# Paschal candle

**Cereus paschalis**

**Known today as.** The great candle blessed and lit from the new fire at the Easter Vigil, marked with a cross, the Alpha and Omega, and the numerals of the year, and set with five grains of incense for the five wounds of Christ.

Kind: Sacramental

## What was it used for?

Carried into the dark church to the cry *Lumen Christi*, then hailed in the *Exsultet*; it burns through Eastertide and stands beside the font at baptisms and by the coffin at funerals.

## What does modern science say?

The rite continues at every Easter Vigil.

## What lore surrounds it?

The light of the whole year was taken from it: in many parishes the other lamps and candles of the church were relit from the Easter fire, and the faithful carried the new flame home.

## What did the older authorities say?

**The Catholic Encyclopedia.** The Catholic Encyclopedia dates the paschal candle to St. Jerome's letter of 384 on a carmen cerei, and finds the great candle's symbolism in “the virgin wax … the most pure flesh which Christ derived from His blessed Mother, in the wick the human soul of Christ, and in the flame the divinity,” while “the five grains of incense set cross-wise in the candle recalled the sacred wounds.” Bede records that “it was usual in Rome to inscribe the date and other particulars of the calendar either upon the candle itself or on a parchment affixed to it.” The Sarum Processional of 1517 has the Salisbury candle “thirty-six feet in height,” Westminster burned “three hundred weight of wax” in 1558, and in England the stubs “were generally melted down and made into tapers to be used gratuitously at the funerals of the poor.”

## Sources

- *The Catholic Encyclopedia* (New York, 1907–1914), “Candle, Paschal.” newadvent.org/cathen/11515b.htm

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*Paschal candle.* In *Materia Medica*, edited by B. C. P. Statema. Version 1, revised 2026-10-01. The Thinking Press. https://thethinkingpress.org/materia-medica/paschal-candle

Historical description, not medical advice.