holy water

• sprinkled on newborn to prevent ghost interference

84:4.6Child­bear­ing was once gen­er­ally looked upon as ren­der­ing a woman dan­ger­ous and un­clean. And many tribal mores de­creed that a mother must un­dergo ex­ten­sive pu­rifi­ca­tion cer­e­monies sub­se­quent to the birth of a child. Ex­cept among those groups where the hus­band par­tic­i­pated in the ly­ing-in, the ex­pec­tant mother was shunned, left alone. The an­cients even avoided hav­ing a child born in the house. Fi­nally, the old women were per­mit­ted to at­tend the mother dur­ing la­bor, and this prac­tice gave ori­gin to the pro­fes­sion of mid­wifery. Dur­ing la­bor, scores of fool­ish things were said and done in an ef­fort to fa­cil­i­tate de­liv­ery. It was the cus­tom to sprin­kle the new­born with holy wa­ter to pre­vent ghost in­ter­fer­ence.

• water priests used to wash feet in; best ghost protection

87:6.12Wa­ter was re­garded as the best pro­tec­tion against ghosts. Holy wa­ter was su­pe­rior to all other forms, wa­ter in which the priests had washed their feet. Both fire and wa­ter were be­lieved to con­sti­tute im­pass­able bar­ri­ers to ghosts. The Ro­mans car­ried wa­ter three times around the corpse; in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury the body is sprin­kled with holy wa­ter, and hand wash­ing at the ceme­tery is still a Jew­ish rit­ual. Bap­tism was a fea­ture of the later wa­ter rit­ual; prim­i­tive bathing was a re­li­gious cer­e­mony. Only in re­cent times has bathing be­come a san­i­tary prac­tice.

• remnant of water fetish

88:1.2The first fe­tishes were pe­cu­liarly marked peb­bles, and “sa­cred stones” have ever since been sought by man; a string of beads was once a col­lec­tion of sa­cred stones, a bat­tery of charms. Many tribes had fe­tish stones, but few have sur­vived as have the Kaaba and the Stone of Scone. Fire and wa­ter were also among the early fe­tishes, and fire wor­ship, to­gether with be­lief in holy wa­ter, still sur­vives.

• used in Mithraic and Christian ritual

98:6.4Al­ways had it been the prac­tice of Mith­raic wor­shipers, on en­ter­ing the tem­ple, to dip their fin­gers in holy wa­ter. And since in some dis­tricts there were those who at one time be­longed to both re­li­gions, they in­tro­duced this cus­tom into the ma­jor­ity of the Chris­tian churches in the vicin­ity of Rome. Both re­li­gions em­ployed bap­tism and par­took of the sacra­ment of bread and wine. The one great dif­fer­ence be­tween Mith­ra­ism and Chris­tian­ity, aside from the char­ac­ters of Mithras and Je­sus, was that the one en­cour­aged mil­i­tarism while the other was ul­tra­pa­cific. Mith­ra­ism’s tol­er­ance for other re­li­gions (ex­cept later Chris­tian­ity) led to its fi­nal un­do­ing. But the de­cid­ing fac­tor in the strug­gle be­tween the two was the ad­mis­sion of women into the full fel­low­ship of the Chris­tian faith.