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“We Three Kings” is, hands down, my favorite Christmas carol. The image of the noble men on camels following a star through the desert, the mournful melody, and the mystery of myrrh and frankincense fascinate me. I always wondered why the wise men considered the stuff as precious as gold, so I did some digging.

Turns out, these two resins from desert-dwelling shrubs have had spiritual significance for thousands of years. Egyptians used myrrh to embalm the pharaohs, and it was also used to anoint Jesus Christ after the crucifixion. In ancient India, frankincense was burned during religious ceremonies.

Frankincense may ease anxiety…
Clues in ancient writings suggest that it wasn’t just frankincense’s heavenly aroma that made it a church and temple staple. Dioscorides, an eminent first-century Greek physician, wrote that frankincense causes madness. The Talmud mentions it as a wine potion given to “benumb the senses” of prisoners awaiting execution. Some scholars even suspect that the drink given to Jesus before his crucifixion was laced with the stuff.

According to modern-day researchers, the ancients may have been onto something: Frankincense may have a psychoactive effect on worshipers, suggest the results of a recent study. A group of American and Israeli scientists from institutions such as Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Tel Aviv University wondered whether this resin, from the Boswellia plant native to the Red Sea region, could be a psychoactive substance with anti-anxiety drug potential. So they conducted experiments using mice to see how they reacted to doses of frankincense.

Why mice? “Mice are rather anxious creatures and prefer dark spaces (presumably where the cats won’t see them or find them),” Raphael Mechoulam, study author and professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tells me. “When we administered incensole acetate, the active component of frankincense, they became less anxious and spent more time outside the dark spaces.”

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