Incense: Crafting and Use of Magickal Scents

Readers hoping for a book to complement Cunningham's classic Incense, Oils and Brews will be disappointed with this text.

Many practitioners today are using natural blends of oils and herbs to further reconnect with Nature. However, rather than producing a book which constructively encourages the reader along this path, Neal had created a volume which narrow-mindedly focuses on one aspect of incense-making to the exclusion of flexibility and audience education.

This sketchy text offers little to no history on the subject, and ignores the exploration of the use of incense in various cultural rituals. The author makes vague claims about the perils and benefits of certain incenses with no textural support. The lack of recipes is puzzling; in a book about creating incense, one would think that recipes would be among the subjects covered thoroughly. Sadly, this is not the case with Incense. Disappointingly few recipes are listed, and little information on only a handful of ingredients is included, a curious oversight in a book purporting to be about the "use of magickal scents".

The valuable portions of this work lie in the exploration of contemporary Japanese incense-making techniques and the instructions on how to roll sticks and cones, and the proportion-based base recipe format. Regrettably, this does not balance the serious gaps and choice to ignore the potential for information to enrich the work. Incense could have been edited down to a third of its size by eliminating repeated material, freeing up room for deeper exploration of cultural incenses, more recipes, lore, and a serious treatment of incense in history. However, Neal has chosen instead to reiterate the same basic material over and over: saltpetre is evil, charcoal is corrupt, moist incense is inferior, dipped incense is offensive, herbal and resin blend incense is inefficient. The only technique Neal espouses is rolling your own sticks and cones, and he does so by putting down every other incense creation technique.

Overall the book reads like a badly expanded article-length work, and is not worth the money. Incense: Crafting and Use of Magickal Scents would have benefited from a serious reworking of material and expansion in several directions, as well as a closer edit.

(c) 2003 A. Murphy-Hiscock. Originally published in Wyntergreene, Yule (December) 2003.