“And you shall command the people of Israel that they bring to you pure beaten olive-oil for the light, that a lamp may be set to burn continually”. Exodus 27:20

I made my olive oil lamp – love it.

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First I started with a nice container and used a cloth wick and a bit of olive oil. Once the wick was saturated it burned nicely. Then I realized that I could just use one of the many oil lamps I have which I never burn because I never have oil lamp.

So I got one of my oil lamps and filled it with olive oil – and it is beautiful. It burns with this perfectly flame shaped flame – and what I can see will burn for many hours. You can see in the picture that the oil in the lamp has a nice hint of green to it. Beautiful in the lamp.

I love the way this oil burns- it has a good flame but not raging, does not smoke, produces a good light, and burns steady with that perfectly shaped flame.

I made the lamp while I was making Saturday night’s dinner – split pea soup with smoked sausage and a salad with different greens, pea sprouts, cauliflower, oranges, etc with a Shiitake ginger dressing with Bragg’s Amino Acids. Very yummy :-)

Saturday night is our movie night and David and I watch a classic movie from our “younger times”. We’ve watched all the Star Wars, Back to the Future, GhostBusters, and now Men in Black – such fun.

While I was making the lamp and burning it I had visions of Priestesses in ancient times bringing stability and grounding to life.

It was the perfect integration within the “dual path” – lovely and fun.

From the internet:

An olive oil lamp is a surprisingly safe and simple lamp that you can do-it-yourself. It produces light, as much as, or more than, an ordinary candle, and is an alternative to kerosene-style oil lamps. The concept of burning oil from vegetables (olive oil) in the home rather than petroleum based kerosene seems more appealing, less toxic, and safer.

The Romans and other ancients regularly burned olive oil in their lamps, so, the concept is sound. Pure olive oil will not produce smoke, while other types of vegetable oils may produce some residual smoke while burning.

For those who are curious, the cost of burning olive oil in this lamp will depend on wick size (flame size and corresponding oil consumption), while my own experiment consumed 2 ounces (1/8 cup) of olive oil in 5 hours. This calculates out to about 10-cents per hour depending on how cheap you can find pure olive oil. An ordinary Votive candle may cost about 3 to 5-cents per hour to burn, although probably not as bright as the oil lamp.

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