Demeter
Holy Water
Cologne

Holy Water

When Demeter came out with our Holy Water scent, NEW YORK MAGAZINE wrote that Madonna had been approached to do a scent with this name. Apparently, even too sacrilegious even for her. Demeter actually have good memories of church. The porcelain font, ozone scented water, oak scented pew.......all mingled. Lovely, Demeter think. To capture this scent, imagine an old European church, in a small town off the beaten track.

This is the scent of the blessed water you might find there in an old stone container. The use of holy water goes back to the earliest days of the Christian era. It is known that some of the faithful believed that holy water possessed curative properties for certain diseases, and that this was true in a special manner of baptismal water. However, baptismal water was not the only holy water. Some was permanently retained at the entrance to Christian churches where a clerk sprinkled the faithful as they came in. Balsamon tells us that, in the Greek Church, they "made" holy water at the beginning of each lunar month.

It is quite possible that, according to canon 65 of the Council of Constantinople held in 691, this rite was established for the purpose of definitively supplanting the pagan feast of the new moon and causing it to pass into oblivion. There are two Sundays on which water is not and seems never to be blessed: these are Easter Sunday and Pentecost. The reason is because on the eve of these two feasts water for the baptismal fonts is blessed and consecrated and, before its mixture with the holy chrism, the faithful are allowed to take some of it to their homes, and keep it for use in time of need.