Is Sacred Secretion Real? What the Chrism Is and Where the Idea Comes From

Is sacred secretion real? Ask online and the answers arrive in two flavours: a holy oil your body makes once a month, or nonsense from start to finish. Both skip the useful part. The teaching has authors, a publisher and page numbers. Inside it sits a word, chrism, about two thousand years older than the teaching.

The callout shows the sky on the day this page went up. The series it opens is about a practice timed by that same Moon, so it helps to know where the Moon actually stands before reading what a 1920 book said about it.

This is part one of three. Part two, how the chrism fast window works, shows how the monthly window is timed, with one worked example. Part three, how to prepare for sacred secretion gently, covers why people keep it and how to begin without harm. The Chrism Fast Calendar does the arithmetic for your own birth date.

Is sacred secretion real?

As anatomy, no. The sacred secretion is a teaching from George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry's God-Man: The Word Made Flesh (1920): an oil from the brain, a seed born monthly in the solar plexus, rising if saved. No such oil or seed has been found. As a parable of attention and restraint, it is real enough to practise. ☉George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry (1920). God-Man: The Word Made Flesh. The Chemistry of Life Co., Los Angeles.Read full source →☉²

That answer has three parts, and each needs its own evidence: what the word meant before the book, what the book claims, and what the body shows. This page takes them in that order and ends with what is left standing.

What the chrism meant before Carey

Long before anyone wrote about a secretion, chrism was something you could hold in a jar. The Greek chrisma means an anointing and the oil used for it. It comes from the verb chriō, to anoint, and so does Christos, the Greek rendering of the Hebrew mashiach, the anointed one. Christ is a title before it is a name, and the title describes oil on a head.

The churches that keep the rite still make chrism from olive oil and a fragrance, traditionally balsam, consecrated by a bishop. The Orthodox call the anointing that follows baptism chrismation.

One early Christian community moved the oil to the centre of everything. The Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian text preserved in Nag Hammadi Codex II, ranks the anointing above the washing and derives the very name of Christ from it:

The chrism is better than baptism, since we're called "Christians" because of the chrism, not because of baptism. And it was because of the chrism that Christ was named, because the Father anointed the Son, and the Son anointed the apostles, and the apostles anointed us.

☿Mark M. Mattison (trans.) (2017). The Gospel of Philip. gospels.net (public-domain translation).Read full source →☿¹

The same gospel names the oil's origin, and the origin is a tree: "from the olive tree came the chrism, and from that the resurrection" ☿Mark M. Mattison (trans.) (2017). The Gospel of Philip. gospels.net (public-domain translation).Read full source →☿¹. Philip's chrism is received from outside, from another person's hand. Scholars still argue about what the community's rites looked like, but nowhere is the chrism a fluid the body makes. Keep that contrast in view, because it is the first thing the modern teaching changes.

Where the phrase sacred secretion comes from

The phrase is not a heading or a name in either of Carey and Perry's books. What God-Man does contain, on page 95, is the wordplay it grew from. The book derives sacred from the sacrum, the bone at the base of the spine, and then glosses its partner word: "Secret, from secretion, gray matter or oil from the upper brain" ☉George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry (1920). God-Man: The Word Made Flesh. The Chemistry of Life Co., Los Angeles.Read full source →☉². Sacred below, secret above. The modern label reads like those two words fused into one; who first joined them in print is something this page could not establish.

The idea itself is on page 19, where the book explains why a structure deep in the brain is called the claustrum, Latin for an enclosure or cloister. It is named that, the authors say, "for the very good reason that a precious and holy thing is secreted or secluded there" ☉George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry (1920). God-Man: The Word Made Flesh. The Chemistry of Life Co., Los Angeles.Read full source →☉². Secreted and secluded: the pun carries the whole doctrine.

Carey died in 1924. The memorial preface to the 1932 The Zodiac and the Salts of Salvation tells where he began, "Hiram Butler's theory appealed to him", and what the purified life substance of every person finally becomes: "for it then becomes the Christ or Holy Oil" ☽George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry (1932). The Zodiac and the Salts of Salvation. 1932 edition, archive.org scan.Read full source →☽³. Oil from the brain, Christ as that oil, a holy thing secreted in a cloister. That is the sacred secretion, in its authors' own words.

What the teaching claims, step by step

Here is the map as God-Man draws it. Every step below is the authors' claim, reported, not a finding.

1. A fluid flows down from the claustrum and divides between the pineal gland and the pituitary body, turning golden in one and milk-white in the other: "the milk and honey referred to in the Bible" (p. 19).
2. An oil runs down the spinal cord, which the book calls Jordan. It is "the life essence (oil or secretion) that constantly flows down the spinal cord" (p. 21), and in the book's best-known sentence, "this marrow is called Christ, which is the Greek word for oil" (p. 44).
3. Once a month, while the Moon is in the sign the Sun held at your birth, a seed forms in the solar plexus, which the book calls the manger, Bethlehem (pp. 20, 90, 126). Part two, on the sacred secretion and the Moon sign, is about that timing.
4. If it is saved, the seed rises. If it is spent through sex, alcohol or overeating, it is lost (p. 90).
5. At the base of the skull, which the book calls Golgotha, the oil is crucified, rests in the cerebellum for the Moon's time in one sign, and on the third day ascends to the pineal gland (p. 89). ☉George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry (1920). God-Man: The Word Made Flesh. The Chemistry of Life Co., Los Angeles.Read full source →☉²

Read it in one breath and you see what the book is doing. It lays the Gospel over a human body: Bethlehem in the belly, the Jordan down the spine, Golgotha at the skull, the resurrection in the head. That mapping is the book's real subject. The physiology is the vocabulary it chose.

Two slips around the key word

The book's most quoted sentence is wrong about Greek. Christos means anointed; the ordinary Greek word for oil is elaion. Carey's chain from Christ to oil holds only through the act of anointing, which is exactly the outer rite his scheme moves inside.

The second slip is quieter. The one place where God-Man adopts chrism as a technical term is not Carey's account of the brain at all. It is a chapter of extracts the book credits to a Prof. Smiley, about a gland near the base of the spine that the extract also calls the Kundalini. There, for the gland's oil in its purest state, the text announces: "we shall use the Greek term Chrism" (p. 78). The same book thus has an oil descending from the top of the head and a chrism named at the bottom of the spine. Anyone who tells you the sacred secretion is one consistent system has not read it closely.

What the anatomy shows

The claustrum is real. It is a thin, irregular sheet of grey matter under the insular cortex in each hemisphere, connected with almost the whole cortex. In a paper published in 2005, Francis Crick and Christof Koch proposed that it may help bind separate streams of perception into a single conscious experience; that remains a hypothesis under study. ♃Francis C. Crick and Christof Koch (2005). What is the function of the claustrum?. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 360 (1458): 1271–1279.Read full source →♃⁴ It is nerve tissue. It is not a gland, and no oil has ever been seen leaving it.

God-Man half-knew this. On page 109 it quotes its own anatomy textbook, Santee, describing the claustrum as "a sheet of peculiar gray substance", and then moves straight on to the oil. The rest of the map fares no better as anatomy. The spinal cord carries nerve signals. The solar plexus is a web of nerves, not a cavity where anything is born. Nothing in the body has been shown to keep time with the Moon's position in the zodiac.

So the plain answer stands. As a description of the body, the sacred secretion is not real.

What is real in it

Everything that matters about the teaching survives that verdict. It belongs to an old habit of reading scripture as a map of the person, the Hermetic idea that the small world repeats the large. The yogic traditions drew their own map of an ascent along the spine long before Carey: kundalini rising through sushumna, with the channels Ida and Pingala crossing on either side. Carey borrows those two names himself (p. 89).

What he adds is a clock and a discipline. The clock is the Moon returning each month to the place the Sun held when you were born, the lunar principle turned into an appointment. The discipline is conservation: what is made should not be spent on drink, excess or compulsion. Neither needs an oil to be true. A few days a month in which attention is gathered instead of scattered is a practice anyone can test, and the result belongs to the one who tests it.

One caution before part three. The multi-day fast that now circulates under Carey's name is not in his books, and he rejected fasting outright (p. 103). Nothing on this page tells you to fast. Anyone under 18, pregnant or breastfeeding, diabetic, with a history of disordered eating or on medication that must be taken with food should not restrict food on a spiritual schedule at all. Read the disclaimer, and speak to a doctor before any fast.

FAQ

What is sacred secretion? The sacred secretion is the name later readers gave to George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry's teaching in God-Man (1920): an oil said to descend from the brain, and a seed said to form in the solar plexus each month while the Moon is in your Sun sign. Saved through restraint, the seed is said to rise to the head. It is an esoteric teaching, not physiology.

Is sacred secretion biblical? No. The Bible never describes it. Carey and Perry read the Bible as an allegory of the body, so they find Bethlehem in the solar plexus, the Jordan in the spinal cord and Golgotha at the skull. Those readings are theirs. The anointing oil of scripture, like the chrism of the early churches, is poured on from outside, by another person's hand.

Is claustrum oil real? The claustrum is real and the oil is not. The claustrum is a thin sheet of grey matter deep in each hemisphere, studied today for a possible role in consciousness. It is nerve tissue, not a gland, and it secretes no oil. The claustrum oil belongs to Carey and Perry's 1920 allegory, where the Latin meaning of the word, a cloister, carried the idea.

What does chrism oil symbolize? In Christian rites, chrism is the oil of anointing. It marks a person as set apart, as kings and priests were anointed, and it gives Christ his title, the anointed one. The Gospel of Philip ranks it above baptism and derives the name Christian from it. Carey later turned the symbol inward and made the oil a product of the body.