Spikenard

The account is in three of the gospels with details that do not agree. A woman comes with an alabaster jar of pure nard, breaks it, and pours it over Jesus, either on his head or on his feet. Those present object that it could have been sold and the money given to the poor, and the sum they name is three hundred denarii, which is close to a year's wages for a labourer.

That is the right price. Spikenard is the rhizome of Nardostachys jatamansi, which grows in the high Himalaya between roughly 3,000 and 5,000 metres and nowhere else, and every gram in a jar in Judaea had crossed the whole width of Asia. Pliny lists it among the most expensive substances in the Roman world and describes adulteration as routine, which is why the gospel text specifies pure.

The Song of Songs uses it twice, both times as the scent of a lover, and the same association runs through the later commentary tradition.

It has a second life that has nothing to do with any of this. Jatamansi is a standard drug in Ayurveda and in Tibetan medicine, prescribed as a sedative and for the mind, and it is that market rather than the perfumery one that drives collection today. The plant is CITES-listed and Nepal, its main source, licenses the trade.

Nardostachys jatamansi is a small unremarkable herb of alpine meadow and rocky slope in the Himalaya and southwest China, at altitudes where the growing season is a few weeks long. It takes years to build a rhizome worth digging, and digging it kills the plant. Those three facts between them explain both the historical price and the present crisis.

Collection is seasonal and is done by people at the far end of a very long chain, largely in Nepal and Uttarakhand, who are paid a fraction of a percent of what the oil eventually sells for. The trade is legal but licensed, since the species was listed under CITES Appendix II in 1997, and a significant share moves unlicensed.

Cultivation has been attempted repeatedly and mostly fails, because the conditions the plant needs are the ones that make an area uneconomic to farm. Some community forestry programmes in Nepal have had partial success with managed wild harvest, rotating the areas dug and setting a minimum rhizome size.

The perfumery use is now small. What sustains demand is Ayurvedic and Tibetan medicine, a herbal supplement market that is not tightly regulated anywhere, and the aromatherapy trade, and the last of these frequently sells other Valerianaceae under the name. A bottle labelled spikenard is not reliably spikenard, which is what Pliny said about it in the first century.