be ‘sprinkled’ with the blood of the Christ, himself seen as the offering by the pagan’s who converted to Christianity and who had previously practised the Blot rituals.
The blessing then, seen here to be entirely related to the term barach or baraka, is to infuse something with holiness or the divine will (which is also another word for ka.) The blessing has always been officially given by the priest of the orthodox church and so is the same as the baraka of the Sufi’s – a blessing or word of will passed from the master to pupil.
Of course I could not miss the fact that to the Sufi, the term baraka was symbolised by a boat and itself became fused with the symbol of the dove. The dove itself was the Christian and Gnostic symbol of the word or spirit of the Lord and hence it was the baraka. The later Gnostic Christian Heretics, the Cathars took this symbol and with their own links within Islam fused the two devices together:
“… One important Cathar symbol was the dove. It represented for them then, as it does for us today, the idea of ‘peace’ or, more accurately the more subtle concept of ‘grace’, that state of being in God’s love. After the first crusades, when the European Cathars in the entourage of Godfroi de Bouillon established some contact with the Sufi mystics of Islam, the symbolism of the dove sometimes became linked iconographically with the Islamic mystical idea of baraka, which also means ‘grace’ and with the idea that a person can be a ‘vessel of grace’… In some instance, the Cathar dove flying with its wings outstretched was rendered in an artistic motif very similar to the stylised ship meaning baraka in Sufi calligraphy, with the feathers of the