aspergill

“She covered her retreat nobly, made a curtsey to the priests, genuflected calmly, laid down the aspergill, and, under pretence of having been sent for something which these careless priests had forgotten, retired with honors; and then I suppose had a good long cry.”

My New Curate

“And she stood there at the altar-rails, erect and defiant, and there was not a tremor in the hand that held the holy-water vase, nor in the hand that held the aspergill.”

My New Curate

“Led by their chief, bearing the insignia of the Antelope fraternity and the whizzer, followed by the asperger, with his medicine bowl and aspergill and wearing a chaplet of green cottonwood leaves on his long, glossy, black hair, they circle the plaza four times, each time stamping heavily on the sipapu board with the right foot, as a signal to the spirits of the underworld that they are about to begin the ceremony.”

The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi