The church ceremony of lighting candles and the lamp is veryancient. Christians before the Gospel always burned fire not for readability, but as a personification of union with the heavenly powers, as a particle of the eternal fire of Jesus Christ.
Lighting a candle in front of an icon is a tribute of love andrespect for the Lord. In the apartment houses of Tsarist Russia, always before the faces of the saints or rich kiotas, lamps burned, which were a special lamp - church oil was poured into it. This name from the V century BC meant a flammable liquid obtained from olive trees. The second name is oil. For millennia, for the needs of the church, oil from the fruits of this tree was used. It is environmentally friendly, burns without residue, without forming tar. Certainly, one of the main purposes of a burning lamp is to clean the air of impurity. But the oil with strong healing properties is also capable of killing germs.
As a rule, fragrances are present.About him and about the fragrant herbs that fill him, as the best gift was mentioned in the Bible. There is a specially recommended set of herbs to be added to the oil for odor. Church oil, that is, olive, is of the highest quality - provencal - and more common, known as "wooden". The lamp is a lamp with a floating wick, for its fixation in most of the rooms there is a partition. About the meaning of it in Russian life speaks the number of sayings, poems and synonyms for this word - eleinik, zhirnik, kaganets, luminary. To light a lamp is in a literal and figurative sense to turn your soul to God. Extinguish it means to finish the job. So the church oil itself, or oil, grew in proverbs, sayings and legends about his wonderworking.
Church oil is used not only forlighting fixtures. One of its most important functions is the anointing, the greatest Sacrament of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the sign of the transfer of God's grace to the person on whom this rite is performed. The oil is part of Saint Miro, the product required for chrismation, in which, in addition to the church oil itself, there are 34 to 74 elements. Because of the antiquity of the rite, the origin of some of the ingredients is no longer known, but in Orthodox churches, performing the Mirovar, servants of the cult try to deviate as little as possible from the divine recipes. Church oil itself is always supplemented by a number of traditional incense - myrrh, sandalwood and incense (the resin of trees that have been growing on the Arabian Peninsula since ancient times), backgammon - the roots of plants of the Valerian family (he was mentioned in Solomon's Song), rose and other fragrant substances. The smell when burning lamp-oil is obtained simply divine! The acquaintance of a new man with the Church begins with the Sacrament of Baptism and ends with the Sacrament of Confirmation. Thus, oil in the church ritual plays a dominant role.
In the Soviet Union in the years of atheism, the costlyOlive oil for church needs to write out from the countries where these trees grow, stopped altogether. The clergy were forced to use some substitutes that had passed the ceremony of consecration. Now this problem is completely removed, but another has arisen - modern surrogates are persistently proposed. The main one is vaseline oil, "liquid paraffin". In some respects, it surpasses the church oil - the oil of divine origin. Yet its effect in the combustion process is not fully understood. In the rites of Orthodoxy, petroleum jelly is often used, although it violates the cult canons. It is strictly forbidden to use low quality technical oil for lighting the lamp, because this is connected with the threat to the health of believers.
