The Long Thread — Introduction. Our series on the origins of burning botanicals across cultures.
There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a room once smoke starts to rise. It doesn’t matter where you are or what you’re burning. The effect is nearly universal; there is a shift, a softening, a sense that something has begun, ended, or is being marked.
This shows up in too many disconnected places to be chance. Long before any single culture claimed it, burning botanicals as a way of marking time, space, and intention was already old. Across deserts, coastlines, mountains, and cities that never knew of one another’s existence, people arrived independently, often centuries apart, at the same instinct: gather something that grows, set it to smoke, and let the air carry what words can’t.
What “burning botanicals” actually means
At its simplest, burning botanicals is the practice of igniting plant material (herbs, resins, wood, bark) and using the resulting smoke for ritual, spiritual, or restorative purposes, rather than for cooking or warmth alone. It shows up under many different names depending on where you are: sahumar, smudging, saining, kōdō, uunsi, ketoret, copal, sang, or simply “incense,” each carrying its own specific meaning within its own tradition. The plants and ceremonies differ, but the underlying gesture is remarkably consistent: smoke as a way of clearing something, honoring something, or moving from one state into another.
A world of parallel traditions
Thirteen traditions, six continents, no contact between most of them. Jump to any one, or read straight through.
• Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony — Australia
• Incense — India and the Middle East
• Incense — Ancient Greece and Rome
Sahumar, Latin America
A household tradition of burning Palo Santo and other aromatic woods to purify a space, older than anyone thought to write down and still practiced daily. Read the full story →
Aboriginal Smoking Ceremony, Australia
Among the oldest continuously practiced ceremonies on Earth, using smouldering eucalyptus and other native leaves for cleansing, protection, and welcome. Read the full story →
Copal, Mesoamerica
Resin burned in ceremony for thousands of years, described as literal food for the gods, suppressed under colonization, and still offered today. Read the full story →
Incense, India and the Middle East
Frankincense and myrrh carried along ancient trade routes into temples, mosques, and homes alike, one of the oldest continuous traditions of scent as devotion. Read the full story →
Smudging, North America
A sacred ceremonial practice among Indigenous nations, burning sage, sweetgrass, cedar, or tobacco to cleanse and to carry prayer. Read the full story →
Saining, Scotland
A juniper-smoke house blessing tied to Hogmanay, nearly lost to time, now quietly returning. Read the full story →
Kōdō, Japan
A refined art of appreciating incense so precise that practitioners don’t say they smell it. They say they listen. Read the full story →
Incense, Ancient Greece and Rome
Burned on temple altars and at funerals, rising smoke was believed to carry prayer directly to the gods. Read the full story →
Uunsi, Horn of Africa
Frankincense burned daily, not reserved for special occasions but woven into the ordinary rhythm of hospitality and home. Read the full story →
Ketoret, Ancient Israel
An eleven-ingredient incense so sacred that its exact formula was treated as divine instruction, burned twice daily in the Temple. Read the full story →
Kyphi, Ancient Egypt
A honey-and-resin incense burned in temples on a fixed daily schedule, and eaten as medicine besides. Read the full story →
Esfand, Persia
Wild rue seeds burned to ward off the evil eye, a Zoroastrian-rooted custom still practiced across Iran today. Read the full story →
Sang, Tibetan Buddhism
Juniper smoke offered on hilltops and rooftops, believed to open a passageway for protective beings. Read the full story →
Other traditions exist too, each shaped by the plants a given landscape offered and the beliefs a given culture carried. What we’ve gathered here are the traditions most directly connected to the botanicals we work with, and a wider sample of just how far this instinct reaches.
Embracing this, honestly
For most of what’s here, bringing it into your own life, burning Palo Santo, lighting sage for your own reasons, keeping a small ritual at home, is a real way of keeping these traditions valued and visible, especially paired with sourcing that actually supports the people and places these plants come from. A smaller number of these traditions carry closed ceremonial knowledge that isn’t fully ours to adopt, however good the intentions behind it, several Indigenous nations across North America and Aboriginal Australian communities, among others, have been direct about exactly where that line sits. Each dedicated post goes further into what genuine, supportive engagement can look like, tradition by tradition.
What ties them together
Strip away the geography, and a pattern emerges. Nearly every one of these traditions uses smoke for some combination of:
• Clearing: a space, an energy, a lingering feeling
• Marking a transition: a new year, a new home, a new season, a goodbye
• Inviting presence: slowing down enough to actually notice where you are
• Connecting to something larger: ancestors, land, spirit, memory
None of this is metaphorical to the people who practice it. These are real, specific, often sacred customs, tied to particular places and particular peoples. What’s shared is the impulse beneath them, not the practices themselves, and that distinction matters. Appreciating the through-line across cultures is different from treating any one tradition as generic or interchangeable with the others.
A modern practice, an ancient instinct
Most of us today don’t live near a longhouse fire, a Peruvian dry forest, or a Highland croft. What we have instead are small rituals, scaled down to fit an apartment, a bedroom, a five-minute pause between one part of the day and the next. A window cracked open. A bundle resting in cast iron. Smoke drifting up and thinning into nothing.
That instinct, to burn something and let it mark a moment, hasn’t gone anywhere. It’s the same one that drew people to gather around fire in the first place, long before any of these named traditions existed. What’s changed is the scale, not the impulse.
Over the next several posts in The Long Thread, we’ll go deeper into each of these traditions on their own terms: where they come from, what they mean to the people who carry them, and how the botanicals we work with at Flame + Flora connect back to that history.
Frequently asked questions
Why do people burn sage or other botanicals? Reasons vary by tradition and by person, but common threads include clearing a space, marking a transition, creating a moment of stillness, and connecting to ritual or heritage. In ceremonial contexts like Indigenous smudging, the reasons are specifically sacred and tied to prayer and community.
What’s the difference between smudging and burning incense? Smudging refers specifically to a ceremonial Indigenous North American practice. Burning incense is a broader term covering many unrelated traditions worldwide, including Latin American sahumar, Aboriginal Australian smoking ceremony, Horn of African uunsi, Greco-Roman temple offerings, ancient Egyptian kyphi, Persian esfand, Japanese kōdō, and Middle Eastern and South Asian incense use, among others.
Is burning botanicals a religious practice? For some traditions, yes. It’s directly tied to religious or spiritual belief (Indigenous ceremony, some incense use in Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic practice). For others, it’s more cultural or folk custom, like Scottish saining. And for many people today, it’s a secular, personal ritual of mindfulness rather than religious observance. Context matters.
Where do Flame + Flora’s botanicals fit into this? Our Palo Santo Sticks connect to Latin American sahumar tradition, sourced from naturally fallen wood in Peru and Ecuador. Our White Sage and Blue Sage bundles are ethically cultivated, not wild-harvested, offered with respect for their connection to Indigenous tradition rather than as a claim to it. Our Eucalyptus Bundle carries a genuine connection to Aboriginal Australian smoking ceremony, though ours isn’t sourced from or tied to any specific community’s ceremonial practice; we offer it for its own scent and its place within a broader, non-ceremonial tradition of aromatic burning. If you’re ready to start your own practice, our Cast Iron Burner Sets bring the tools together in one place.