Well, I’d been planning to write a little thing about Santa Claus and piety over at America Divine, but then I saw that a Roman Catholic priest had esoterically napalmed a town in rural Louisiana.

Cropdusting an entire town with holy water is a massive re-escalation of Catholic colonialism and it is inviting imitation. I’m sure a number of parishes are already considering something similar.

Unfortunately, many in our society think that holy water is simply a form of well-wishing. They think of “blessing” in the same sense as someone saying “bless you” after a person sneezes. While asking that someone be blessed certainly has a benevolent aspect, blessing has some very specific esoteric functions. Namely, it is a form of sanctification, though much less total than consecration.

The process of sanctification involves asking a Holy Power to bring someone or something closer to Them. Much of what humans do in this regard involves prayer, contemplation, ritual, offerings, and works that align the person mentally, emotionally, and spiritually towards that Divinity so as to invite Their grace. Blessing is the act of requesting that sanctification on behalf of a third party, for example a priest asking blessings upon a parishioner.

Holy water is a fungible means of storing such a blessing and is a used in a number of different faiths worldwide, not just in Catholic Christianity. The exact liturgical process differs but the esoteric foundation is usually similar. Such blessed water is typically used for ritual purification and to bring the faithful closer to their Gods.

Here’s the thing- holy water is NOT generic. Holy water blessed by Asklepios is, on a fundamental level, closer to Him and His nature. Holy water of Yah is closer to Him. Holy water of Isis is closer to Her. Some Gods might be favorably inclined towards those aspersed with water blessed by a colleague, but it’s still an individual consideration. It’s Their choice, not ours.

The spiritual technologies of sanctification and blessing exist only because of the inherent diversity of the Gods and therefore, of Creation. If there was only one God, humans would have no need for holy water- everyone would naturally flow towards That One.

But we do need it. Whichever Gods blessed the holy water are the Gods towards whom the recipients will be drawn. Similarly, holy water can attract spiritlife friendly to or in alignment with those Divinities. It also tends to repel spiritlife inimical to those Gods and their ways.

That repulsion isn’t an absolute, though. The stronger the spiritlife in question, the more likely it is to simply piss them off. Given how angry much of Louisiana’s spiritlife seems, this is probably not a good idea.

Old-school perfume counters were infamous for randomly blasting passers-by with their scents. I don’t remember the film or TV show, but there was a comedy many years ago in which a man goes to a department store to get a gift for his wife and gets sprayed. His wife then suspects him of infidelity because he smells like some other woman’s perfume.

It’s a crude analogy, but holy water is a bit like that- it identifies those blessed with it as aligned with, or even the property of, the God(s) in question.

Thus, blasting a whole area with holy water is a deliberate offensive. It lays claim to that land and everything in it- all of its spiritlife (including humans). It’s quite literally an act of spiritual warfare- a term that proponents of this kind of atrocity are fond of.

I don’t know if modern Roman Catholic priests are taught this aspect of their spiritual tech, but any competent priest should know it. Indeed, much of history involved a great deal of deliberately leveraging spiritual technology for purposes of conquest. Missions, especially the big Spanish ones, served not simply to convert the populace, but to exert esoteric influence over the land itself and the spiritlife thereon.

That’s not to say that a priest blessing his parishioners is bad. My objection is to the indiscriminate nature of the spraying and the willful ignorance of those who think it was an innocent act of kindness. It was not.

It was an act of war and we are caught in the crossfire.

-In Deos Confidimus