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- Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"
Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"
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Table of contents
- Introduction
Introduction
Most religions, faiths, philosophies and visions of the world value water, describing it as baptismal, lustral, holy, vital, purifying...
In India, one of Shiva's five manifestations is in water because this great God of Hinduism -alongside Brahma and Vishnu- is a symbol of the forces of destruction, but also of regeneration. Water and its representations are ambivalent. It follows that water is sacred in India and the divine nature of its rivers greatly respected. In periods of drought, wrote David Annoussamy, Honorary Chief Justice of the Madras High Court: "The people still like to invoke the God of rain. Even the authorities in certain States tell all the temples to organise prayers.The people prepare sacrifices and continue to perform the most unusual rites until water finally falls from the heavens".
The same author goes on to say that, as a result, engineering plans to connect the overflowing rivers of northern India to the chronically drought-ridden rivers in the south through a gigantic network of canals, satisfies the religious sentiments of Indians who consider that as a result all the divinities of the Indian pantheon could be united so that they would have ready to hand both the waters of the Ganges and those of the Cavery.
As we shall see, mankind is reluctant to dissociate the physical sphere from the technical and the metaphysical sphere from the sacred.This is clear throughout human history, in India and elsewhere, with water revealing many forms of human prejudice, preconception and social organisation.
Concepts attaching importance to water have travelled down the centuries. In the Louvre, we can admire the statue of the God Horus pouring water on the Pharaoh during a purification ceremony, butwe may also wonder at the near full-page photograph displayed by the Financial Times (October 30-31, 2004) of the former king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, sprinkling holy water on the new king, his son Norodom Sihamoni, at his coronation.
This thousand year legacy continues to dictate to many of our contemporaries their attitude, or more precisely their reverence and veneration for this element. In May, 1999 the Catholic bishops of California signed a pastoral letter calling for respect for the Columbia river which is "a driving force of the spiritual life of the region... and should not be treated simply as the workhorse of the economy" (Los Angeles Times, May 8th, 1999). Along the same lines, reporting recently on the book "The Nile", by Robert Collins, Robert Rotberg, Harvard University, Boston, entitles his review in the Christian Science Monitor: "The Nile is not just a river", highlighting the vital role of the river for so many brilliant civilisations.The same could be said of the Ganges, the Indus, the Jordan and many more.
This historical resonance needs to be highlighted and accentuated in the world of today to encourage mutual sympathy and avoid disputes, misunderstandings and conflicts over water with their sad sequel of victims, refugees, suffering and tragedy that recent events illustrate, alas, most abundantly.
The same symbolism is also to be found in traditional lore and customs the world over, Morocco, Nepal, or the Andean plateaux. It conditions our environment and continues an unending dialogue between history and myth in our everyday lives. It is written into our history, our architecture, in the towns and toponymy of northern France, as shown for example in the works of André Guillerme "Les temps de l'eau. La cité, l'eau et les techniques" (Champ Vallon, Seyssel, 1983), who studied Beauvais, Auxerre, Rouen, Soissons and other towns and wrote "Out of the four elements that structure our social imagination, water is probably the most fundamental -the origin of all things and the ultimate equalizer.The history of techniques and, more precisely, the history of western urbanisation, is clearly signposted by the multiple problems related to water management. In this respect, myths and history, both physical and social, mingle their reflections in the mirror of the urban hydrographic system", as verified by Campbell's postulate that myths help us to perceive and elaborate our collective conscience as regards the construction of speech and the contributions of experience. In fact, myth and symbol are fundamental needs of human beings through which they express both their imaginary world and their symbolic thought. They help us to face up to the major issues of Life, Death, Afterlife, to the sacred and the mundane, to what is forbidden and what is allowed.Water is often the vector or even the interpreter of thought.
If truth be told, water is at the source of almost all faiths -those of ancient Egypt, the Animists and Islam- even of those, like Buddhism, that evade cosmogonic issues. We shall consider briefly its various aspects in the following study because although water is the alpha and omega of life, the bridge between "the material and the spiritual" proposed by the philosopher Henri Bergson, it is still true that its religious and symbolic meanings are innumerable, sometimes ambiguous, but more often than not coherent. This is a vast field of research and reflection, including the links, connections and relationships that the various human faiths and ideologies interweave one with the other around the subject of water.
There are many examples to show that even if certain metaphysical considerations are left aside, there are almost no forms of experience, activity or ideology where water (or its magic) is not omnipresent.
The natural sciences seem to echo the central importance of water in faiths and religions. Is not hydrogen -"maker of water" in Greek and one of the two components of a molecule of water (*) - the prime constituent of modern cosmology? Some authors see hydrogen as the scientific counterpart of Nu, the Divine Spirit of Ancient Egypt.
No doubt, Science has erred at times on the question of water. For example, the phlogiston theories -which dominated chemistry between 1730 and 1760- held that humidity and vapour were the source of nature's transformations, but that water was the "prima materia". "It is water which forms the earth, as is confirmed by the experiments of Van Helmont, Boyle and later Hamel: plant a bush in a pot; it grows by the simple addition of pure water, which means that in the course of a few years, this water is transformed and becomes vegetable matter that distillation reduces to salts. So all solids, earth included, are generated by water through the action of seeds and ferments; even gasses are only a form of water, vapour." (André Guillerme, op. cit, p. 178). Even the great Newton was mistaken about water, probably as a legacy of his alchemic convictions. But fortunately Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was soon to bring some order into this hotchpotch of ideas, first by discovering the composition of water (1783) and then with the publication of his fundamental work "Traité élémentaire de chimie" (1789).
Nevertheless, water opens up for the researcher another domain for reflection regarding the relationships between the first cosmogonies which served to explain the Universe and its inscrutable mysteries to mankind.
Gaston Bachelard wrote in "L'eau et les rêves" : "I see in water, not infinity but profundity".
On a much more modest scale, we shall try to explore some of this profundity since, like Primo Levi, we believe that "Water is ever close to mankind, or rather to life, by the bonds of age-old familiarity and ever-present necessity so that its uniqueness is concealed under the guise of the habitual" (in "The Periodic Table").
As we progress, we shall observe that symbolism creates a water culture which emerges -for anyone who cares to see- the world over and in all human civilisations.
(*) A noteworthy detail: the best known chemical formula the world over is for water:H2O.