Cedar

Cedar's first article separates the true cedar of Lebanon from the North American red cedar sold under the same name. The peoples who actually burned each tree developed purification rites independently of one another, with no shared source and no contact, and the parallel is worth more than the shared word.

The Hebrew Bible uses true cedar, Cedrus libani, in a specific purification rite for a healed skin affliction at Leviticus 14, alongside hyssop and scarlet thread, a ritual use distinct from its better known role as Solomon's Temple timber; cedar here functions as a cleansing agent in law, not only as fine building material.

An ocean and several thousand years away, numerous peoples of the northern and plains regions of North America burn Juniperus virginiana, the tree that carries the cedar name without the botany, as a purifying smoke central to the sweat lodge and to other ceremonial cleansing practice. As with sage and other North American plant medicine described elsewhere on this site, that specific ceremonial use belongs to the peoples who practise it rather than to a general technique available to anyone who burns the wood.

Two purification traditions, one Levitical and textual, one oral and still living, arrived at the same basic act, cedar smoke against contamination, from trees that are not even the same genus, joined only by a common name inherited from a mistaken botanical identification made centuries after both practices were already old.

Cedar is a fragrant wood used as incense: the aromatic wood of cedars and junipers, burned for purification from the ancient Near East to the Indigenous traditions of North America. In Western correspondence it is often given to Jupiter.

Material and correspondence

In the Western system of ritual correspondences it is set under Jupiter and the element of Fire. Such planetary and elemental attributions belong to the Western esoteric tradition of correspondences, drawn from writers such as Agrippa and codified in the modern period by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn; the material's use as incense is far older and cuts across many cultures. It is described here within that documented tradition of ritual perfume.

Several trees under one old name

"Cedar" covers more than one tree. The true cedar of the Bible and of the ancient Near East is Cedrus libani, the cedar of Lebanon, whose timber built Solomon's Temple according to 1 Kings 5 and appears earlier still as prized building wood in the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh; its dwindling ancient forests are one of the oldest documented cases of deforestation in recorded history. Much of the wood sold as "cedar" for incense and construction today, including the red cedar common in North America, is botanically a juniper (Juniperus virginiana) rather than a true Cedrus, an unrelated genus that happens to share the common name and a broadly similar resinous scent, a naming overlap that runs through the whole cedar-and-juniper family of incenses rather than being unique to any one product.