Storax

Storax here is Liquidambar orientalis, the oriental or Turkish sweetgum, a deciduous tree of 30 to 35 metres native to the eastern Mediterranean, where it grows in pure stands mainly on the floodplains of south-western Turkey and on Rhodes. Its wounded bark gives a fragrant balsam, liquid storax: the inner bark is stripped, softened in boiling water and pressed, yielding a soft, sticky, greyish-brown mass about as thick as honey, and the spent bark was itself sold as storax bark. The name has caused centuries of confusion, since storax is also a name for benzoin from Styrax trees and for the solid resin of Styrax officinalis, and scholars still debate which of them was the storax of the ancients. Herodotus, Aristotle, Theophrastus and Strabo mention a storax tree and its balsam, Pliny knew storax as a perfume, the Greek Magical Papyri call for it in several rites, and Dioscorides describes it burned as incense much like frankincense; later it was burned in churches and mosques and in French medieval magic. The tree is now endangered, its forests lost to farmland and to dams built where it grew. In magical practice storax is burned for protection, for divination and to break hexes, and its oil purifies ritual tools and space.