Elbenzauber – Mogra

This is another pack from “Arkanum des Lichts”, an inexpensive online retailer that I unfortunately cannot recommend. I paid €3.90, the regular price for one pack (15g) is €4.50. Since the thickness of the hand-rolled sticks varies, the number of incense sticks included varies between 9 and 14 incense sticks. My pack contained 12. The burning time is given as 40–60 minutes.
If you want to find out more about the brand, you can read my main article here.

“The pleasant, spicy freshness of these long-burning sticks is brought to bear by a mixture of sandalwood, Night Queen, star anise and camphor. Very helpful for letting go of mental stress”, says the brand owner’s website.
Night Queen is a cactus whose large flowers only open at night. In India, Mogra is a kind of collective term for different jasmine-called flowers, but in particular it’s the name for Arabian jasmine. This supposed discrepancy between name and description confused me a lot at first, but I recently found out (through a conversation with a new incense manufacturer in India) that Night Queen can also refer to night-blooming jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum). “Rat Rani” is the name he uses for it.

Whether this Mogra is night-blooming jasmine or another kind, the smell is slightly pungent and tends to be unpleasant for me. They have a vague similarity to Sonnentag – Kailash, which also reminds me of the cat pee-like smell of nutmeg; however, nutmeg seems to smell creamy to many people.
I also find a slightly sour note in Mogra, which I could force myself to explain with star anise, but it doesn’t add up. 
I don’t notice the camphor at all. Overall, the scent profile seems quite thin.

As with Patchouli, which I bought from the same dealer, I wonder whether the incense sticks were perhaps stored incorrectly or beyond their shelf life. However, other varieties from this source were perfectly fine, and Steve (Incense in The Wind) also had nothing to complain about the Patchouli sample I sent him. These two varieties are probably just not for me.