From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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Opopanax chironium, also known as "sweet myrrh" or "bisabol myrrh," is a herb that grows one to three feet high and produces a large, yellow flower. The plant thrives in warm climates like Iran, Italy, Greece, Turkey and Somalia, but also grows in cooler climates. Some view opoponax grown in cooler climates as being of inferior quality.

A consumable resin can be extracted from opoponax by cutting the plant at the base of a stem and sun-drying the juice that flows out. Though people often find the taste acrid and bitter, the highly flammable resin can be burned as incense to produce a scent somewhat like balsam or lavender. The resin has been used in treatment of spasms — and, before that, as an emmenagogue in treatment of asthma, chronic visceral infections, hysteria and hypochondria. Opoponax resin is most frequently sold in dried irregular pieces, though tear-shaped gems are not uncommon.

Opoponax is also used in the production of certain perfumes, and is the fragrance of one of the popular Diptyque candles.

Cultural references to opoponax

• King Solomon allegedly regarded the opoponax as the noblest of incense gums.

• In the penultimate chapter of James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom recognizes opoponax as an ingredient in the perfume of his wife, Molly.

• In The Grand Duke, by W. S. Gilbert, the mock-grecian chorus that opens the second Act repeat the words "Opoponax eloia!" many times.

• In the novel Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub, the word opopanax is used repeatedly and constantly in a nonsensical fashion, as both a verb and an adjective (e.i "distant cry of the opoponax", the opoponax this, the opoponax that, etc) eventually becoming a symbol for all the strange and incomprehensible events unfolding in the book.

• In another Stephen King novel, Wolves of the Calla (the fifth book in The Dark Tower series), a character holds an "opopanax feather", thus suggesting that it is the name of a bird. No other explanation is given in the story.

• In the novel Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, the child mobster "Plug" Loafsley runs a club that smells strongly of opopanax, vervain, and bodily ejecta.