Water

Water A Spiritual History

Ian Bradley

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

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First published in Great Britain 2012 Copyright Š Ian Bradley The moral right of the author has been asserted No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the Publishers would be glad to hear from them. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978 1 4411 1173 9 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN Printed in India

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Contents Preface and acknowledgements  ix

1 The spiritual significance of water in the world’s major religions  1 2 Classical, Celtic and early Christian attitudes to water  37 3 Medieval holy wells  73 4 The rise of spas – a Protestant approach to water  101 5 Romanticism and antiquarianism in the 18th and 19th centuries  125 6 Water is best – hydropathy, temperance and the cult of cleanliness  155 7 Visions and miracles – the rediscovery of holy water in the late 19th century  181 8 The dawning of the Age of Aquarius – spiritual approaches to water in the 20th century  193 9 Water today – holistic hedonism, overflowing fonts and disappearing rivers  217

Appendix: 10 places in which to experience the spirituality of water – a personal selection  247

Notes  265 Bibliography  277 Index  281

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Preface and acknowledgements Water is at once mundane and mysterious, ubiquitous and precious. Odourless, colourless and tasteless, it is unique as a chemical compound in terms of its stability, solvent properties and potential as an energy source. Covering roughly 70% of the earth’s surface and making up a similar proportion of the human body, it is essential to life in all its forms and is at both the start and the heart of the evolutionary chain. The most primitive single-celled organisms are almost entirely composed of water, as is the human embryo. The breaking of waters is the signal that human life is ready to emerge from the watery environment of the womb. For most readers of this book, water is an everyday commodity instantly available at the turn of a tap. In many parts of the world, however, it is becoming increasingly scarce. Women in developing countries walk an average of 3.7 miles to fetch clean water. Global consumption is rising twice as fast as the increase in world population and experts in international relations and conflict studies predict that the major wars of this century will be fought over water. Water has held a fascination for some of the greatest minds in history. Drawings and memoranda scattered through the papers of Leonardo da Vinci show that it was the major preoccupation of his intellectual attention throughout his life. ‘Water’, he held, ‘is the driver of nature, the vital humour of the terrestrial machine’ (Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p.18). He felt that he might solve the mysteries of creation by studying the laws of its movements. A massive treatise on the subject remained unfinished at his death. It is not surprising, given its essentialness to life in all its forms, that water has been revered throughout human history. Wells, springs, pools, lakes and rivers have been regarded as especially sacred sites, the dwelling places of deities, gateways to the next world and

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sources of healing and rejuvenation. The foundation texts of the world’s great religions are united in describing water as the principal agent of creation and source of life, the special gift of God or the gods with exceptional power to purify, cleanse and renew. This book aims to trace the spiritual history of water – how it has been understood as a religious symbol and used as a healing, purifying and sanctifying element in ritual and worship. A word is needed about the book’s scope and limitations. It is restricted to fresh water, which, in fact, makes up just 1% of the water that covers the world – 97% is salt water and 2% is locked in snow and ice. In turn, 97% of the total supply of fresh water on our planet is contained inside the earth from which it emerges in springs and geysers or through wells and boreholes, sometimes boiling hot and sometimes icy cold, sometimes sluggishly and sometimes with enormous force, sometimes containing a rich variety of minerals and salts and sometimes containing almost nothing at all. It is this fresh water, bubbling up from the ground, tumbling down hillsides in fast flowing streams, flowing more sedately through great rivers and forming pools and lakes that has been accorded particular spiritual significance and venerated through human history. The much greater quantity of salt water that makes up the seas and oceans has, on the whole, inspired rather different religious emotions – awe and wonder, certainly, but also fear and dread. The sea, conceived of as ‘the deep’, has been seen as something other, a remnant of the chaos that existed before creation, untamed, savage and associated with danger and death. Fresh water has, for the most part, been conceived of in much more positive and benign terms, although it too has not been wholly without negative and demonic associations. While there are frequent excursions into continental Europe, the Middle East and North America, and across different religious faiths, the main focus of this book is on the British Isles and on the western Christian tradition. It aims to be representative rather than exhaustive. A fully comprehensive examination of how water has been understood and used in all religious traditions would occupy many volumes. My purpose here is to chart certain key developments and themes in the spiritual history of water – from classical bathing cults and medieval holy wells through the emergence of spas and the temperance and hydrotherapy movements to New Age spiritualities and the

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rediscovery of water’s sacred character in both the modern leisure industry and the recent liturgical practice of the churches. Water has two particularly striking and seemingly contradictory characteristics – its propensity to flow and be always on the move and its calm stillness while at rest to form a perfect mirror. Both of these qualities are at the heart of what I seek to explore and illuminate in this book. Like a flowing mirror, water reflects the fluidity of the beliefs and practices of humankind over thousands of years – from primitive animism and medieval piety through the rigour and rationalism of the Reformation and the Enlightenment, to the idealism of the romantic movement and the hedonism and individualism of the modern age. The regimented routine of taking the waters in 18th century Bath is as much an expression of the mindset of moderate deism as the steamy enervating atmosphere of the hammam is of certain aspects of Islam and the modern spa’s array of hot tubs and Jacuzzis of the contemporary religion of de-stressing and having ‘me time’.

Acknowledgements Kevin Tingay, Geoffrey Rowell, Gavin Hopps, Zero Qurbani, Charlotte Hanna, Alick Bartholomew, Bill Pritchard and Gregory Morris have helped me with thoughts, references and suggestions. James and Jane Bradby, Nicholas and Jane Ostler, Stephen and Rosie Shipley, Andrew and Teresa Orange and Peter and Molly Lawrence have provided very welcome hospitality and refreshment, not just of a watery kind. Nicholas Ostler has further helped me by reading and commenting on three of my chapters and supplied the interesting suggestion about the interrogative being at the root of the word for water in several languages (p.19). Oliver Smith kindly translated the Hungarian inscription on the Promenade at Jesenik.

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1 The spiritual significance of water in the world’s major religions

Water features in both the opening and closing passages of the Christian Bible. The first chapter of Genesis portrays the Spirit of God moving over the face of the waters, in keeping with the finding of science that all life owes its origin to water and that it was from a primeval watery soup that the first organisms emerged. The last chapter of the Book of Revelation describes ‘the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb’ through the middle of the new heavenly city of Jerusalem. Between these first and last statements of its importance, the Bible is crammed with other references to water, presented as a symbol and agent of life and death, spiritual yearning and refreshment, healing and ritual purification. Specific wells, springs, lakes and rivers are identified as sacred places where significant encounters and events take place, often directly involving God or Jesus Christ. Water plays a similarly central role in the foundational scriptures, myths and stories of the other major religious faiths. This is hardly surprising given its fundamental importance and particular preciousness in those parts of the world in which the world’s first cultures and major faiths arose. The earliest human civilisations grew up around rivers. The area often considered as the cradle of civilisation and known as Mesopotamia – a Greek word meaning the land between the rivers – encompasses the delta marshes of the rivers

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Tigris and Euphrates in what is now Iraq. From before 5000 bc the plain between these two great rivers was transformed by the first known drainage and irrigation works into the granary of the Middle East and the most densely populated part of the ancient world, accommodating successively the Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian empires. The great Egyptian civilisation that emerged around 3000 bc was built on the fertile alluvial plain created by the regular annual flooding of the Nile, which was held to be sacred. The ancient Egyptians constructed nilometers, vast crypts under their temples, to measure the rise and fall of the water and symbolically recreate the springtime flood, which was seen as marking the annual rebirth of the river. They also invented the 365-day calendar on the basis of the Nile’s inundation. The Harappan civilisation, the first of the great Indian cultures, which flourished from c. 2600 bc, was located in the 1000 mile flood-washed valley of the river Indus. The first great Chinese civilisation was centred around the basin of River Hwang Ho or Yellow River. Not surprisingly, water was central to the beliefs and rituals of these ancient peoples. So it was for the adherents of the great monotheistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that arose slightly later in the harsh desert regions of Palestine and Arabia. In their case, it was a critical shortage of water that made it so precious and wonderful. Common to all the early myths and stories that seek to explain the origins of the world is the idea that creation arose out of water, rather in the same way that the human foetus is formed and nourished in the maternal waters of the womb. The Sumerian creation myth, dating from the third millennium bc, tells of the primeval sea, represented as the goddess Nammu, giving birth to Heaven and Earth. The Babylonian creation story, Enuma Elish, describes the primal fresh and salt waters Apsu and Tiamat commingling to bear silt deposits which eventually form land. A descendent of their union, Ea or Enki, was venerated by both Babylonians and Assyrians as the primordial water god, creator of life-giving streams, rivers and lakes and associated with fertility and wisdom. The ancient Israelites pictured the world coming into being with the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters. The Jerusalem Talmud, a compilation of early Jewish oral tradition and teaching, likens the process of creation to kneading flour, representing inert matter, with water, the agent of dynamic change and organic transformation. In Islam water is seen as the

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origin of all life on earth, the substance from which Allah created every living thing, including humans (Koran 21.30, 25.54). In the Vedic tradition of Hinduism water, or Apah, is identified as the pratishtha or underlying principle and foundation of the universe. The creation hymn in the Rig Veda suggests that before there was anything else, there was ‘water bottomlessly deep … all was water’ and describe its central role in the creation of both the cosmos and the gods: When the mighty water moved, conceived the All as an embryo, giving birth to fire, then did he evolve, the One life force of the gods … He was the first embryo the waters bore in whom all gods together came. (Rig Veda 10.121) In one Hindu creation story primordial cosmic man, Purusa, is born out of the waters and in another the divine swan, Hamsa, hatches the golden egg of earth as she swims on the primordial waters. In several other cultures and religious traditions what have become known as earth-diver creation myths tell of an animal or bird, sent by the Supreme Being, entering the primal or maternal waters as a kind of midwife and bringing back the mud or clay of creation. The waters here are envisaged as the unformed female principle and the diver as the creator god’s emissary into that principle, out of which will come cosmos. Such myths are particularly common in native American spirituality and are also found in Central Asia where the creator, Otshirvani, orders a frog to dive to the bottom of the waters and bring back what it finds there – this turns out to be earth, which forms the first land Water has an ambiguous status in these early religious texts and stories. It is seen, quite rightly, as an agent of chaos and destruction as well as of creation and life. The cosmology of the ancient world envisaged a three-decker universe with waters both above and beneath the earth held in restraint but always threatening to break out. It is predominantly but not exclusively the salty water of the sea that was taken to be the angry and unpredictable element representing chaos. The destructive power of the sea is a major and consistent theme of both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament and it is significant that one of the marks of the new heaven and earth described in the Book of Revelation is that ‘there will be no more sea’.

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Perhaps the clearest affirmation of the destructive power of water, fresh as well as salt, among ancient cultures and civilisations is in the many stories that tell of a cataclysmic flood or deluge brought about by the gods soon after the creation of the world. The earliest extant flood legend is almost certainly found in the Sumerian Eridu Genesis, dated by its script possibly to 2000 bc. It tells of the gods’ decision to destroy humankind in a flood and to preserve just one man, Ziusudra. A similar story is recounted in the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Utnapishtim is warned of the gods’ plan to destroy all life through a great flood and instructed to build a vessel so that he may save his family, friends, wealth and cattle. A variant of this story is found in the Book of Genesis where Noah is the one who is warned by God and preserved during a great flood. Even in these flood and deluge myths water is not portrayed in a wholly negative light. Although destructive of life, it is also purging and renewing. These stories convey the idea of humanity returning to the water from which it originally came and establishing a new relationship with the divine order, as in Noah’s rainbow covenant with God after the flood. It is almost as though a periodic deluge in water is necessary to dissolve human selfishness and rebelliousness. In the words of Mircea Eliade, the pioneer historian of religion: From the point of view of water, human life is something fragile that must periodically be engulfed, because it is the fate of all forms to be dissolved in order to reappear. If forms are not regenerated by being periodically dissolved in water, they will crumble, exhaust their powers of creativity and finally die away … The flood effects an instantaneous dissolution in water, in which sins are purified and from which a new, regenerate humanity will be born.1 The Hebrew Bible illustrates very well the ambiguity with which water was regarded in the ancient world. This is particularly true of the Psalms, which are full of watery imagery, both positive and negative. Psalm 46, for example, moves in adjoining verses from the terrifying image of the mountains shaking in the heart of the sea, its waters roaring and foaming, to the reassuring statement ‘There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God.’ The stark contrast here between the savagery and violence of the sea and the

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pleasantness of rivers and streams is found throughout the Hebrew scriptures. It is entirely understandable given the experience of the ancient Israelites who were not natural seafarers but rather in origin a nomadic people who wandered through parched desert lands seeking out water in pools and springs. Their search and longing for water is one of the main motifs in the story of the Exodus and the journey to the promised land. It is the dream of the prophets that ‘waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert; the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water’ (Isaiah 35.6–7). The Israelites’ consciousness of the preciousness of water in their arid land explains why the Psalmist praises God as the great water giver: ‘Thou visitest the earth and waterest it. Thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water’ (Psalm 65.9). It also explains why the Hebrew Bible is so full of practical advice about using, conserving and cherishing water: Drink water from your own cistern, Fresh water from your own spring. Do not let your well overflow into the road, Your runnels of water pour into the street. Let your fountain be blessed. (Proverbs 5.15 and 16) Water plays an important role in the stories of the leading figures in the foundational history of Israel. It is beside a well that Rebekah is identified as the future wife of Isaac, that Jacob first meets his future wife Rachel and that Moses helps the daughters of Reuel, or Jethro, the priest of Midian, to water their sheep, leading the priest to give him one of them, Zipporah, to be his wife (Genesis 24 and 29; Exodus 2.16). These three leading patriarchs, the progenitors of the people of Israel, all gain their wives as a result of meeting at a well. It is also beside a well that Abraham first invokes Yahweh by name as the everlasting God (Genesis 21.33). His son, Isaac, is portrayed several times as one who both digs and unblocks wells and springs. In one of the most dramatic stories in the early books of the Hebrew Bible, Moses follows a divine command to strike a rock and produces a gushing stream to quench the thirst of the disbelieving and grumbling people of Israel (Exodus 17.1–7).

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The Christian New Testament picks up and amplifies the Hebrew Bible’s fascination with water and its spiritual significance. Nowhere is this more evidenced than in John’s Gospel. In his classic commentary, J. B. Lightfoot notes that the theme of water runs ‘like a silver thread’ through the early chapters of this Gospel.2 In fact, the whole Gospel is full of references to water: as a symbol of purification, life and the Holy Spirit; an agent of healing; the medium through which Jesus repeatedly chooses to display his identity and saving purpose; and a sacramental symbol of baptism and the Eucharist. The watery motif first appears when John the Baptist announces himself as the one who baptises with water (John 1.26). It is continued in the first of Jesus’ miracles described in this Gospel when at the marriage feast in Cana water from vessels used in the Jewish purification rites is turned into wine, providing the guests with renewed alcoholic refreshment when supplies run out and enabling the disciples more fully to grasp Jesus’ identity (2.1–11). In his dialogue with Nicodemus, Jesus says that only those born of water and the Spirit will enter the kingdom of God (3.5). He goes on to have a highly significant encounter with a Samaritan woman at a well where much of his conversation is about water (4.6–30), heal a paralytic by the pool of Bethesda (5.2–9), astonish his disciples by walking on water (6.16–21), heal a blind man with water at the pool of Siloam (9.7) and wash his disciples’ feet in a symbolic gesture of servanthood (13.1–20). Water makes a final powerful appearance in John’s description of the Crucifixion when it flows intermingled with blood from Jesus’ side as he hangs on the Cross, suggesting, perhaps, that he saves by water as much as by blood. From this last reference the practice has arisen in several Christian traditions of mixing water with wine in the communion chalice. The use of wine mixed with water in the celebration of the Eucharist is first mentioned by Justin Martyr, the early Christian apologist, in the mid-2nd century. Three of these episodes are worth looking at in slightly more detail because they have been highly influential in the spiritual history of water within the Christian tradition. The two healing stories point to the therapeutic powers of pools and springs. They appear to have conflicting messages. The pool of Bethesda is presented as a well-known place of healing in Jerusalem much resorted to by the sick, blind, lame and paralysed. Some early texts, usually

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relegated to a footnote in most editions of the Bible, suggest that they congregated there, ‘waiting for the moving of the water. For an angel of the Lord went down at certain seasons into the pool and troubled the water; whoever stepped in first after the troubling of the water was healed of whatever disease he had’. Jesus appears to have little time for such supernatural nonsense. Instead of helping the paralytic into the water as requested, he simply tells him to pick up his mat and walk. At the pool of Siloam, by contrast, Jesus enlists the healing power of the water, telling the blind man to go and wash in it. We seem to be presented here with Biblical warrant both for rationalist Protestant critiques of miraculous water cures and for Catholic holy healing wells. Jesus’ encounter with the Samaritan woman has had an even greater impact on Christian understanding of the spiritual significance and symbolism of water. The story bears retelling. Jesus is sitting beside Jacob’s well in the city of Sychar in Samaria. A local woman comes to draw water. He asks her for a drink. She is amazed that he as a Jew should ask her, a Samaritan woman, for a drink. He offers her living water and when she asks him what that means he responds: ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again but whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (John 4.13–14). That statement is echoed later in John’s Gospel when Jesus identifies himself as the one out of whose heart shall flow ‘rivers of living water’ (7.38) and in the Book of Revelation when the one who sits on the throne and describes himself as the Alpha and the Omega says: ‘To the thirsty I will give water without price from the fountain of the water of life’ (Revelation 21.6). Jesus’ words to the Samaritan woman have appeared on countless drinking fountains, appropriately so given that he also identifies himself very clearly in this story as a thirsty traveller who is desperate for a drink of water. They can be read at several levels and taken literally as a testimony to the benefits of drinking water, allegorically, symbolically or sacramentally. This is a story about real thirst as well as about salvation to eternal life. What is striking about these three watery episodes in Jesus’ ministry as told in John’s Gospel is that they are all set at very specific named locations. The Hebrew Bible similarly locates very precisely the wells and springs at which the significant encounters it records take place. It also makes much of both

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the physical and symbolic power and presence of other particular watery locations, notably the river Jordan. This Biblical anchoring of the symbolic spiritual power of water to specific pools, wells and rivers has had a considerable influence throughout Christian history not just in promoting cults and pilgrimages around particular sites but also in devotional life and liturgy, as shown by its take-up in hymns about the verge of Jordan and cool Siloam’s shady rill. Other religions make even more of specific sacred rivers and springs. Hinduism accords huge importance to the Ganges, or Mother Ganga as it is known after the goddess who gives it its name. One sip of water from the river, or a ritual bathe in its waters, takes away the sins of a lifetime. Journeys to sites near rivers are especially meaningful for Hindus who describe pilgrimage as tīrtha, a ford or bridge to the divine. The most important of all Hindu pilgrim places are on the Ganges: Benares where it is joined by the Varuna; and Allahabad where the rivers Ganges and Yamuna converge with the mythical underground Saraswati River and which is the venue for the Kumbh Mela, a massive religious festival held every 12 years. In 2001 this attracted 25 million pilgrims in one day in what is thought to have been the largest gathering in human history. For Muslims, drinking the zamzam water which emerges from a rock near the Ka’ba at Mecca and is believed to have been miraculously provided by the Archangel Gabriel for Ishmael and his mother in the desert is an important element of participation in the Hajj. Sometimes a particular spring or pool has been successively venerated by different religions. A good example is the fishpond of Abraham, a long rectangular pool fed by a spring next to a mosque at Urfu in Edessa, southeast Turkey. Muslim legend has it that Abraham was carried as a baby to the edge of this pool by carp to prevent him being destroyed by Neptune who hurled him into a fiery furnace which God turned into a pool. In fact, the pool was originally venerated by devotees of a Syrian fertility goddess whose worship centred on the adoration of water and ponds full of fish. When Edessa converted from paganism to Christianity, the pool became a holy Christian shrine and Muslims later took it over.3 The religions of the Far East often combine veneration of specific water sites with a more general emphasis on water’s spiritual symbolism and

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message. Japanese make pilgrimages to waterfalls and gaze for hours at the unruffled surface of a temple pond. In the words of Titus Burckhardt: An awareness that the soul recognises itself when it beholds water – finding animation in its play, refreshment in its rest, and purity in its clarity – is perhaps nowhere more widespread than amongst the Japanese. The whole of Japanese life, to the extent that it is still formed by tradition, is penetrated by a sense of purity and pliant simplicity that finds its prefiguration in water.4 Arguably the religion with the strongest attachment to water is Taoism. Here it is primarily valued for its symbolism and metaphorical message. Alan Watts, a leading 20th century expert on Chinese religion and philosophy, has called Taoism ‘the Watercourse Way’ because its two original exponents, Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu, used the flow of water as its principal metaphor. In Taoism, water is seen not just as the source of life, the mysterious female base from which heaven and earth sprang, but as a metaphor for the Tao, or way of life itself, the flowing course of nature and the universe. Like the Tao, water has the character of quiet effortlessness and calm efficiency. Unaffected by what is going on above and around it, the river gets on with its business, which is simply to flow, sticking close to the ground and not getting bothered or agitated. For Taoists, the strength of water lies in its weakness, fluidity, adaptability, coolness and judgement, its gentle persuasion and lack of passion. In the words of Lao-tzu: ‘The highest good is like water, for the good of water is that it nourishes everything without striving. It occupies the place that all men disdain. It is thus that Tao in the world is like a river going down the valley to the ocean.’5 Chuang-tzu made even bolder claims for water’s spiritual significance: Water is the blood of the Earth, and flows through its muscles and veins … it is accumulated in heaven and earth, and stored up in the various things of the world. It comes forth in metal and stone, and is concentrated in living creatures. Therefore it is said that water is something spiritual. Being accumulated in plants and trees, their stems gain their orderly progression from it, their flowers obtain their proper number, and their fruits gain their

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proper measure. The bodies of birds and beasts, through having it, become fat and large; their feathers and hair become luxuriant, and their stripes and markings are made apparent. The reason why creatures can realise their potentialities and grow to the norm is that the inner regulation of their water is in accord. Man is water, and when the producing elements of male and female unite, liquid flows into forms… What is it, then, that has complete faculties? It is water. There is not one of the various things which is not produced through it. It is only he who knows how to rely on its principles who can act correctly.6 After this brief introductory survey, let me now move on to identify 18 different ways in which water has been understood and appropriated in the world’s major religious traditions. There are certainly more but these seem to me be the principal headings under which water has been conceived in a spiritual sense or used in a spiritual way.

Ways in which water has been appropriated The heavenly realms and dwelling place of the gods Common to many religions is the idea that the gods have their dwelling place in water. The Koran describes Allah’s throne as situated ‘upon the waters’ (Surah 11.7). This notion derives from the concept of the three-decker universe. Water has its origins in the heavens from where it comes down to the earth. The Hebrew Bible describes God dividing the waters from the waters by a vault or firmament, which he calls heaven. The Hebrew word used here is shamayim, which literally means ‘where waters are’, suggesting that heaven is the place of water. As dwellers in the heavens, the gods are seen as rain bringers. Some historians of ancient religion suggest that Yahweh, the tribal god of the Hebrews and adopted as the name of the One God when they became monotheists, was originally the rain god of the Assyrians. God is portrayed in the Hebrew Bible as visiting the earth and watering it, notably in Psalm 65. Jesus is described in similar terms in ‘Hail to the Lord’s Anointed’,

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James Montgomery’s Christianized paraphrase of Psalm 72: ‘He shall come down like showers upon the fruitful earth.’ The idea of water as the dwelling place of the gods is especially strong in Hinduism where the divine presence is often symbolised as a lotus leaf floating on water. The Rig Veda identifies the waters as the first residence of Nara, the Eternal Being. It contains a hymn asking for help from the waters of life: In the midst of the waters is moving the Lord, surveying men’s truth and men’s lies. How sweet are the waters, crystal clear and cleansing from whom all the deities drink exhilarating strength and into whom the Universal Lord has entered. (Rig Veda 7.49) There are stories in many traditions of gods emerging from water. The Hindu deity Vishnu emerges from the ocean as a fish and an ancient Armenian poem describes the fire god Vakagu coming as a child from the water.

The infernal regions haunted by evil spirits If the waters above the earth were seen as the divine abode, those below it were often seen as infernal and haunted by malevolent spirits. This was especially true in the case of thermal springs with a strong sulphurous smell. The Book of Enoch, written in the 1st century bc, refers to ‘a valley where there was a great convulsion of the waters … And from the convulsion, there was produced a smell of sulphur, and it was connected with those waters … and the angels who had led astray mankind burned beneath that land’ (1 Enoch 67.6–7). This passage goes on to say that these waters, in which the fallen angels were punished, also served ‘for the kings and the mighty and the exalted … for the healing of the body and the punishment of the spirit’ (1 Enoch 67.8, 11). This is a foundational text both for the therapeutic benefits of hot natural springs and also for their closeness to the fiery furnaces of hell. This latter interpretation was taken up by the Jewish sages of the Mishnash and the Talmud who often attributed the origins of hot springs to the consequences of human sin and volcanic activities during the Flood. Rabbinic tradition regarded them as thoroughly undesirable places. Rabbi Yose ben Halafta taught that ‘the springs received their heat from the nethermost fire of the underworld’.7

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A similar sense of the demon-infested nature of hot springs permeated much early Christian teaching and it often extended to wells and cold water springs, especially if they had an unpleasant taste. More generally, wells and springs were seen as gateways to the underworld and nether regions. Baths and bathhouses, suspect in many early Christian eyes for their licentiousness and decadence, were often held to be haunted by demons. The Satanic associations of sulphurous thermal waters persisted into more modern times as this anonymous rhyme testifies: As Satan was flying over Harrogate wells His senses were charmed by the heat and the smells! Said he, ‘I don’t know in what region I roam, But I guess from the smell that I’m not far from home!’8

A place for human encounter with the divine The belief that water provided a locus for human encounter with the divine was a corollary of its status both as the dwelling place of the gods and as a gateway into the other world. For the Romans and Greeks, hot springs with their presiding deities were particularly appealing for this reason. Celtic mythology included lakes and rivers as being among the watery places where humans could commune with deities and as a result they became favourite sites along with wells and springs for votive offerings and sacrifices. Several of the most important theophanies and encounters between God, his messengers and his people recorded in the early books of the Hebrew Bible take place beside water. The Angel of the Lord finds Hagar near a spring in the wilderness and tells her that she will give birth to Ishmael (Genesis 16.7). Subsequently, when the child nearly dies of thirst, God opens Hagar’s eyes to show her a well (Genesis 21.19). When the story of Moses striking a rock and bringing forth a stream is retold in the Book of Numbers, the waters of Meribeh are described as the means by which Yahweh has revealed himself and asserted his holiness (Numbers 20.13). It is perhaps significant that in Hebrew the same word, ayin, is used for both a spring and an eye, suggesting that where water bubbles up from the ground, there too is the eye of God. The Christian New Testament echoes this theme of human divine encounters

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taking place near water, most notably in the story of Jesus’ meeting with the Samaritan woman by the well in Sychar.

The source of life In nearly all religions water is seen as the source of life. In the words of Micea Eliade: ‘water symbolises the whole of potentiality; it is the fons et origo, the source of all possible existence’.9 With its flowing quality and vitality, it is seen as the prime life-giving agent. In Sumerian, a means water but also sperm, conception and generation. In the Hebrew Bible, God shows the prophet Ezekiel a flowing river ‘and wherever the river goes every living creature which swarms will live … for this water goes there that the sea may become fresh, so everything will live where the river goes’ (Ezekiel 47.9). The lifegiving properties of water go beyond its physical role of bringing nutrients to the earth and to plants and creatures. It is a symbol both of creation and re-creation, restoring youth and bestowing eternal life. To quote Eliade again, ‘living water, the fountains of youth, the water of life, are all mythological formulae for the same metaphysical and religious reality: life, strength and eternity are contained in water’.10 When the authors of the fourth Gospel and the Book of Revelation talk about living water and the water of life bestowing immortality they are tapping into a mythological tradition found throughout the ancient world. It is there in the Greek legend of Aphrodite ordering Psyche to bring her the waters of life. She does so, aided by Zeus’ eagle, which fills her crystal vessel with water flowing from the high crags of a mountain guarded by dragons. Chinese emperors of the Chin and Han dynasties made pilgrimages to the springs of Mount Lao Shan, which were seen as bestowing the elixir of life. The Aztec god Quetzacoatl drank from the water of immortality before sailing on his raft of snakes towards the land of the sun. The Maidu and Wintun Indians of California believed that there was a time before death entered the world when people could regain their youth by diving into the water of life. Dreams of a fountain of youth, with the power not just to rejuvenate the tired and elderly but to bring the dead back to life, continued to inspire painters and poets well into the modern age.

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A symbol of death and the journey to the next world Although water is predominantly seen as a symbol of life in most religious traditions, it also has strong associations with death. As we have already noted, this is especially true of the sea, where the concept of drowning is uppermost, but it is also expressed in a widespread belief that rivers, often specifically named, separate this world from the next and have to be navigated or crossed in the journey of death. The Yoruba people of Nigeria actually bury their dead in canoes to prepare them for their final journey across one or more rivers to enter the next world. One of the best known expressions of the idea of the river of death is in Greek mythology where the souls of the newly dead are rowed by the ferryman, Charon, across a river that encircles the underworld and forms the boundary between Earth and Hades. In the earliest sources, this is identified as the Acheron (literally meaning pain) but it later came to be seen as the Styx (hatred), another of the five rivers in the infernal regions, the others being Phlegethon (flaming), Lethe (oblivion) and Cocytus (wailing). The notion of water as the bringer of life as well as death is evident in the legend that contact with the Styx endowed mortals with superhuman skills and could make them immortal or invulnerable. According to one tradition, Achilles was dipped by his mother in its waters in his childhood, making him invulnerable, except for his heel, with which she had held him. In Virgil’s Aeneid (Book VI) the way down to the underworld is through Lake Avernus. Much Buddhist teaching centres on the proper way to prepare for the journey across the river of death to eternal life. The Buddha himself is often seen as the ferryman. One of his discourses compares monks crossing Mara’s stream and making the journey from life to death to cattle and calves crossing the River Ganga and arriving safe on the further shore. In Hinduism, death on the waters of the Ganges is believed to prevent further reincarnation and enable the deceased to go straight to Brahman. Ideally, a dying person should be placed on a floating hurdle in the river and their face washed. Once dead, the body is washed again and wrapped in a yellow cloth before being tied to a hurdle, which is carried down to the ghats, or riverside steps, and put on a

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pyre of wood for cremation. The following day the bones and ash are collected and lowered into the Ganges in a cloth. Perhaps the most powerful description of crossing the river of death in Christian literature is in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. At the end of their pilgrimage to the celestial city Christian and Hopeful are told that the depth of the river that they must cross to reach it depends on their faith in its King. Perplexed by doubts and fears, Christian sinks and very nearly drowns but Hopeful keeps his head above the water. Christian has a vision of Jesus Christ telling him, ‘When thou passest through all waters, I will be with thee, and through the rivers, they shall not overflow thee’ and finds his feet touching the bottom so that he is able to make the rest of the crossing in shallow water. The depiction of the journey through death to eternal life as a crossing of the River Jordan is picked up in Negro spirituals and in the great 18th century Welsh pilgrim hymn, ‘Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah’: When I tread the verge of Jordan, Bid my anxious fears subside, Death of death and Hell’s destruction, Land me safe on Canaan’s side.

A metaphor for dissolving and merging with the infinite Water’s exceptional solvent properties and its natural lifecycle from individual rain drop to stream and then river flowing eventually into the immensity of the ocean have led it to be seen as a metaphor for the dissolution of the individual soul and its merging with the infinite at death. For Mircea Eliade, water symbolises a return to the original state of pre-existence, ‘the dissolution of forms and a reintegration into the formlessness of pre-existence.’11 In Eastern religions, the emphasis is on the loss of individual egos and identities as human souls merge with the divine infinite. Buddhism teaches that just as rivers gravitate towards the sea and lose their separate names and identities in its vastness, so monks gravitate towards Nirvana and castes and distinctions break down. This idea is beautifully expressed in the Upanishads: ‘As the flowing rivers disappear in the sea, losing their name and their form, thus

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a wise man, freed from name and form, goes to the divine Person, who is greater than the great’ (third Mundaka, second Khanda). Within ancient Celtic settlements, graveyards and cemeteries were often sited next to a fast flowing stream so that the souls of the dead could be carried away to the sea. The practice persists in many parts of the Highlands and islands of Scotland. Although Christian tradition makes more of the survival of individual personality after death than most eastern religions it, too, has made much of the symbolism of the river merging with the sea. Gerard Winstanley, the 17th century radical Puritan and founder of the Digger movement, wrote that Christ returns to the Father ‘as a bucket of water first taken out of the sea and standing alone for a time is afterwards poured into the sea and becomes one with the sea’.12 Isaac Watts famously wrote in his great paraphrase of Psalm 90 that ‘Time, like an ever rolling stream, bears all its sons away’. George Matheson, the blind 19th century Church of Scotland minister and mystic, wrote of the believer’s reunion with God in terms that echo both Eliade’s return to a primal original state and the Upanishads’ sense of entering the greater greatness of God: O Love that wilt not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, That in thine ocean depths its flow May richer, fuller be.

A feature of Paradise Water is a central feature of Paradise as it is presented in the scriptures and teachings of the three great Abrahamic faiths. In the Hebrew Bible, the Garden of Eden is described as being watered by a mist that went up from the face of the earth (Genesis 2.6) and as having a river flowing through it which divides into four streams (Genesis 2.10). The Jerusalem Talmud states that all the waters of the world flowed beneath the Tree of Life and that after the banishment of Adam and Eve, when the Garden of Eden was hidden in the depths of the earth, four underground streams branched out from it supplying water for the whole world. The New Testament Book of Revelation identifies

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the river of the water of life flowing by the throne of God as a key feature of the new heavenly city of Jerusalem. The Koran states that water flows through Paradise, quenching thirst and bringing coolness and greenery. It makes specific reference to fountains of flavoured drinking water and promises that believers will be rewarded for their piety by ‘rivers of un-stagnant water, rivers of milk unchanging in taste, rivers of wine, delicious to the drinkers and rivers of honey’ (Surah 47.16). Throughout the Middle Ages Paradise with its four rivers was seen as having an actual geographical location. The rivers flowing out of the Garden of Eden were well known – they included the Tigris and Euphrates – but their source was believed to have been closed up on account of human sin. In the words of the 13th century English Franciscan, Bartholomeus Anglicus, ‘In the middle thereof springeth a well, that findeth water enough in that place. That well is parted in four streams and rivers but the way thereto is stopped and unknown to mankind after the sin of the first man.’13 Unable to locate the true Paradise, both Christians and Muslims designed gardens with fountains and water features in a conscious imitation and anticipation of Paradise on earth. Perhaps the most impressive are those found in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain, where several courts and gardens incorporate four streams of water flowing from central fountains, the best known being the Court of the Lions at the heart of the Nasrid Palace. In the adjoining gardens of Generalife, water cascades down channels in the handrails of the Escalera del Agua, or water staircase, in imitation of Paradise. The floor of the great church of St Sophia in Constantinople has four bands of green marble representing the four rivers of Paradise. Hieronymus Bosch painted Paradise as a garden with a prominent fountain in the middle. Medieval monastic cloister gardens were often designed to represent Paradise with a fountain in the centre representing Christ, the water of life. The idea that water is a major feature of heaven remains potent in the modern imagination. Despite professing not to believe in ‘that religious stuff ’, a group of 8- to 16-year-olds in Dorset asked in 2002 to visualise and describe heaven came up with a set of vivid watery images consistent with those in the Bible and the Koran:

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There would be clear spring water, sparkling, glittering, like a river of diamonds. It would be all the colours of the rainbow, floating with gold. It would be diamond clear, light and warm for swimming in. It would be very clear and golden, cool and soft to drink. There would be lakes, rivers and waterfalls, with flowers at the side.14

An expression of movement and repose For many philosophers the key characteristic of water is its fluidity and constant movement. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus who lived in Ephesus around 500 bc used a river as a metaphor to describe the nature of all things: superficially, it might appear to be a permanent and stable entity, but closer inspection reveals that it continually changes: ‘You cannot step twice into the same river for other waters are ever flowing over you.’ From this, he drew his conclusion that everything is flowing and nothing stands still, a sentiment echoed later by Plato who wrote: ‘All things move like flowing streams.’

Yet many have also been taken by water’s extraordinary stillness. Chuang-tzu,

the Taoist philosopher, felt that still water had a particularly restorative and calming effect deriving from its lucidity, noting that: ‘Men do not mirror themselves in running water – they mirror themselves in still water. Only what is still can still the stillness of other things.’ Both characteristics of water have been seen as equally significant within the Chinese tradition as expressing water’s paradoxical nature and comprehensiveness, embodying both the yin and the yang principles. Flowing water and still water symbolise movement and repose, the complementary opposites, and water-worn stones symbolise the interaction of the soft and the hard. 15

A reflection and mirror of this life and the next The reflective power of still water and its ability to act as a mirror have long prompted spiritual musings. It was in pools of water that human beings first saw their own faces and a reflection of the world around them. The Book of Proverbs suggests that ‘as water reflects back face to face, so one human

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heart reflects another’ (27.19). The notion that water provides a reflection not just of the human soul but also of God himself has long been a feature of eastern religions. A modern expression of it is found in the autobiography of Paramashansa Yoganada, a 20th century Indian guru who was one of the first to bring yoga to the west: My master always asked me to meditate whenever I saw an expanse of water. Here its placidity reminds us of the vast calmness of God. As all things can be reflected in water, so the whole universe is mirrored in the lake of the Cosmic Mind.16 Water has also been seen as a mirror into the future and into the next world. Its association with prophecy and divination goes back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks. The famous 16th century seer Nostradamus used a basin of water rather than the more usual crystal ball as a skyring tool for seeing future events. Their mirror-like reflective quality is one of the reasons why wells and springs have been regarded as a gateway and portal into the next world. As J. M. Barrie reflected in his book The Little Minister, ‘Children like to peer into wells to see what the world is like at the other side.’17 In Africa, pools are often places where people go to commune with their ancestors, as in the scene from the Lion King where Simba looks down into the water and sees the face of his father reflected there. Robert Lowry’s gospel song ‘Shall we gather at the river’ conveys a somewhat similar image in its lines ‘At the shining of the river, Mirror of the Saviour’s face’.

A symbol of God’s grace In both Islam and Christianity, water symbolises the grace, mercy and impartiality of God. This is often expressed in terms of rain falling from clouds. The Bible speaks of God sending the rain on the just and unjust alike (Matthew 5.45). The Koran says of Allah: ‘He sends forth the winds as harbingers of his mercy, and when they have gathered up a heavy cloud, We drive it on to some dead land and let the water fall upon it, bringing forth all manner of fruit’ (Surah 7.55). Shakespeare uses a similar image in Portia’s well-known lines in the Merchant of Venice:

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The quality of mercy is not strain’d; It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless’d; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes. … It is an attribute to God himself. (Act IV, sc. 1) In his hymn, ‘Glorious things of Thee are spoken’, John Newton picks up both the theme of living waters and the idea of water as a symbol of God’s grace: See! the streams of living waters, Springing from eternal love, Well supply thy sons and daughters, And all fear of want remove. Who can faint while such a river Ever flows their thirst to assuage, Grace, which, like the Lord the Giver, Never fails from age to age? The inspiration for Newton’s hymn came from Isaiah 33.20–21, which includes the words: ‘The glorious Lord will be unto us a place of broad rivers and streams’, perhaps as close as the Hebrew Bible comes actually to envisaging God Himself in terms of a watery paradise. Water, in the form of rain and clouds, can be a sign of God’s anger as well as of his mercy, witness the image in another much-loved hymn, Robert Grant’s ‘O worship the king’, of the dark thunder clouds forming God’s ‘chariots of wrath’. In the Koran, too, Allah sends water both as a refreshing gift to believers and also boiling and festering as a punishment on unbelievers and evildoers.

A manifestation of the feminine Water has commonly been characterised as manifesting archetypal feminine qualities and properties, most notably fertility and fecundity. Goddesses rather than gods typically preside over springs and rivers and have their dwelling places within them. The Sumerian goddess of fertility and sexual love, Inanna, is sometimes portrayed with a vase in place of her heart, from

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which flows water that promises eternal spring. The Ancient Egyptians believed that the annual Nile flood was brought about by the tears of sorrow shed by Isis, the goddess of motherhood, magic and fertility, for her dead husband, Osiris. The union of the two deities was celebrated in the annual festival of Phallephoria in which a bowl of water, symbolising the fertilizing moisture of Isis, was carried in front of an image of an erect phallus. The ancient Persian goddess Anahita, known as the Immaculate One, personified earth’s seminal fluid flowing from the stars and was revered as the goddess of the fertilizing waters. In the Vedic tradition, water is very clearly represented as a manifestation of the feminine principle. A hymn dedicated to the Waters of Life describes them as ‘Mistresses of all things’ who bring the life force and asks for a share ‘in the most delicious sap that you have, as if you were loving mothers’ (Rig Veda 10.9). Early rabbinic commentaries on the passage in Genesis describing God dividing waters suggested that the upper waters, made up of vapour and rain, represented the masculine element while the more liquid lower waters of rivers, lakes and springs symbolised the feminine element, being more passive, receptive and formative. In the Talmud, the merging of drops of rain from above into seas and rivers below was seen as a union of masculine and feminine, the joining of the two waters reflecting the coupling of living creatures.

A source of wisdom Several religious traditions have regarded water as both a metaphor for and a source of wisdom. The Book of Proverbs states that ‘words are as deep waters, and the wellspring of wisdom a flowing brook’. In the Jewish kabbalistic tradition, the meeting of the upper and lower waters was seen as producing wisdom, with the former representing divine intelligence and the latter the depths of the subconscious. In Kabbalah, Isaac’s wells were regarded as bottomless and as giving access to the deep wisdom of infinite consciousness. It may be significant that the Hebrew word for a well, beer, also means to comment or explain. It is also striking that the word for water in Hebrew, Arabic, Latin and German (mayim, mai, aqua and Wasser), as in English, all

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have as their root the interrogative ‘what?’ (mi, mah, qua, was). Both classical and Celtic mythology made strong connections between water and wisdom.

A metaphor of spiritual yearning and refreshment The Psalms use water as a symbol of spiritual longing and satisfaction. The author of Psalm 23 writes of the Lord restoring his soul by leading him beside the still waters. At the beginning of Psalm 42, the thirsting of the human soul for God is likened to the longing of a deer for flowing streams. In its simple and unsophisticated way Robert Lowry’s ‘Shall we gather at the river?’, which draws its inspiration from the description in Revelation of the river of the water of life flowing from the throne of God, perfectly expresses this watery metaphor of spiritual yearning and refreshment: Soon we’ll reach the silver river, Soon our pilgrimage will cease; Soon our happy hearts will quiver With the melody of peace.

A model of humility In Taoism, water is the perfect symbol and embodiment of humility. It seeks the lowest ground possible and follows the natural contours of the earth. Its natural tendency is to fall rather than to rise and it is completely unassertive and yet also strong and powerful. It is indeed the supreme expression of strength achieved through weakness. In the words of Lao-tzu: The most gentle thing in the world overrides the most hard. How do coves and oceans become kings of a hundred rivers? Because they are good at keeping low – that is how they are kings. Nothing in the world is weaker than water, but it has no better in overcoming the hard. 18 A similar perspective is found in the Talmud: As waters from the heights descend, that they a lower bed may find, So, too, with him alone will knowledge stay who hath a humble mind. (Taanith 7a)

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In the Christian Gospels, water becomes a symbol of humility when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet at the last supper in an act of utter self-abasement and servanthood. Some churches practise a ritual of foot washing on Maundy Thursday in imitation of his actions.

A healing agent Water has a long association with both physical and psychological healing which goes back to the earliest civilisations and cultures. The ancient Babylonian word for physician is a su, meaning one who knows water. From the time of Hippocrates Greek medicine made much of the therapeutic benefits of both drinking and bathing in water. Healing springs became sacred places and shrines. The Hebrew Bible contains several references to the healing properties of water, most notably, perhaps, in the story of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, being cured of leprosy by dipping himself seven times in the River Jordan as instructed by the prophet Elisha (2 Kings 5.14). Jesus seems to endorse the therapeutic powers of the pool of Siloam when he tells a blind man to go and wash there. In Shi’a Islam, dust from sacred locations such as Karbala is dissolved in water and drunk as a cure for physical as well as spiritual illness. Medieval healing springs, the medicinal spas established in the aftermath of the Reformation, and the hydrotherapy and temperance movements of the 19th century, discussed in later chapters of this book, were all based on water’s perceived healing properties.

A sign of hospitality and generosity Given the desert conditions prevailing in much of the Near and Middle East, it is not surprising that the provision of water for both drinking and washing in was seen one of the most important expressions of hospitality. Water pots stood at the door of each house so that visitors could wash their feet. Both Christian and Islamic teaching make much of the requirement to give water to a stranger. According to the parable of the sheep and the goats, one of the three criteria by which people will be judged when Jesus comes again in glory is whether or not they gave a drink to the thirsty (Matthew 25.34–46).

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A similar statement in one of the Hadiths says that among the three people whom Allah will ignore on the Day of Resurrection will be ‘the man who, having water in excess of his needs, refuses it to a traveller’. Islamic shari’ah law started as a series of rules about the use of water to ensure its equitable distribution and was later extended to become a more general body of law. The word shari’ah originally meant ‘the path leading to the watering place’. Water is regarded in Islam as one of the prime gifts of Allah that should be freely available to all. The two fundamental principles enshrined in the shari’ah are shafa, the universal right for humans to quench their own thirst and that of their animals, and shirb, the right of all to irrigate and water their crops.

Having a holy or blessed quality Many religions have rituals and ceremonies for blessing water, which is almost universally seen as a divine gift and often endowed with a sacred or holy quality. In ancient Greek religion, the extinguishing of a flaming torch in water was used ritually to distinguish and demarcate the sacred from the profane. In preparation for the Israelite Feast of the Tabernacles, a priest went down to the pool of Siloam, from which he drew more than two pints of water into a golden pitcher that was then carried to the Jerusalem temple. At the most solemn moment of the festival the water was poured along with wine into silver basins on the altar. The Hebrew word for benediction, brachà, is closely related to and possibly derived from the word for a pool of water, brechà. In the mystical Jewish Kabbalistic tradition, the rite of transmission of the name of God from master to pupil takes place over water. Before the master teaches it to his pupil, both must immerse themselves and the master says a prayer ending with the words ‘The voice of God is over the waters’. In Islam, zamzam water, which emerges from a rock near the Ka’ba at Mecca, is seen as particularly holy and having a composition quite unlike any other water in the world. Sufi Muslims often pray around an open jug or jar of water and in the Ismaili tradition the drinking of water blessed by an Imam is seen as conferring both physical and spiritual benefits. Water put in a new pot in

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the Buddhist ceremony of Paritrana is believed to have protective power. In Thailand ‘lustral water’, created in a ceremony in which a candle is burned and extinguished above the water, is given to people to keep in their home for protection. Within Christianity, the concept of holy water has played an important part in Roman Catholic and Orthodox liturgy and personal devotion. Its perceived holiness comes about either as a consequence of its provenance from a sacred shrine or from being blessed and set apart by a priest. Within Roman Catholicism, holy water is seen, along with other material objects such as crucifixes, which are blessed by the church, as a sacramental rather than a sacrament. This means that it does not have power in and of itself to confer grace but is rather symbolic and acts as a kind of blessing or aid that prepares the faithful to receive grace. The Cathecism of the Roman Catholic Church specifically refers to the use of holy water for protection from the powers of darkness and it has also traditionally been regarded as efficacious in cleansing from venial sin. St Teresa of Avila, the 17th century Spanish mystic, wrote in her autobiography: From long experience I have learned that there is nothing like holy water to put devils to flight and prevent them from coming back again. They also flee from the Cross, but return; so holy water must have great virtue. For my own part, whenever I take it, my soul feels a particular and most notable consolation.19 She referred specifically to an occasion on the night of All Souls when she was tormented by demons that interrupted her prayerful devotions. They were dispelled only by a sprinkling of holy water. In the Catholic tradition, holy water blessed by a priest, and sometimes mixed with salt, is used for baptisms, blessings, exorcisms, burials and for asperges, the ceremony of sprinkling the altar, clergy, and congregation with holy water at the beginning of the Mass. There is also a long tradition of its domestic use for the blessing of homes. In the Orthodox Church, holy water is similarly used for baptism and exorcism and also for the blessing of icons, Palm Sunday palm branches and sacred vessels, often with a triple sprinkling. The traditional time for blessing

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holy water is at Epiphany when the baptism of Jesus by John is celebrated in the eastern church. The 4th century Greek fathers Epiphanius of Salamis and John Chrysostom both describe the custom of drawing sanctified water from streams at midnight on Epiphany and keeping it for use throughout the year. Epiphanius links it with the miracle wrought by Jesus at Cana in Galilee, while John Chrysostom relates it to the remembrance of Christ’s baptism. A liturgy for the consecration of water on the Epiphany was first developed by Peter, bishop of Edessa, in 498.

The prime medium for ritual cleansing and purification The single most important and ubiquitous spiritual function of water within all the world’s major religious traditions is as a medium for ritual cleansing and purification. It is expressed in many different ways – from naked dips in cold streams to bathing in specially constructed tubs and washing hands and feet before entering a place of worship – but the basic underlying principle is the same: the unique capacity of water to cleanse, dissolve and wash away dirt, conceived in spiritual and psychological as well as physical terms. In Mircea Eliade’s view, there is also a deeper, more primal connection: Ritual lustrations and purifications with water are performed with the purpose of bringing into the present for a fleeting instant that time when the creation took place; they are based on a symbolic re-enactment of the birth of the world or of the ‘new man’. 20 Psychological factors may play a part as well. Recent research from the University of Michigan suggests that hand washing, long associated with ridding the mind of guilt, can also erase doubts about everyday choices. It seems to have a therapeutic effect on those who are wracked with uncertainty or feel they have made a wrong decision, even about something trivial. In classical Hinduism, ritual purification with running water, often undertaken by means of a bath, is seen as removing pollution of any kind and as being especially important before approaching the shrine of a deity. The Rig Veda lays down that ‘Whatever sin is found in me, whatever wrong I may have done, if I have lied or falsely sworn, waters remove it far from me’.21

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Purification and cleansing rituals involving running water are extremely important in Shintoism where they go under the general name of harae and are traditionally performed twice a year to wash away anti-social evils. Pilgrims to sacred waterfalls, rivers and lakes participate in the cleansing ritual of misogi, which involves taking a cold dip in running water, preferably naked. Shinto priests must bathe thoroughly before conducting any ceremonies and it is usual for worshippers to wash their hands and rinse out their mouth with water before entering a shrine or temple. The Koran states that ‘Allah loves those who clean themselves’ (Surah 9.108) and the Hadiths that every sin that a believer contemplates with his eyes is washed away from his face with the last drop of water. Purification through ablution is an obligatory component of Islamic prayer ritual and prayers offered up in an impure state are not considered valid. Before going to a mosque to pray, the believer must go through a structured sequence of cleansing and purification known as wudu in which the mouth, nose, face, right and left hands and arms, whole head, ears and feet are in turn washed in water. The procedure is clearly laid down in the Koran: ‘Believers, when you rise to pray wash your faces and your hands as far as the elbow, and wipe your heads and your feet to the ankle. If you are polluted cleanse yourselves’ (Surah 5.6). A more intensive process of purification, ghusi, is required after intercourse, menstruation and childbirth, before adopting Islam, after death and during the Hajj. The Hebrew Bible has detailed instructions for the use of the water of purification for cleansing the unclean and impure, such as those found in Numbers 19. Ritual purification has remained extremely important in Orthodox Judaism. It is centred round the mikveh, a pool or ‘gathering’ of natural water usually collected through rainfall in a special bath to which tap water is added. Women bathe in a mikveh at the end of their period of menstrual separation before resuming sexual relations with their husbands. Gentile converts to Judaism must immerse themselves in a mikveh and vessels bought from Gentiles must be dipped in one before they can be used for food. Pietistical Jews immerse themselves in a mikveh before Sabbath prayers and it is also used for the ritual washing of a corpse before burial. The Talmud, which lays down rituals for bathing in the mikveh after conjugal intercourse,

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childbirth, touching a corpse, travelling and also in preparation for holy days and festivals, decrees that a Jew may not live in a city where there is no public bath, so important is it to engage in regular ritual cleansing. In many religious traditions, cleansing and purification rituals involving the use of water are associated with childbirth or initiation. In ancient Aztec civilisation, midwives bathed newborn babies and chanted ‘May this water purify and quieten your heart: may it wash away all evil’. The Islamic ceremony of adham involves the washing of a newborn baby while the father whispers a call to prayer and the command to rise and worship in each of the baby’s ears. The name-giving ceremony performed on the seventh day of life and also performed by the father involves a further washing of the baby’s head. Sikhs go through a process of baptism, known as amrit sanskar, or the drinking of the elixir of immortality, which is made up of water representing purity and humility and sugar representing sweetness and saintliness. Both those administering and receiving the baptism must first bathe and wash their hair. The immersion of Gentile converts to Judaism in the mikveh is a ritual of initiation as much as purification. It was probably out of the Jewish rite that the practice developed among early Christians, especially in the east, of washing their hands and feet before going into church. Early Christian basilicas had a fountain for ablutions, known as the cantharus or phiala, and usually placed in the centre of the atrium. They are still found in some eastern Orthodox churches, notably at the monastery of Laura at Mount Athos, where the phiala is an imposing structure in front of the entrance covered by a dome resting on eight pillars. In several Orthodox churches today worshippers take off their shoes and wash their feet before entering the church just as Muslims do before going into a mosque. In western Christendom, the elaborate fountain for full-scale ablutions gave way to a more modest stoup or bowl of water near the door into which those entering the church building dipped their fingers before making the sign of the cross, a practice still prevalent in Roman Catholicism. Another pointer to the continuing significance of cleansing and purification rituals in the Christian church are the priestly ablutions, or hand washing, practised immediately before the celebration of Holy Communion and the washing out of the Eucharistic vessels immediately after it.

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The spiritual significance of water in Christian baptism The Christian sacrament of baptism is worthy of separate and extended consideration at the end of this chapter on the spiritual significance of water in the major world religions. This is both because it involves a particular and concentrated focus on the element of water and also because of the exceptionally wide range of symbolism that it embraces. It is difficult to think of any other water-based purification or initiation ritual with a greater richness of meaning and resonance. Christian baptism recognises and uses the physical and spiritual ambiguity of water by making it a symbol both of drowning to sin and rising to new life. Those undergoing baptism are simultaneously cleansed, purified, reborn and incorporated into the body and fellowship of the church. Recognised as a sacrament by virtually every branch and denomination of the church, it confers and carries God’s overflowing prevenient grace. It signifies both human conversion and divine acceptance and brings together understandings of water as the source of creation, elixir of life and supreme healing element. As the Welsh poet and Franciscan priest Tudor Aled put it after a visit to St Winefride’s well in North Wales around 1500: The water of baptism is the sap of the world, And is called the fount of the healing oil of faith.22 The practice of baptising converts in water goes back to the very beginning of the Christian church. It almost certainly grew out of the Jewish practice of immersing Gentile converts in the mikveh. The example and model of John the Baptist, the Judean prophet sent to prepare the way for the coming of Jesus, was also crucial. Crowds of people responded to John’s message that they would be forgiven by God if they repented of their sins and underwent baptism at his hands. The link that he forged between baptism and repentance was fundamental to early Christianity, as was his teaching that the kingdom of God was entered through baptism. In asking John to baptize him in the Jordan, Jesus sealed baptism as the way for believers to identify with him and signal their faith in his status as Messiah and saviour. The fact that it

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was during Jesus’ baptism that the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form as a dove gave a new link between baptism with water and anointing by the Spirit, expressed in his words: ‘Unless one is born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’ (John 3.5). Further sanction to the practice of baptism was given in the so-called ‘great commission’ in which the resurrected Jesus told his disciples to ‘make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit’ (Matthew 28.19). Baptism in water with this Trinitarian formula became the regular way of initiating converts into the infant Christian church and community. The connection with the themes of repentance and the Holy Spirit was emphatically restated in the account of the first Pentecost, often taken to mark the birth of the Christian Church. When those who had experienced the power of the coming of the Spirit asked Peter what they should do, his reply was unequivocal: ‘Repent and be baptised, every one of you’ (Acts 2.38). He apparently went on to baptise 3000 people in one day. There were probably several such mass baptisms in the early days of the church, although there must also have been many individual baptisms like that following Philip’s chance encounter with an Ethiopian eunuch who was reading the prophecies of Isaiah on the road from Jerusalem to Gaza. Convinced by Philip that the prophecies had come true in the good news of Jesus, the eunuch could not wait to be baptised: As they went along the road they came to some water, and the eunuch said, ‘See, here is water! What is to prevent my being baptised?’ And he commanded the chariot to stop, and they both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptised him. (Acts 8.36–8) There are four main means of Christian baptism: submersion or total immersion of the whole body; partial immersion where the head is dipped under while the candidate is standing in water; affusion where water is poured over the head; and aspersion where water is sprinkled on the forehead. In each case, the ritual action is often performed three times with a separate invocation of each person of the Trinity. Full immersion in an outdoor lake or river, with both baptiser and baptised going under the water and rising again, seems to

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have been the most common means practised in the early days of the church. The Greek word baptizo, which is used throughout the Septuagint, means to dip, plunge or immerse. Immersion emphasised the idea developed by Paul that baptism represented an actual drowning with Christ in order to rise again. The use of running water linked with Jesus’ own baptism in the Jordan and more generally with the theme of the water of life. The Didache, one of the earliest extant handbooks on liturgy and church order, which probably comes from the late first or early 2nd century Syrian church, indicates a preference for baptism by total triple immersion in running water, symbolising the water of life, but also allows the validity of partial immersion or affusion. It was not long before baptisms became more intimate and domestic, moving from outdoor to indoor locations and taking place in specially constructed baptisteries and fonts. Excavations at Dura Europos in what is now Syria have revealed the remains of what appears to be a private house adapted for liturgical worship, dating from as early as c. 230 ad and containing a rectangular baptistery, the walls of which are decorated by murals depicting Jesus walking on the water and talking to the woman of Samaria at the well. Several church buildings dating from the 5th century contain walk-in baptisteries, usually square, rectangular or octagonal in shape and often equipped with bowls or fonts, suggesting that baptism was practised through both immersion and affusion although there seems to have been a continuing preference in the early Christian centuries for the use of rivers and flowing water. Whatever means was used, it is clear that the early church put very considerable emphasis on the importance of the element of water in baptism. The early Latin church father Tertullian (c. 160–c. 220) wrote a treatise on baptism in which he described Christianity as ‘the religion of water’ and noted that ‘It is surely a thing of wonder that death should be washed away in a bath.’ Drawing both on the Biblical account of creation and on Stoic philosophy, he developed the idea that water played a nutritive, ‘tonic’ role in the Universe: ‘When the world was all formless shadow and sad abyss and untilled earth and shapeless sky, only water, an element always perfect, joyful, simple, and pure of its own nature, was adequate to become the vehicle of God.’23 In this first state of things, water created souls and gave life by imparting the spirit

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that it had received into itself. Given preference over all other elements, water was the first to be sanctified by God and commanded to bring forth living creatures. Made holy by God, its nature was in turn to make holy: Therefore all natural water, because of the ancient privilege with which it was honoured from the first, gains the part of sanctifying in the sacrament, as long as God is invoked to that effect. As soon as the words are said, the Holy Ghost, coming down from heaven, rests upon the waters which he sanctifies with his fruitfulness; the waters thus sanctified are in turn filled with the power of sanctifying … What used of old to heal the body now heals the soul.24 Tertullian underlined the importance of blessing baptismal water and invoking the power of the Holy Spirit to make it efficacious. The first reference to a rite for such a blessing comes from the writings of the 3rd century African churchman, Cyprian of Carthage: ‘It is required that the water should first be cleansed and sanctified by the priest, that it may wash away by its baptism the sins of the man who is baptized.’25 The fundamental importance of immersion in water for the theology of baptism was emphasized in the 4th century by the Greek Church Fathers. For John Chrysostom (c. 344–407) it represented death and burial, life and resurrection: ‘When we plunge our head into water as into a tomb, the old man is immersed, wholly buried; when we come out of the water, the new man appears at that moment.’26 Writing around 350, Cyril of Jerusalem used even more striking language evoking the imagery of the womb as well as the tomb: You have plunged thrice in the water, and have come forth again. In the water, as during the night, you have seen nothing. In coming forth you have found yourself in the brightness of day. At the same time you died and were born, and this wholesome water has become for you both a tomb and a mother.27 The fullest analysis of the significance of the element of water in baptism came from the 7th century Greek theologian and Syrian monk, John of Damascus (c. 676–749). He made much of the fact that water had flowed from Jesus’s side on the Cross, writing that: ‘He caused the fountain of remission to well forth

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for us out of His holy and immaculate side, water for our regeneration, and the washing away of sin and corruption.’ He also cited the Biblical accounts of the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters, Noah washing away the sin of the world by water and Elijah showing the grace of the Spirit by pouring water on the sacrifice that he offers to God (1 Kings 18.33–38), arguing that these three Old Testament stories prefigured the crucial link between water and the Spirit made explicit by Jesus: He laid on us the command to be born again of water and the Spirit, through prayer and invocation, the Holy Spirit drawing nigh unto the water. For since man’s nature is twofold, consisting of soul and body, He bestowed on us a twofold purification of water and of the Spirit, the Spirit renewing that part in us which is after His image and likeness, and the water by the grace of the Spirit cleansing the body from sin and delivering it from corruption, the water indeed expressing the image of death, but the Spirit affording the pledge of life.28 No theologian in the western or Latin tradition produced such a detailed or sweeping statement about the significance of water in baptism. Perhaps the nearest, which similarly linked the element of water with the power of the Holy Spirit, while also emphasizing the importance of the word, came from Augustine of Hippo (354–430) who played a highly influential role in shaping both the doctrine and practice of Christian baptism within the western church: What is baptism? The bath of water with the word. Take away the water, and there is no baptism. Take away the word, and there is no baptism. It is, then, by water, the visible and outward sign of grace, and by the Spirit that the man who was born solely of Adam in the first place is afterwards re-born solely in Christ.29 Augustine’s radical theology of original sin as something transmitted like a hereditary disease played a part in switching the focus of baptism from adults to infants. If babies were born in sin, as he argued, then it became important and urgent to wash it away as soon as possible. Other trends also encouraged infant baptism. With Christianity becoming essentially the state religion of

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the Roman Empire following the Emperor Constantine’s conversion in 311, baptism came to be seen less in terms of repentance and conversion and more as a means of initiation into the church and civil society. The Emperor Charlemagne forcibly baptized the people whom he conquered in order that they would be faithful to him as well as to the Christian religion. The early English church historian Bede memorably described a mass baptism of Northumbrians who followed their king in converting to Christianity in the early seventh century with Bishop Paulinus ‘washing them in the waters of regeneration’ in the river Glen near the royal palace of Yeavering in north Northumberland. With the focus switching from adults to children and from conversion to initiation as Christianity became more established and less apocalyptic in outlook, such mass outdoor baptisms by total immersion gave way to more low-key ceremonies held in churches and involving affusion or aspersion. While some walk-in baptestries continued to be built, most new churches were equipped with smaller fonts, essentially circular or octagonal bowls resting on elaborately carved bases and pillars and sometimes surmounted by a dome. Although they were mostly large enough for babies to be immersed in them, a few drops of water sprinkled on the infant’s head were often regarded as sufficient. The Council of Ravenna of 1311 declared that full immersion was not necessary for baptism to be efficacious. The sacrament became a celebration within a settled community, often associated with the christening or naming of a new born child, rather than a dramatic sign of conversion and repentance. The siting of fonts just inside the doors of medieval churches expressed the idea of baptism effecting entrance into the Christian church. The Reformation reaffirmed the link between the element of water and the word of God in baptism. Echoing Augustine, Martin Luther wrote that ‘baptism is not merely by water, but water used according to God’s command and connected with God’s word.’ The sacramental efficacy of the water came through applying to it the words of the great commission from the end of Matthew’s Gospel: ‘When these words are added to the water, then it is no longer simple water like other water, but a holy, divine, blessed, water.’30

In the aftermath of the Reformation there was a gradual move within

Protestant churches to relocate the font from the west to the east end of

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Norman font in St Mary’s Church, Charlcombe

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churches to bring it nearer to the pulpit and communion table or altar and make baptism a more public sacrament carried out in full view of the congregation. Health and safety concerns and the growing trend for infants to be dressed in ornate christening robes contributed to more and more baptisms being conducted by aspersion. This trend can be seen in the changing rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. The 1549 rubric stated that naming the child to be baptised, ‘the priest shall dip it in water thrice, first dipping the right side, second the left side, the third time dipping the face towards the font.’ By 1662, the priest was merely enjoined to ‘dip it in the water discreetly and warily’.31 Despite the endeavours of the Reformers to make baptism a more public sacrament, many babies were baptised at home, often in bowls used for cookery preparation or even for washing up. The most radical reformers of the 16th and 17th centuries, the so-called Anabaptists, abandoned infant baptism in favour of adult believers’ baptism, often involving rebaptism. Their successors, the Baptists, who similarly demanded a repentance of sin and a confession of faith from those of a responsible age as a prerequisite for baptism, scorned fonts and returned to the practice of total immersion. Other later Protestant denominations, notably the Churches of Christ and Pentecostalists, also practise adult baptism by full immersion. Their churches are equipped with baths or pools, usually situated behind the pulpit. The dramatic rise of Pentecostalism across the world has meant a return to mass baptisms by full immersion, quite often carried out in rivers or the sea. As we shall see in the next two chapters, baptism played an important role in Celtic Christian water cults and in the development of medieval holy wells and springs. A greater focus on this particular sacrament and on making it more dramatic and visual has been a striking aspect of the recent renewal of interest in the spirituality of water discussed at the end of this book. It is, indeed, hard to think of any other religious doctrine or practice that better illustrates and demonstrates water’s spiritual history.

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