Water

 

     The world was once all water and all existing life was then at home in water.  Upon emerging from the seas, creatures in a way turned inside-out, such that we carry the primeval ocean about now on higher ground within us in bodily fluids, our great gangs of cells cooperating like a gang of walking jellyfish.  Water is an urgent requirement for all forms of life in spite of the fact that it contains no nutrients.   Long after life crawled onto dry land, just as the humanoid branch of great apes was developing, our ancestors continued to spend much of their time in the water according to the aquatic ape hypothesis developed independently by Max Westenhöfer and Alister Hardy, and our species adapted with such characteristics as hairlessness, fat attached (like blubber) to skin, and webbed fingers.  (Despite its imagination and suggestive power, this idea has received little support from other investigators.)

     Myths of origin using less scientific language most often begin in the water.  The opening of the Babylonian “Enuma Elish” describes the birth of the world out of an undifferentiated primal chaos when the waters divided into the fresh identified with Apsu and the salt which is Tiamat.  According to Genesis even before light the spirit was moving “upon the face of the waters,” and the Koran teaches that Allah made all living things from water.  The oldest Egyptian god was Nu, a personification of the watery abyss from whom the sun god Ra arose to order the world, first by hovering over them and calming them just as Jehovah had done.  Likewise in Hinduism the name of the archaic deity Narayana worshipped at Mohenjo-Daro is derived from the word for water and later accounts describe Prajapati’s emergence from the waters as the Hiranyagarbha or golden embryo from which the creation unfolds.  In the New Wiorld the accounts of both the Mayan cosmogony according to the Popol Vuh and the Zapotec version preserved by Fray Gregorio there was at first nothing but the expanse of the sea covering everything. 

      People did indisputably choose to live near water, and the growth of the earliest civilizations arose in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus, and the Yellow Rivers where people could coax food production into surpluses sufficient to support idle aristocrats, administrators, and intellectuals.  Some think that extensive kingdoms developed primarily out of the need to manage water resources without undue conflict.  Interventions like dams, dikes, cisterns, sewers, and pipes were naturally first built for agricultural use, but even domestic arrangements for consumption and removal or waste appear as early the fourth millennium B.C.E. 

     Nonetheless, thousands of years passed before flushing water closets were designed in the sixteenth century by Sir John Harington, godson of Queen Elizabeth and translator of Ariosto, who included a description of his invention in his allegorical satire The Metamorphosis of Ajax, a work with enough bite in its non-hydraulic implications to cause its author to be exiled from court.  (He left it to his valet to write a practical manual for those who wished to construct such a device.)

     Though it took a very long time for people to organize systems to avoid being offended by our own stink, hydraulic engineers had been successfully managing water from the very dawn of the Neolithic.  Such work occurred not only in the cradles of civilization but in more out-of-the-way spots like Papua, New Guinea where nine-thousand-year-old drainage ditches have been traced at the Kuk site.  In the fourth century B.C.E. resident of Jawa in Jordan built a walled town in the middle of the exceedingly dry Black Desert.  Their extensive earthworks prevented flooding during the seasonally destructive overflow of the Wadi Rajil, directing the waters into reservoirs for later use. 

     Thales of Miletus believed water to be the basic stuff of the universe, the substance out of which all things emerged.  Aristotle noted that this was a demythologized version of the creative work attributed to Okeanos and Tethys.  He adds that Greeks take oaths by water as it is “most ancient is most revered, and what is most revered is what we swear by.”  Two and a half millennia after Thales, his regard for water was thought by Nietzsche to be a worthy insight in spite of its inaccuracy as it embodied a monistic view free from mythology. 

     Pindar’s first Olympian ode, celebrating the victory of Hieron of Syracuse’s entry in the horse race, opens by declaring that for some, “water is best” (ἄριστον), but this turns out to be only the first term of a priamel.  Pindar instantly amends this survival-based intuition with the socially informed recognition that some people would prefer gold, then moves to his theme, the even more culturally determined choice of prestige gained by success in games (ἄεθλα). 

     Doubtless the loftiest role played by water as a symbolic actor is that it assumes in Laozi for whom it conveys the attributes of enlightenment: purity, simplicity, indestructibility, naturalness, submission, and humility.  The transparency of water makes it uniquely suited to represent an apophatic spirituality.  The manifold forms of water make it suggest the constantly changing phenomena of experience, while its essence remains always unchanged, “a deep pool” that will “come clean like still waters.”  At the same time, it is “restless, like the ocean,” forming “torrents that flow/ into river and sea” descending always, unresisting, going “unmurmuring to places men despise.” 

 

Nothing is weaker than water,

But when it attacks something hard

Or resistant, then nothing withstands it,

And nothing will alter its way.

 

If somehow, one can sidestep the sparks of ratiocination on the roiled surface of consciousness, perhaps the water which is the majority of the living body may assume the lead and conduct the self, unresisting, into harmony with what surrounds it. 

     Though today people commonly carry small water bottles about, swigging now and then to maintain hydration, in the past certain waters were ascribed more dramatic restorative powers.  Herodotus says that certain Ethiopians attained an average age of a hundred and twenty due to their regular use of a fountain of youth and his story was confirmed by numerous others.  According to the legends of Alexander his veterans, upon bathing in a stream that flowed into the Euphrates, found their youth restored.  The idea of rejuvenating waters percolated then through numerous accounts of the east, including romances and travelers’ reports.

     Among the most influential is the twelfth-century “Letter of Prester John” which describes a spring located in India “at the foot of Olympus” (considered by some to be in Sri Lanka) but also “not far from Paradise” which renders its drinkers perpetually thirty-two years old and free from disease to boot.  In  a strange anticipation of the aquatic ape theory, children in that land, the author adds, are raised in water and may spend three or four months at a stretch submerged.

     Two hundred years later, the travel book attributed to “Sir John Mandeville” (a pseudonym) describes a well in Polombe (likely modern Kerala) that “hath odour and savour of all spices,” though this changes hourly.  Drinking its waters cures all illnesses as well as bringing youth. The author accounts for these extraordinary powers by the fact that the spring arises from Paradise. 

     After Renaissance voyages enlarged the world by half, the location of this marvelous spring was transferred to the new found lands.  The sophisticated Italian humanist Peter Martyr d'Anghiera who served the Spanish court recorded the reports of a fountain of youth in the Bahamas, though he expressed his own skepticism about their truth.   Juan Ponce de León was first associated with the magic spring decades after his death in the Chronicles of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo.  The story was repeated and received revived attention through the memoir of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda who had spent seventeen years among the Native people.  Referring to Ponce de Leon’s supposed quest, he claims to have known the location of the waters of youth, which regained in the Americas its Biblical geography, as according to Fontaneda Florida was the true location of the River Jordan, flowing out of Eden.

     That language is a reminder that the search for physical immortality is only the vulgar aspect of the spiritual grace conferred by baptismal waters.  The Mandaean Sabians who revere John the Baptist and were perhaps the first to practice the sacrament continue to perform full-body immersion.  Until the Middle Ages baptism was performed with candidates naked to signify their return to a primeval state, but even today most Christians continue to undergo this ritual of healing waters.  Their cousins in South Asia fancy similar benefits from contact with the waters of Mother Ganges, foul though it might appear to the visiting tourist. 

     Even the appreciation of the more natural qualities of water can lead to connoisseurship.  The savants in Athenaeus discuss the qualities of various drinking waters, finding that Paphlagonian sources “winy,” while a drink from the Corinthian spring Peirene is the “lightest” in all Greece.  He quotes Herodotus’ description of how the Persian king drank only water from the Choaspes which flows by Susa on its way from the Kush toward the Indus.  The deipnosophists’ contemporary descendants may find an entire supermarket aisle made up of waters, many of them touting not only their subtle flavors, but no end of vitamins and probiotics, our contemporary version of the quaint Victorian patent medicines.   

     Almost a phantom element, water has the most mysterious qualities, lacking any fixed form, transparent, odorless, able to rise invisibly from earth to sky and descend again independent of human desire.  We bathe in it and consume it and, for the rest of the day, walk about in one level or another of humidity, observing, perhaps, mists in the morning and clouds overhead in the afternoon.  Though we recognize it as a primal force, we have an intimacy with water and daily contact that suggests our kinship.  Water is always at hand to remind us of beginnings, of sublimity, of the unfathomable mysteries of the most commonplace things.