Coptic Holy Myron

Chrismation in the Coptic Orthodox Church follows immediately after baptism: the priest anoints the newly baptised at a series of points on the body with the holy myron, and it is this anointing, not the water alone, that completes initiation. The same oil consecrates altars, church buildings and the vessels used on them. Because only the patriarch may consecrate it, and because he does so only at intervals, the supply used in every parish of the church traces back to one act performed at one place. The oil is prepared from olive oil compounded with a long list of aromatic spices and with balsam, cooked and blessed across several days of services, and then distributed to the dioceses in sealed vessels.

The arrangement is administratively deliberate. A communion spread across Egypt and, more recently, across a large diaspora, is bound together at the most personal sacramental moment by a substance that physically came from the patriarchate. It also gives the church a recurring public event of some magnitude: a consecration of the myron is attended by the bishops, is recorded, and marks a point in a patriarch's tenure. The liturgical books preserve the order of the rite in detail, and the Coptic liturgical scholarship of the twentieth century paid it close attention precisely because the texts are unusually full.

The Coptic tradition holds that each new consecration of the myron carries the previous one forward, a portion of the old being added to the new, and traces the chain back to the spices brought for the burial of Christ. Whether or not the chain can be traced historically, the claim tells you what the object is for. This is a church that has defined itself for fifteen centuries by unbroken succession in a see, through Chalcedonian separation, Arab conquest, long periods as a minority and repeated episodes of pressure. An oil that is deliberately never allowed to start fresh is a claim about that continuity in a form a congregation can smell.

That is also why the consecration is a patriarchal reserve rather than a bishop's prerogative. A bishop consecrates an altar with myron; he does not make it. Every altar in the church therefore depends on Alexandria in a direct material sense. Comparable reasoning operates in the Byzantine churches, where the great chrism is likewise a patriarchal consecration, but the Coptic rite is distinctive in the length of its spice list, the detail preserved in the service books and the emphasis its own commentators place on the carrying forward of the old oil into the new.