November
15
/ 2025
Tamara Lewit /The Conversation Today, olive oil is often hailed as helping to protect against disease, but beliefs in its medicinal or even sacred properties date back millennia. Olive oil was used for healing and purification and associated with important rituals from at least the second millennium BC, in ways which still influence practices today. A Holy Liquid Mid-2nd millennium BC texts from the capital of the Hittite empire (in what is now Turkey) describe the anointing of a newborn child and the mother to ward off the dangers of birth. In ancient Syria the high priestess of the god Baal was initiated with an anointing of “fine oil of the temple”. Mycenaean Bronze Age tablets from the palace of
