Sacred Waters

A Cross-Cultural Compendium of Hallowed Springs and Holy Wells

Celeste Ray, Celeste Ray, Celeste Ray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000025088
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Describing sacred waters and their associated traditions in over thirty countries and across multiple time periods, this book identifies patterns in panhuman hydrolatry. Supplying life's most basic daily need, freshwater sources were likely the earliest sacred sites, and the first protected and contested resource. Guarded by taboos, rites and supermundane forces, freshwater sources have also been considered thresholds to otherworlds. Often associated also with venerated stones, trees and healing flora, sacred water sources are sites of biocultural diversity. Addressing themes that will shape future water research, this volume examines cultural perceptions of water's sacrality that can be employed to foster resilient human–environmental relationships in the growing water crises of the twenty-first century. The work combines perspectives from anthropology, archaeology, classics, folklore, geography, geology, history, literature and religious studies.

PART I

Ancient influences

Individually, and as the sources of civilization-shaping rivers, numinous springs were ubiquitous in the cosmologies of ancient states around the world. The Sumerians, Akkadians and Babylonians all venerated Enki/Ea (the god of water and wisdom and the lord of springs) whose temples across ancient Mesopotamia were often beside pools. Ancient Greeks could seek the mysteries of the universe from the Muses’ famously inspirational Hippocrene spring on Mount Helicon. Christopher McDonough opens the volume by examining the significance of water in general and springs in particular for classical Greek and Roman imaginations. McDonough considers the gendered and sometimes violent spring creation legends in classical antiquity that appealed across social classes, and their likewise bloody oblations. Focusing on springs within caves, Evy Håland next examines links between pre-Christian spring sites and contemporary Greek water rituals. She especially discusses those with persistent sacrality which are now dedicated to Panagia (the Virgin Mary in her identity as Zōodochos Pēgē, or the Life-giving Spring). Similarly, Nicholas Dunning examines the sacred waters of deep caves and cenotes that figure in the Mayan cosmologies of the Yucatan Peninsula. Portals to the watery underworld and the deities, these ritual sites were formative of place identity and also served as sacred omphaloi for the orientation of sacred architecture.

1

FONS ET ORIGO

Observations on sacred springs in classical antiquity and tradition

Christopher M. McDonough

In 476 BC, the Greek lyric poet Pindar famously intoned Ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ, or “the best of things is water” (Olympians 1.1; see Glover and Castle, 1945:1). It is hardly possible to overstate the significance of water in general and springs in particular to the classical imagination. From symbolic images for inspiration and mythological stories featuring deities and their exploits to the various official ceremonies performed for their maintenance and the less formal worship activities conducted on their locations, springs occupied a significant place in the religious mentality of the Greeks and Romans and have remained an important point of contact with classical tradition and its religious sentiment ever since.

The story of the origin of the cosmos and the gods told by one of the earliest European epics, Hesiod’s Theogony (ca. 700 BC), opens with an appeal to the Muses, whom the poet imagines dancing and bathing on Mount Helicon around the spring called the Hippocrene. Since its evocation by Hesiod, this particular spring has been alluded to ever after in Western literature as a token of inspiration, as, for instance, by John Keats (Ode to a Nightingale, 15–18, composed in 1819 AD):

O for a beaker full of the warm South

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim,

And purple-stained mouth.

Less overt than Keats in its allusiveness, though firmly rooted in this Hesiodic tradition, is “The Pasture,” the poem with which the American poet Robert Frost begins his first collection of poems, North of Boston (1915):

I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;

I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away

(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):

I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.

In the otherwise harsh and rocky terrain of the Boeotian mountains (or in Northern London, or North of Boston), the Hippocrene comes as a surprise in the landscape, offering an ever-flowing source of refreshment whose ultimate origin is hidden in wonder and mystery. That such an image should suggest itself to ancient and later poets as a metaphor for poetic creativity seems especially apt.

Beyond its afterlife in the poetic tradition, the creation of the Hippocrene is of particular importance as well (see McDonough, 2002 for a discussion of classical sources). According to Pausanias, a geographer of the second century AD, “They say that the earth sent up the water there when the horse Pegasus struck the ground with his hoof” (Description of Greece, 9.31.3 and 2.31.9). The story of a spring breaking forth where the ground has been hit was widespread in classical antiquity: the worshippers of Bacchus beat the earth to cause not just water, but even wine, milk and honey to issue forth. But more often, it is a powerful male figure who performs the task, as, for instance, Poseidon bringing forth a salt spring on the Athenian Acropolis with the stroke of his trident, a scene famously depicted on the West Pediment of the Parthenon. In like fashion, the springs of Thermopylae—the so-called “Hot Gates” where Leonidas and the Spartans made their famous stand against Xerxes’ Immortals—were created when Heracles struck the mountain-top with his club. The topos is not limited to the Greeks and Romans, of course. One thinks of Moses hitting the rock of Horeb with his staff in order to create a spring in the desert (Exodus 17.6 and Numbers 20.1–13), and similar miracles recorded in Ireland, China and France according to Stith Thompson’s 1955 Motif-Index of Folk- Literature (A941.3 & D1567.6). The association of violence with the creation of springs is not entirely surprising. As one can readily infer for antiquity from the etymology of the English word “rival”—derived from the Latin rivalis, “one who shares a common riverbank”—the control of water sources has been and is one of the persistent causes of conflict.

The violence prevalent in the depiction of springs—which are without fail figured as females called nymphs or naiads—gives rise to some troubling myths of domination and rape. In his Metamorphoses (5.552–641), the poet Ovid recounts the story of the virgin nymph Arethusa who one day took a bath in a clear stream in Arcadia, not realizing that it was in fact the river-god Alpheus. Startled by the god’s sudden appearance, she flees and he chases after her intending to rape her. Although she is hidden in a cloud from her pursuer by the goddess Diana, the nymph’s nervous sweating causes her to be transformed into a pool. Alpheus, seeing this, himself transforms back into a river to mingle with her waters, but Diana then opens the ground to give her a means of escape; she eventually re-emerges on the island of Ortygia, in the heart of the city of Syracuse in Sicily (where a fountain of fresh water by the harbor has been called Fonte Aretusa since antiquity). Ovid tells another story of abduction and escape in his poem of the Roman calendar, the Fasti (2.583–616)—in which Jupiter has conceived a desire for the Roman spring-goddess Juturna, but is stymied by her sister, Lara, who reveals his plan to Juno. The god rips out Lara’s tongue and consigns her to the Underworld, although her sister indeed escapes.

Juturna herself, better known from her vivid depiction in battle in Book 12 of Virgil’s Aeneid, was a quintessential Italian goddess of springs and as such was ritually celebrated every January 11th by “those whose work involves water,” qui artificium aqua exercent (Scullard, 1981:64). Among the most important of Roman springs was that which fed the Lacus Juturnae, the Pool of Juturna, in the Roman Forum. Water from this pool was used for all official sacrifices of the Roman state religion. After military victories in 496 and 168 BC, the gods Castor and Pollux had been seen watering their horses at the Lacus Juturnae, an event commemorated on coins from the late Republic. The city of Rome itself is plentifully supplied by water, the sources of which were subjects of particular worship. “Esteem for springs still continues, and is observed with veneration. They are believed to bring healing to the sick,” writes the first-century author Frontinus, whose work, On Aqueducts, is a rich storehouse of information on this topic (1.4; Bennett, 1925:339). On the Ides of October, all of the city’s springs were honored in the festival of the Fontinalia during which “garlands were thrown into the springs and wells crowned with them,” an especially fitting tribute for the water by which flowers are nourished (Scullard, 1981:192). A gate in the Servian Wall that surrounded the city was called the Porta Fontinalis, the Gate of Springs, after the Tullianum spring that was located alongside it by the northwest corner of the Capitoline Hill. This spring is still visible today, in the lowest level of the church of S. Pietro in Carcere situated above it. The cistern constructed in the seventh century BC for gathering water from this particular spring was later repurposed as the Mamertine, Rome’s most notorious dungeon: foreign captives such as Vercingetorix and Jugurtha were incarcerated here before their executions, as was Saint Peter who used the spring-water of the Tullianum to baptize his jailers, according to the Passion of Saints Processus and Martinianus (Lapidge, 2017:385).

Located near the Porta Fontinalis, it has been posited, was a shrine to the spring-god, Fons, reckoned the son of Juturna by some authorities. While its site is ultimately unknown, the story behind this shrine’s dedication is related by a historian of the Byzantine era who indicates that it was built by the general C. Papririus Maso in 231 BC from the spoils of the Roman victory in Corsica in commemoration of the fortunate discovery of a water source. A similar story is told about the discovery of the Aqua Virgo, so called “because a young girl pointed out certain springs to some soldiers hunting for water, and when they followed these up and dug, they found a copious supply. A small temple, situated near the spring, contains a painting which illustrates this origin of the aqueduct” (Frontinus, On Aqueducts, 1.10; Bennett, 1925:351).

The Aqua Virgo is even today the most beloved of all Roman water sources and its termination in the city is celebrated by Niccolo Salvi’s famous Trevi Fountain (1744). Behind the Baroque statuary of Oceanus, Tritons, and hippocamps (around and over which the waters from the aqueduct joyously burst forth) can be seen a bas relief depiction of the maiden showing the soldiers the spring’s point of origin. No tourist leaves Rome without tossing a coin or two into the Trevi, in imitation of ancient practice. The 1954 film, Three Coins in a Fountain, and its Oscar-winning theme song, sung by Frank Sinatra, made much of the tradition and assured its continuation in the post-war period. The Trevi Fountain remembers the good luck of the soldiers in its sculptural program, and in its ritual practice promises good luck for lovers.

The fact that springs dispense not just good water but also good fortune is a commonplace in classical thinking. The fact that the dispensation of these benefits is not free of charge, however, but rather dependent upon a regular cycle of ritual maintenance is the subject of a justly famous ode by Horace, a great poet of the Augustan era, which is worth looking at in its original Latin. As the poet writ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Holy wells and sacred springs
• Part I Ancient influences
• Part II Stewarding curative waters and caring for pilgrims
• Part III Genii loci and ancestors
• Part IV Temporal powers, social Identity and sacred geography
• Part V Medieval Europe
• Part VI Contested and shared sites
• Part VII Sacred waterfalls
• Part VIII Popular pieties
• Part IX Hydrology, stewardship and biocultural heritage
• Index