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Report n°5: summary
Water: symbolism and culture
Most religions, faiths, philosophies and visions of the world value water, describing it as baptismal, lustral, holy, vital, purifying...
Moreover, water reveals many forms of human prejudice, preconception and social organisation. Concepts attaching importance to water have travelled down the centuries...
This thousand year legacy continues to dictate to many of our contemporaries their attitude, or more precisely their reverence and veneration for this element.
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.
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.