Ulysses Essay 5 (11:12)

Chapter 1 (Telemachus) No. 5

“The boat of incense”

Malachi (“Buck”) Mulligan calls Stephen to come downstairs to the lower level of the tower where they are about to have breakfast with Haines, their English guest. Stephen notices that Mulligan has forgotten his nickel shaving bowl (the parodied “communion bowl”) on the parapet but, still at odds with Mulligan, he equivocates within himself as whether to bring it down or whether “to leave it there all day, forgotten friendship.”

Eventually (and typically) he does take the bowl: right away its smell of “clammy lather” arouses in him memories of his Jesuit schooldays at Clonglowes Wood College, where he would act as the priest’s server (the part that Mulligan had wanted him to imitate while playing out the parody on the Mass). The bowl is now transmuted in his mind to the “boat of incense” which the server would carry to enable the priest to spoon off grains of incense onto the red-hot charcoals of the incense thurible, swinging it ceremonially from its metal chains to allow the congregation to imbibe its sweet aroma.

The Catholic incense ritual has its roots in Judaism and its formulation and usage for the Temple service are specified in the Tanach (Exodus 30:30-34). The incense offering (k’toret) was an integral part of the Temple sacrificial procedure and according to the Talmud, the House of Avtinas, a family of perfumers, were in charge of its manufacture. The family (perhaps anticipating “the pause that refreshes”) kept the exact botanical details of the ingredients secret, handing them down from generation to generation. However, in common with the other sacrificial rituals, after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., the k’toret was withdrawn from Jewish ritual, only to be resuscitated by Christianity.

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Still, the k’toret makes a surprising comeback at the conclusion of every Shabbat and festival service. After the cantor has finished the Musaf repetition, the mourners (those who have been bereaved over the past one year, or are marking the annual remembrance day (“Yahrzeit” in Yiddish) of a close relative, recite two versions of the Kaddish, the classical well known version, as well as a longer version known as “Kaddish d’rabbanan” which includes a special section requesting the bestowal of divine providence on those who study the Torah. “Kaddish d’rabbanan” is typically recited after a minyan (ten adult men) have studied any part of the works of the Rabbis, and therefore the siddur (the standard Jewish prayer book) dictates that the worshippers quietly recite three short  texts from the Talmud before the mourners recite the Kaddish d’rabbanan. Although these texts are usually mumbled at lightning speed, I always found it engrossing that the first of the three is an excerpt from the post-exilic Talmudic treatise “Kritot” which specifies in detail the components of the incense when it was still in use in the Temple. (“Kritot”, the name of the treatise, refers to “Karet” – “cutting off” – understood to be untimely death occasioned by divine retribution for a host of religious and sexual offences but as usual in Talmudic discourse, the discussants wander away from the nominal subject matter of the treatise). Here is the English translation of the relevant Talmudic text from my mother’s Singer’s siddur, published by the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire and printed in London by Her Majesty’s Printers, Eyre and Spottiswoode Limited, in 1961 (the 27^th edition):  

“The compound forming the incense consisted of balm, onycha, galbanum and frankincense, in quantities weighing seventy manot each; of myrrh, cassia, spikenard and saffron, each sixteen manot by weight; of costus, twelve; of aromatic bark, three; of cinnamon nine man; of lye obtained from leek, nine kabim; of Cyprus wine three seahs and three kabim but if Cyprus wine was not available old white wine might be used. Of Sodom salt the fourth part of a kab; and of the herb Ma’aleh Ashan a minute quantity. Rabbi Nathan says, a minute quantity was also required of the Kippat herb that grows by the Jordan. If, however, the preparer added honey to the mixture, he rendered it unfit for sacred use, and if he omitted any one of its ingredients, he was liable to the penalty of death. Rabbi Simon ben Gamliel says that the “balm” is a resin that exudes from the balsam tree. The lye was obtained from a species of leek that was rubbed over the onycha to improve it. The Cyprus wine was used to steep the onycha in it so that its odor would be more pungent.”

It’s interesting is that if you read the text in other siddurim, there is an extra sentence which elaborates on the issue of increasing the pungency of the incense. This sentence is omitted in the Singer siddur and runs as follows:

“While ‘mei raglayim’ might have been good for this purpose, it was not decent to bring it into the Temple.”

So what is “mei raglayim”? Literally is means “water of the legs”, and is understood to be a euphemism for “urine”. Pungent for sure. And apparently too indelicate to appear in a prayer book produced by Her Majesty’s Printers.

But aromas still have a place in Jewish ritual. After sunset on Saturday evening, when three stars become visible (and note that Joyce refers to this stipulation as the day darkens in the Nausicaa episode), the outgoing of the Shabbat is marked in orthodox Jewish homes by recitation of the “Havdalah” (“differentiation”) prayer, proclaiming the moment of separation between Shabbat and the weekdays. An integral part of the Havdalah service is the smelling of sweet spices which is meant to symbolically assuage a sort of humdrum despondency that supposedly envelops the household as the delights of the Shabbat give way to weekday mundanity. The spices are housed in a ceremonial spice-box, often made of silver, its design intended to be reminiscent of the yearned for Temple (antique ones run high prices at Judaica auctions). Our Havdalah spice-box was typical: it was fashioned in the form of a tall feudal tower, with four little bells at its corners and an unfurled silver flag at top of its spire. Just as medieval and renaissance artists portrayed biblical events in their own European setting, so did the Jews of their time perceive the architecture of the Temple as a feudal castle, and the tradition of making Havdalah spice-boxes in this form persists down to the present day. At the front of our spice-box a tiny door opened to display the interior of the “castle” and within it were placed spices (we used cloves) from which exuded a delightfully sweet aroma.  

The smelling of the spices during the Havdalah service is preceded by a blessing thanking God for “making all kinds of spices”. Jews are enjoined to make such blessings on all sorts of occasions (such as before eating or drinking, or on experiencing natural phenomena such as lightning and thunder, or even when coming into the presence of royalty. (The novelist S.Y. Agnon, Israel’s first Nobel prizewinner, pronounced this blessing, thanking God for “giving of his glory to flesh and blood,” when receiving the prize from King Gustav VI of Sweden at the Nobel ceremony in 1966). In fact a Jew is instructed in the Talmud to make at least one hundred blessings a day: usually this does not present a problem as the daily liturgy itself incorporates some eighty blessings, not to speak of those that stud the graces recited before and after meals. However a problem arises on Yom Kippur, whose order of service (like that of Shabbat and the other festive days) somewhat surprisingly contains considerably less blessings than the weekday liturgy. While on Shabbat and festive days the discrepancy can be made up by the frequent blessings before and after meals or snacks, on Yom Kippur the fasting pious Jew has little opportunity to complete the required total. However, one pleasure is permitted on the holy day: the smelling of aromatic spices. So I recall the “gabbai” (the synagogue warden) or the “shamash” (the beadle) walking among the prayer shawl covered men during the Yom Kippur service and proffering the worshippers a pinch of snuff, enjoining them to make the blessing “for making all kinds of spices” before inhaling so that they could make up the requisite one hundred blessings.

And the closely guarded trade secret? Apparently this was the herb Ma’aleh Ashan (literally “that which raises smoke”). According to the Talmud, the Ma’aleh Ashan herb made the smoke of the incense rise “straight up to heaven” in a perfectly perpendicular vector. But only the Avtinas family knew where to find it, and its botanical identity remains a mystery to this day. But maybe this is our salvation. Like the currently happily unavailable pure red heifer (whose ashes are needed to purify the priests before performing the temple service – see Numbers 19:1-22), the lack of the Ma’aleh Ashan herb could serve to prevent the correct preparation of the k’toret (remember that if the preparer omits even one of its ingredients “he is liable to death”). Perhaps this inability to properly prepare the incense offering will put paid to the dreams of some of our fanatical extremists who contemplate reinstituting the sacrificial cult in a rebuilt Third Temple at the Haram Al-Sharif site of the Al-Aksa mosque, sacred to some one and a half  billion Moslems, with who knows what catastrophic consequences.