Gifford explains
the ritual function of the basins: "Traditionally, worshipers
dip the first and second fingers of the right hand in the water
and touch their foreheads or cross themselves on entering and
leaving the church" (97). This ongoing wetting reenacts the
original sanctification of baptism, and holy water is thought to
cleanse venial sins. Jacquelyn Lindsey's
Catholic Family
Prayer Book (2001) supplies a prayer to utter while
anointing onself: "By this Holy water and by your Precious
Blood, wash away all my sins O Lord" (65).
Priests can also dispense holy water with a short metal stick
with a knob on the end of it that Bloom, in
Hades, calls
"
a stick with a knob at the end of it." The church
prefers to call this liturgical implement an aspergillum (or
aspergill, aspergilium), which can take the form either of a
knobbed stick or a brush. It assigns the name of aspersorium to
the "
brass bucket," held by a
server,
from which Bloom sees Father Coffey lift his water-loaded stick.
As with worshipers dipping their fingers into a font, these
ritual sprinklings commemorate the believer's original
sanctification. Gifford quotes the
Layman's Missal to
the effect that the holy water sprinkled over the coffin by the
celebrant recalls "the water that flowed over the deceased
person's head at baptism" (118).
The buckets and basins appear to have figured as strongly in
Joyce's imagination as the water they contain. As
William York Tindall observed
in his caption to the photograph of the font at the entrance to
St. Andrew's, figures of containment (cups, pots, tubs) pervade
Lotus Eaters. These images contribute to a mood of safety
and comfort consistent with the chapter's many references to
intoxicating pallatives. For Catholic believers a basin of holy
water or ciborium of wafers offers the powerful physical
reassurance that exhausted horses find in feedbags, weak
swimmers in the Dead Sea, thirsty travelers in jars of cool
water, alcohol enthusiasts in pints, afflicted sufferers in
compounding mortars, and questing sceptres in gold cups. At the
end of the chapter, Bloom pulls together all of this imagery,
and indicates a nodding awareness of its ultimate source, as he
imagines lying in a "clean trough of water" at the
Turkish baths: "He foresaw
his pale body reclined in it at full,
naked, in a womb of
warmth, oiled by scented melting soap, softly laved."
One final thought about fonts of holy water, admittedly
tangential, perhaps deserves mention: they have been shown to
harbor bacteria and viruses capable of causing human infections.
An 1898 study by bacteriologists publishing in the
Dietetic
and Hygienic Gazette (14: 578) found staph, strep, E.
coli, and diptheria-causing bacilli in samples of holy water
taken from an Italian church. A 1995 study in the
Journal of
Hospital Infection (32: 51-55) prompted by the bacterial
infection of a burn victim who had been treated with holy water
found a similarly "wide range of bacterial species," some of
them implicated in human illness. During the swine flu epidemic
of 2009 the bishop of Fresno, California ordered that fonts be
emptied of holy water, and an Italian church installed a
motion-activated device that dispenses holy water automatically,
like sinks in an airport restroom. It would seem that in some
instances holy water, rather than warding off evils, may
introduce them into the human organism.
Such considerations do not figure in Lotus Eaters or
Hades, but Bloom is well aware of the public health
aspects of microbial transmission. In Lestrygonians he
reflects that the basins of potable water at the base of "sir Philip Crampton's fountain"
may spread "microbes" among users. By 1898 bacteriologists had
subjected church fonts to the same sort of scrutiny, and one
can easily imagine Joyce taking pleasure in this irreverent
intersection of religion and science.
