Compound incense = God-and-flesh; fragrance of Christ; morning/evening lamps

Cyril: …Father, is now said to be shown as in himself at least and first, setting beside in the Father’s sight the human things, and transferring that ancient turning-away. ‘For he himself is our peace,’ according to the Scriptures.

Palladius: So it has been fitted that again an image of Christ is the gold altar.

Cyril: And in addition to this he himself would fittingly be understood as the compound and thin incense. For he himself is the high priest; ‘For Aaron will burn,’ he says, ‘upon it compound thin incense’; and compound is the incense; for the Word, being God, became flesh. And Emmanuel has somehow been compounded for us, divine nature and humanity having been brought together ineffably unto a unity beyond mind. And thin, because it does not have the thick of the worship according to law. ‘For sacrifices and offering you did not wish. Whole-burnt-offering and concerning sin you were not well pleased. But a body you prepared for me, he says; then I said, Behold I have come; to do, O God, your will.’ And what then this will of the Father is, he himself has initiated us in the Gospels saying that ‘I have come down from the heaven, not that I may do my will, but the will of the one who sent me. And this is the will of the one who sent me, that everything which he has given me, I may not destroy from it, but may raise it in the last day.’ For he has brought himself forward for us unto a smell of fragrance, and has for this reason also been named high priest. So then he himself is the high priest, he himself the compound and thin incense; and Paul will witness saying: ‘And to God thanks, who always triumphs us in Christ, and makes apparent the smell of his knowledge through us in every place, because we are a fragrance of Christ to God, among those being saved, and among those being destroyed; to some a smell from death unto death, and to others a smell of life unto life.’ And he was also addressing us: ‘Become then imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love, just as also Christ loved us, and gave himself over for us—an offering and sacrifice to God unto a smell of fragrance.’ And he also makes clear the time of the burning incense, legislating that all things must be practiced in order and good adornment, and through what the power of the inward contemplations would hold well for us. For ‘In the morning,’ he says, ‘and at evening when the lamps are lit and overshadowed’—the evening and morning showing the unceasing and continuous, and the needing to burn incense under lamps somehow very well hinting that, illuminated with the divine light, then already, then we are richly filled with the fragrance of Christ, and thus we go toward a sense of the goods inside the tent—or of the distribution of the divine gifts, which Christ stretches to the worthy; so that if someone has not yet become in light through faith, he is somehow altogether also without a share of the intelligible fragrance, still not knowing the mystery of Christ.