When the Munich faithful on Tuesday evening with a solemn requiem from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. said goodbye, thick clouds of incense continued to drift through the Liebfrauendom. They were of such a dense consistency that the guests of honor in the front pew, including Franz Duke of Bavaria and Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, could sometimes no longer be seen, even though the television cameras were very close in front of them.
Traditionally, incense plays a dominant role in church processions and funerals, as it symbolizes purification, worship and prayer, i.e. the presence of God. This smoking was once also intensively cultivated in house and yard, especially in the rough nights before and after Christmas, when popular belief and superstition reached their highest flowering.
A good 15 years ago, Bavarian television made several films about the Rottal farmer Emma Loibl (1926-2015). She once went out into the forest with the author Paul Enghofer and showed him how the farmers used to get the raw material for smoking. As in the past, she scraped the resin dripping from the tree bark into a container with a knife. The raw material was then cooked on the wood stove, because the resin was also used as a pitch ointment. Above all, however, the stable and all rooms in the house were smoked out with the resin of the conifers, which usually happened on Epiphany. The custom was intended to protect people and livestock from evil spirits and from any misfortune.
Emma Loibl still had an old, foldable iron, into which she put the embers from the wood stove and the resin. Thick smoke immediately rose in the kitchen. “Today I never smoke,” Emma said at the time. “Why do I have to do a gstange (stench) macha all over the house?” And there was also the risk of fire if a spark flew away while smoking in the stable. In the old chronicles, a frightening number of cases are documented in which whole farms were reduced to rubble and ashes after smoking after flying sparks.
Although the influence of religion is waning more and more, the acceptance of incense seems to be growing again. Today, however, it is less about warding off evil than about the medicinal effects of incense. The resin of the frankincense tree, which grows in Africa and Arabic countries, is very popular again, especially in naturopathy, it is said to help against asthma, neurodermatitis and rheumatism. This is correct insofar as the word incense (wihrouh) can already be found in Old High German, where it had a recognizable reference to ordinations and remedies. Even the ancient Egyptians are said to have made ointments with frankincense resin.
Eva Kilwing has been running an incense factory on the Kapellplatz in Altötting for several years, where she produces many different types and offers them for sale. Her shop also has a small museum in which the topic of incense is not only illuminated from many perspectives, but also meets with ever-growing interest. Even if modern medicine – unlike homeopathy – still regards the active ingredient frankincense with caution. Solid scientific studies on the healing effectiveness of incense are still few and far between.