Why does Incense smell Religious?: Greek Orthodoxy and the Anthropology of Smell

Smells are both metonymical and metaphorical, operating both as clues to the existence of their source and as hints of a wider significance for this point of origin. Incense, when analysed from an ‘etic’ perspective, appears to act as a marker of transition between the profane and the sacred. Its constituents symbolise incorruptibility and immortality, and release an olfactory and visible sign of a connection between the human and superhuman realms. Drawing on ‘emic’ understandings within Greek Orthodoxy, incense is interpreted as a performative sign of a transcendent world, one among many sensory indicators that worshippers are securely within the world of the sacred.