This full moon, I decided to make an incense blend for the full moon as a complement to the incense I have been using for the new moon.
I checked the correspondences in Alistair Crowley’s 777, Scott Cunningham’s Magical Herbalism, and Starhawk's Spiral Dance and decided on three ingredients: dammar, sandalwood and cyperus papyrus root.
I decided to keep the white dammar as it produces a lot of fragrant smoke. I added sandalwood, which has associations with the moon and the sphere of Yesod in the Kabbalah.
Crowley says that fragrant roots are associated with the moon. Most people go for orris root, but I didn't have any in the cupboard and I don't remember being particularly impressed with the fragrance when I bought some as a teenager. I did, however, have a jar of cyperus papyrus root. It has a kind of dusty, old lady’s perfume smell to it, which I thought might go well with the cleaner sandalwood smell.
I had a bit of a practice grinding up the cyperus papyrus root in my pestle and mortar before the ritual and it turned out to be too hard. So I prepared some in advance by chopping it into smaller pieces with a knife on a chopping board.
Neither the sandalwood nor the papyrus are particularly smoky when burnt, so I decided to add twice as much dammar into the mixture than the other two ingredients.
I used Glastonbury White Spring water and a little bit of the dammar to bless the circle in the opening ceremony.
After the opening ceremony, I declared my intentions to make an incense to honour the time of the full moon. I then recited the same herbalist prayer over the herbs as when I was making the offering mix. You can find that here.
I then blessed the root, wood and resin individually and ground them together in a pestle and mortar.
Holding the mortar to my chest, I visualised myself sitting in a meadow in bright moonlight. I imagined the moonlight shining into the incense and blessing it.
I then burned a little of the incense. I often find that lots of things smell nice when burned individually, but I have a knack for making things smell acrid when I mix them together. However, this combination was not too bad.
I then spent a little time meditating: I visualised my place of peace and stillness and then went out to explore the world surrounding it. After coming back to my place of peace and then into the everyday world, I performed a closing ceremony.
After the ceremony, I took the incense burner out to the balcony and offered some of the smoke up to the full moon. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a cloudy sky, but I could see a small bright spot in the clouds.