sticks.

To answer to @liminalblessings : I’m not a specialist, I mostly use my instinct and some inspiriting things, like books (bio-regional old folklore for instance. I also find C. Boyer's books very inspiring even if she is not talking about incenses). I also use poetry (mine and the one from great poets), art (painting, linked to the ‘colors dance’ cause the final shape of the incense is also very important I think), my dreams and the little experience knowledge about plants I have acquired.

I harvest all the plants I use. I have the chance to live in a region where the vegetation is very rich in bio-diversity, between valleys and top of the mountains. I don’t like buying dry plants but it’s sometimes very useful to make some exchanges with other practitioners (for example to have resins who are not available in my country like dragon’s blood or olibanum.)

I also try to gather resin from trees when it’s needed. And I don’t hesitate to put ‘extras’ on it (things who are not usually seen in an incense like hairs, feathers, bone powder, insect powder, etc.)

Offering incense is (for me) the only possibility we have actually to make blood sacrifices regularly to pay homage to our land, so I take this very very seriously.

All my pickings are ritualized. I don’t pick anything "until" I donate something to the earth. And my gifts are always made up of things that are important to me.

Also I always gather less than I’m thinking I need. (And in the end I have always more than I thought.)

To finish, I use planetary correspondences, of course. But it’s not correspondences I learned from books, it's things I learned directly from my land observations crossed with things I have read in books.

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The well known site of W. Rost : Pflanzenkunst, provide useful infos from someone truly passionate about plants, trees, resins and her link section is also very interesting.  Particularly this old link  : https://www.making-incense.com/

Also the book : “Herbs and things, a Jeanne Rose Herbal”  teaches me a lot.