You come along the dungeon and find an old temple of Torag - easily identified by the hammer chiselled into the stone. In the antechamber stands a a basin of water that sits atop a stone pedestal.
You know it and I know it and the AP book tells it: Holy Water.
But besides the context - how would you know? Easiest thing would be to take that imp out of your backpack and test the water for it's effect. The imp has fast healing so you can use him again and again for such tests. But you also use up the holy water just for testing.
It is created with a spell, but it is no potion. It has no caster level given and therefore it is probably not detectable as magic.
Craft(Alchemy) would also be worthless in that aspect.
Maybe the five pounds of silver give it that typical colour everyone in Golarion would recognize immediately?
Best bet I found so far would be detect good.
But is there anything given anywhere in the rules how to tell it from normal water?
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First two things that come to mind:
Knowledge: Religion could be used to identify the basin as an appropriate vessel for storing holy water according to the tenets of Torag's faith and an educated guess would do the rest.
Detect Magic (or Detect Good) should be capable of picking up a Transmutation (or Good aura) and identifying Bless Water as the source of the aura.
Barring that, a trained alchemist might figure it out by mixing a sample with a bit of sulfur and waiting to see if any little black particles (silver sulfide) form in the vial. That's probably stretching the chemistry a bit since I think it takes a lot of time to form silver sulfide, but it should work for Pathfinder Science!.
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Barring that, a trained alchemist might figure it out by mixing a sample with a bit of sulfur and waiting to see if any little black particles (silver sulfide) form in the vial. That's probably stretching the chemistry a bit since I think it takes a lot of time to form silver sulfide, but it should work for Pathfinder Science!.
Unfortunately, the silver powder isn't mixed in, it's a material component of the spell, so is lost when casting. Holy water, chemically, is normal water. You can drink it if you are thirsty, without worry about Argyria (metal poisoning disease from overexposure to silver dust).
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I know the rules say the material components just cease to be when you cast a spell. When I GM, I just like to come up with all the fluff to explain how the magic works and I imagined the spell breaking the silver down and bonding it with the water. I'd rule out argyria by just saying there isn't enough pure silver left to harm anyone. None of that is RAW, obviously, but it's more fun for me than just saying, "It's Maaaaaagic!"