Amidst the last convulsions of political Judaism a new spiritual conception of the kingdom of God, of salvation, and of the Saviour of God's anointing, had shaped itself through the preaching, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.
According to one of these stories Thetis used to lay the infant Achilles every night under live coals, anointing him by day with ambrosia, in order to make him immortal.
In ancient Egyptian cultus the priest, after he has solemnly saluted the gods, begins the daily toilet of the god, which consists in sprinkling his image, clothing it with coloured cloths, and anointing it with oil (Erman, Die aegyptische Religion, p. 49).
The Catholic Church has more wisely left physicians in possession, and elevated the anointing of the sick into a sacrament to be used only in cases of mortal sickness, and even then not to the exclusion of the healing art.
Bonif ace does not seem to have taken part in the anointing of Pippin as king of the Franks in 752.
