Paschal TAPER, among the Romanists, is a large taper, wherein the deacon applies five bits of frankincense, in holes made for the purpose in form of a cross; and which he lights with new fire in the ceremony of Easter Saturday.
The Pontifical makes Pope Zosimus the author of this usage; but Baronius will have it more ancient, and quotes a hymn of Prudentius to prove it. That pope he supposes to have only established the use thereof in parish-churches, which, till then, had been restrained to greater churches.
F. Papebroch explains the original of the paschal taper more distinctly, in his Conatus Chronico-Historicus, &c. It seems, though the council of Nice regulated the day wherein Easter was to be celebrated, it laid it on the patriarch of Alexandria to make a yearly canon thereof, and to send it to the pope. As all the other moveable feasts were to be regulated by that of Easter, a catalogue of them was made every year; and this was written on a taper, cereus, which was blessed in the church with much solemnity.
This taper, according to the abbot Chastelain, was not a wax-candle made to be burnt; it had no wick, nor was it any thing more than a kind of column of wax, made on purpose to write the list of moveable feasts on; and which would suffice to hold that list for the space of a year.
For among the ancients, when any thing was to be written to last for ever, they engraved it on marble or steel; when it was to last a long while, they wrote it on Egyptian paper; and when it was only to last a short time, they contented themselves to write it on wax. In process of time they came to write the moveable feasts on paper, but they still fastened it to the pastoral taper. Such is the original of the benediction of the pastoral taper.