Chrism

Definition

Chrism is consecrated anointing oil, and the anointing done with it. The Greek chrisma comes from the verb that also gives Christos, the anointed one. The Gospel of Philip ranks it above baptism. In 1920 George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry gave the name to an oil they said the body makes: the sacred secretion.

Primary source

The Gospel of Philip, a Valentinian text preserved in Nag Hammadi Codex II, derives the name of Christ itself from the oil:

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.

— The Gospel of Philip, NHC II,3, codex page 74, trans. Mark M. Mattison (public-domain translation, 2017). Open-access copy

Deep Understanding

The sacrament. Chrism began as something you could hold in a jar: olive oil, usually perfumed, poured or smeared on a person to set them apart, as kings and priests had been anointed. The churches that keep the rite still make it from olive oil and a fragrance, traditionally balsam, consecrated by a bishop. The Orthodox call the anointing that follows baptism chrismation. In this register the oil always comes from outside, from another person's hand.

The Valentinian reading. Philip lists the chrism among the mysteries the Lord performed, beside baptism and the Eucharist, and treats it as the higher rite: water washes, but the oil carries the name and, in the text's imagery, the light. The same gospel gives the oil a tree for its origin, the olive. Whatever the community's rites looked like, and scholars still debate it, the chrism was a sacrament received, not a fluid produced.

The esoteric physiology. George W. Carey and Inez Eudora Perry turned the symbol inward. In God-Man: The Word Made Flesh (Los Angeles, 1920) an oil descends from the brain, which they place in the claustrum, and once a month, while the Moon is in the sign your Sun held at birth, a seed forms in the solar plexus; restraint lets it rise to the head. They call the oil Christ. Later readers named the whole scheme the sacred secretion, and the monthly observance built on it the Chrism Fast. This is a twentieth-century teaching, not anatomy: the claustrum is a sheet of nerve tissue and secretes nothing, and no monthly seed has ever been found. Carey himself did not prescribe a fast.

How Pleroma holds it. Two registers, kept apart. The sacrament is history and its texts can be read. The physiology is an allegory written in a medical vocabulary, the Gospel story mapped onto a spine. What survives as practice is the rhythm, a few days each month timed by the lunar principle, and the instruction to keep rather than spend.

Often confused with

Claustrum: the brain structure Carey named as the oil's source, where chrism is the oil itself, or the rite. Kundalini: the coiled power the yogic texts place at the base of the spine and raise upward, where Carey's oil first runs downward from the brain.

In Practice

Tonight, without oil and without fasting, practise the gesture the word describes. Sit for ten minutes. Bring attention to the crown of the head as if something were being poured there, and let it travel slowly down the back of the neck and the length of the spine to the belly. Rest there. Notice how seldom attention is allowed to arrive anywhere. An anointing marks a person as set apart; for ten minutes, set your attention apart from the day's spending.

In Pleroma's Words

The early churches poured the chrism on from outside. Carey looked for it inside. Neither needs to be literal for the gesture to work: something is set apart, and kept.

Stefan's Alkimia. (2026, October 4). Chrism. Pleroma Guide. https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/chrism

Stefan's Alkimia. “Chrism.” Pleroma Guide, 4 Oct. 2026, pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/chrism.

Stefan's Alkimia. “Chrism.” Pleroma Guide. October 4, 2026. https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/chrism.

@online{alkimia2026chrism,
  author = {{Stefan's Alkimia}},
  title = {{Chrism}},
  organization = {{Pleroma Guide}},
  date = {2026-10-04},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://pleroma.guide/en/lexicon/chrism},
  langid = {english}
}