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Report n°5 : "Water : symbolism and culture"

Myths and symbols are fundamental needs

But let us first consider this human need for myths and symbols.

It is true that myths and symbols are fundamentally necessary to human beings and through them are expressed man's imagination and symbolism.They enable man to face the key issues of life, death, and afterlife and questions of what is profane or sacred, forbidden or permitted. Water is often their vector and interpreter through innumerable approaches such as religious perception, by way of beliefs, spiritual calendars, rites and prayers. Marcel Mauss recommended an appreciation of any reality through its cultural and religious entirety in order to understand its complexity. This is also the case for the liquid element because technicalities and exploitation of the resource may interfere with symbolism and sanctity, as is demonstrated through two historically remote, but equally significant examples: when water was brought to the Roman Capitol via the aqueducts, several Senators were displeased and referred to the prophecies in the Sibylline Books according to which water from parts foreign to Latium (4) should not be brought to the Capitoline hill, home of Jupiter's temple; in Tunisia, in the 19th century, Sheikh Mahmoud Mohsen, grand Maliki imam of the Great Zitouna mosque, Tunis, protested when water from Zaghouan was brought to Tunis. He claimed the water was tainted for ablution since the conduit had been used upstream by others (5).

Indeed, throughout history, mankind does not dissociate to any great degree the physical from the technical sphere, nor the metaphysical sphere from the sacred. Fountains, wells and springs are never purely functional. They are inhabited by both material culture and deep- rooted spiritual values (6). Constructions relate to both the cultural domain and to hydraulic necessities.The archaeological site El Guettar, in southern Tunisia, probably revealed the oldest religious building in the world: a "Mousterian" monument (45,000 years BC) constructed to protect a spring and mark the site's sacred nature. In the same way, Hadrian's aqueduct, 132 km in length, erected around 120 or 130 AD to supply Carthage with water, included an imposing temple dedicated to the gods of water, the remains of which are still visible, at the foot of the Zaghouan mountain, at the source.

At first, man's relationship to water was seen as a divine gift so that a frequent interpretation is water as a symbol of the source of life. But one must be wary of oversimplification since so many events in this domain are sometimes the cause and sometimes the effect, due to a constant quest for equilibrium where water's ambivalence is frequently prominent.

Most mythologies integrate pre-existent traditions which sometimes date far back into man's history, or even pre-historical times, as we shall consider below.

Rather enigmatically, but with constant consistency, water is associated with life, death, birth, reproduction, power or even resurrection, as demonstrated for example by Christian baptism. In India, at the time of the Hindu Ganesha Festival in Bombay, a statue of the elephant god is immersed in the river. Statuettes of a myriad gods and goddesses are fashioned in clay and water. After worshiping them, the faithful consign them to the river or the lake since "what began with water ends as water". The practice must be universal since fertility statuettes have been found in a river at Châtillon-sur-Seine!

The primordial gods frequently take on human forms, thoughts and sentiments (7) and borrow from the animal world. The play between these various factors forms the basis of many cosmogonies.

Amidst the four elements of the Greek materialists, water is, for Empedocles, just one of the elements, like fire, the ether (air) and earth. It no longer has the universal significance that Thales recognised;it is the one that best transmits powers and virtues.

Innumerable rites have been used by men to maintain these powers -positive at times, negative at others- to benefit from them and attempt to reconcile immensely destructive vital forces whilst making sure that "the essential natural cycles of the seasons and the rains are repeated, year after year, to feed springs and wells, fill cisterns and irrigate the land (8)."

The case of the "Neolithic" Baruya community is an opportunity to see in action some of the practices which began with the dawn of history.

(4) Michel Camdessus, Bertrand Badré, Ivan Chéret et Pierre-Frédéric Ténière-Buchot, "Eau", Robert Laffont, Paris, 2004.

(5) Jacques Berque, "L'intérieur du Maghreb. XV - XIXe siècle", NRF - Gallimard, Paris, 1978.

(6) In Morocco, Muslims and Jews continue to venerate some springs despite condemnation by both imams and rabbis. (Patricia Hidiroglou, "L'eau divine et sa symbolique", Albin Michel, Paris, 1994).

(7) One example in a thousand to be found in Greek mythology which teems with Nereids, half woman, half fish: the river god Alpheus, having seen Arethusa, a nymph favoured by Artemis, bathing, fell in love with her and pursued her. The goddess changed the nymph into a fountain and Alpheus changed into a river to be united with his beloved. Heracles changes its course and that of the Peneus to clean the Augean stables. Alpheus is the river god of oblivion.

(8) Jean-Louis Oliver, "Eau et diversité culturelle", Cahiers de l'Université de l'eau, Créteil,2004.