[Cvengr]

I wanted to post this to the Catholic Caucus thread on Holy Water, but respect their caucus (but it's too humorous not to provide to others:,...let's just don't encourage the mixing of these two compounds:

[Cronos]

Actually, all water is holEy :-P



H²O

[Cronos]

In fact, the bit about holy water relates to Zoroastrians again :-)

Now, the Zoroastrians worship the god of light, Ahura Mazda.

He is represented in Zoroastrian temples (agiaries or fire-temples as they are called) by a continuously burning fire. This fire in each temple is supposedly the same fire that Zoroaster initially lit in what is now Azerbaijan and transported from place to place. Their rituals also consist of adding ghee and sandalwood to this fire as offering.

Now, the Zoroastrians (Parsis as they are called in India -- derived from Fars or Persia), escaped to India about 800 AD when the ARabs invaded the Sassanid Empire. When the escaped, they first landed in what is now the Indian state of Gujarat (west coast of India), the Gujarati rajah gave them a tola of milk to show that while Gujarat had a lot of rich, cultivatable land, it was already full and so there was no place for the Parsis to settle permanently. To show that the Parsis would enrich the land, without replacing any existing people, the Zoroastrian priest cleverly added sugar to the milk, which dissolved without spilling a drop.

This was the holy water sign!

Also, the Zoroastrians promised not to marry into the neighboring Gujaratis -- a promise they keep to today, with dire consequences, as their population has now dwindled to 50,000 people only (as children of a Parsi woman who marries outside the faith are not given their Navjot entry into Parsi religion), but they have enriched the land -- with the Tatas etc. being Parsi

[Cronos]

The Zoroastrians also had the idea of angels and of guardian angels