The hand as altar. Before temples, before stone, there was the cupped palm and what it could hold. The Rigveda calls Agni the priest of the sacrifice, the mouth through which the gods eat. Smoke carried what the voice could not. The word perfume comes from the Latin per fumum, through smoke. Every scent sprayed on a wrist still carries the memory of a burnt offering, a handful of resin, a field of flowers reduced to ash on a stone. The Greeks called it hekatombē. The Hebrews called it olah, that which ascends. Different names for one trade: matter given back to air, returning changed. In the Zoroastrian temple at Yazd, a fire has burned without pause for more than fifteen hundred years. Priests feed it sandalwood through conquests, carry it across oceans when empires fall. Every private flame is a remnant of that longer burning.