Candles in religion

Tilcayo Cats original · British Bees · Sources and editorial assessment · Originals retention rule

Candles and lamps appear in the worship of many religions: lit before images and at altars, carried in processions, used to mark evening prayer and, in modern paganism, to stand for elements of the world. Their history is closely tied to that of incense and of sacred fire.

In early Christianity

The historian Susan Ashbrook Harvey notes that lamps were part of the pagan worship that early Christians refused, alongside libations, scented flowers, incense and blood offerings. Later, once Christianity was legal, processions through cities were lit with "candles of scented wax" and censers, following an old Mediterranean habit of marking solemnity and honour. In Harvey's view this use was ceremonial and honorific, rather than specifically Christian at first.

The pilgrim Egeria, describing worship in Jerusalem in the late fourth century, stressed the sheer quantity of light: candles, torches, large glass lamps and candelabra, increased further on feast days. The poet Prudentius wrote a hymn for the lighting of the lamp at evening prayer, in which the light and fragrance of beeswax candles are offered to God and connected with bees, flowers and the cycle of day and night.

Because these customs looked like pagan ones, they needed defending. Harvey reports that Jerome argued that the same ceremony was wrong when offered to idols but acceptable when used to honour the martyrs.

In Wicca and modern paganism

Joanne Pearson describes Wiccans consecrating a ritual space with the four elements, salt for earth, water, fire and incense for air, with a candle standing for the fifth element, spirit. She argues that candles, like the other tools of Wiccan ritual, are largely inherited from Catholic practice, and that candles, music, incense and altars engage the senses in a similar way to Catholic and Anglo-Catholic worship. Michael Strmiska notes that pagans often use candles and incense indoors as a substitute for festival fires.

Fire and light in Zoroastrianism

Zoroastrianism does not centre on candles, but on sacred fire. Jenny Rose explains that in the oldest Zoroastrian hymns, fire is the means of crossing between the human and the divine. Fires were kept in fire-holders and later in fire temples, fuelled with clean, dry wood, and priests wore mouth-covers so as not to pollute them.

Scholarly explanations

Scholars offer several explanations for why candles and flames recur across religions, and none of them is accepted as the whole answer.

• Harvey argues that early Christian worship was deliberately multi-sensory. Light, together with scent and sound, was meant to keep believers turned towards God and to link worship with the natural world, as in Prudentius's hymn.
• Harvey also points to plain continuity: lighting candles in processions was an established Mediterranean way of showing honour, and Christians took it over.
• Robert Yelle argues more generally that ritual coordinates several senses at once ("sensory pageantry") to make its performance effective. Light is one of the senses it can engage.
• Strmiska describes a practical motive in modern paganism: candles stand in for fire where a bonfire is not possible.
• Rose's account of Zoroastrianism suggests a deeper link between flame and the divine in some traditions, where fire is itself a meeting point between the human and the sacred.

See also

• Incense
• Altar
• Worship
• Ritual
• Wicca
• Fire temple