One cannot underestimate the importance of water for all organisms.
Throughout human history, advances in the means of locating, collect-ing, storcollect-ing, carrycollect-ing, and distributing water have been vital elements in the evolution of our technologies. As but a single example, for thousands of years, various modes of dowsing, or water witching, have been used to locate water sources. This sort of divination, often with ritual compo-nents, assumes a psychological control over the physical environment,
using a forked stick, pendulum, or L- or Y-shaped divining rod made of wood or metal. Most commonly, the vibration or other movement of the device is taken as evidence of the location of underground water. Today’s practices may have originated in fifteenth-century Germany, where dows-ing was used to find metals. While dowsers assert that they possess inher-ited, paranormal abilities to detect energy fields, the bioscientific com-munity notes a lack of evidence or reproducibility and dismisses these claims (Jansson 1999). If nothing else, however, dowsing is a metaphor that expresses the significance of water and people’s motivation to have agency in its location and collection.
Rain ‘‘dances’’ and other water-encouraging customs also are wide-spread and are commonly coordinated with lunar cycles. The Cherokee of the U.S. Southeast performed ceremonies to stimulate rain and to wash away disaffected spirits. For Zuni rain customs, dancers wore tur-quoise and feathers, which represent rain and wind, respectively. Many native peoples in South and North America used rainsticks, hollow tubes made from plants, commonly saguaro (Carnegiea gigantea Britton &
Rose, Cactaceae) and other cacti, whose spines were reversed to line the inner surface. A rainlike percussion was created when small beads or stones placed inside the stick moved from one end to the other as it was upended. In other regions, bamboo is a good source material for rainsticks.
The earliest hominids would have carried and stored water in natu-ral vessels such as calabashes and, later, fashioned water containers out of wood, clay-lined earthenware and wicker baskets, and animal horns, hides, and other organs. More-advanced technologies for domesticating water include ceramics, metals, and glass. The most recent developments in beverage containers are plastics, commonly the thermoplastic poly-mers polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and polyethylene terephthalate (PET).
Humans and other animals also exploit rain, including its adventitious collection from rock depressions and tree boles; large-volume water har-vest exploits snow and glacier melt and natural bodies such as springs, rivers, and oceans.
Beyond its tangible qualities, water also captures the imaginations of people who speculate where bodies of water might take them on river quests and sea voyages (see chapter 2) and who, questioning its genesis, weave it into their cosmogonies. Water is one of the five elements in
Chinese cosmology (see chapter 3, section on manapua). For the Ibibio of Nigeria, moon/water and sun/fire engaged in a dynamic tension to create the universe and its inhabitants. The origin narratives of the Hindu god-desses Sarasvati and Laskshmi and the gods Brahma and Vishnu center on the sacred lotus, a water plant (Croutier 1992). Fresh water, ocean navigation skills, and the sea are part of the fabric of Marshallese origin narratives. ‘‘Bwil im Kartak’’ is an account of a ‘‘living seamark,’’ a naviga-tion sign in the form of a bird that guides people who are lost at sea back to land. ‘‘Litarmelu kab Lainjin’’ describes how visitors from distant places imparted navigation knowledge to a woman who established the founda-tions of pan-Marshalls navigation (Genz 2008). In languages that are grammatically gendered, the sea is commonly feminine, marking its asso-ciation with emerging life: the Sumerian mar denotes both ‘‘sea’’ and
‘‘womb’’; the Japanese umi, ‘‘ocean,’’ is homophonous with the term for
‘‘birth’’ (Croutier 1992).
Pima, Blackfoot, and Apache Native Americans describe an old man riding a raft who conjured the earth out of water. Other Native North Americans invoke a deity who sent an animal to the bottom of the sea to retrieve mud from which to fashion the earth. In the U.S. Southwest, Navajo apprehend natural and spiritual worlds comprising both male and female aspects, underscoring the balance and duality that is fundamental to the Navajo way of knowing. This extends to ceremonial images, includ-ing rainbows, lightninclud-ing, and rain, which are integral to Navajo origin narratives and are key symbols in weaving and other patterns. For each of six geographic directions (the four compass points, and below and above), Zuni religion designates rain spiritual leaders who live in clouds and are accompanied by six advocates, which are rain-carrying birds. Other design themes throughout North America include water serpents, turtles, frogs, and fish (Baxter and Bird-Romero 2000; Heard Museum 2008).
Throughout the arid U.S. Southwest, native peoples invoke rain through a variety of customs, many of which center on the connection between rain/water and life and growth. Some of these expressions, such as depictions on ceremonial garb, are durable; others, such as sand and body paintings, are transient. For Hopi, water is sacred and undergirds many other symbols in ritual and secular customs. It is a theme in cos-mogonies, ritual attire, persons’ names, kiva (ceremonial chamber) ico-nography, and songs that summon the cloud chiefs to rejoin the cycle of
life that joins people with other animal and botanical forms. Rain, clouds, and other waters are the essence of the dead; the clouds that return are the ancestors, and ‘‘their rain [is] both communion with and [a] blessing of the living . . . [the earth’s waters are] transubstantiated human life’’
(Whitely and Masayesva 1999:404). In a related motif, Hopi communi-cate with their deities through intermediaries, katsina≤ spirits that embody the essence of everything in the natural world and cosmos and come to the Hopi in the form of rain-laden clouds. The spirits are represented by katsina ‘‘dolls,’’ three-dimensional figures traditionally made by men from the root of the cottonwood (Populus spp., Salicaceae), which is associated with water; these figures are dressed in materials that evoke water-related themes. People also dress as katsina spirits to perform ceremonial dances (Teiwes 1991).
The imagery and customs of many peoples in the U.S. Southwest include dragonflies (Aeshnidae), insects that are intimately associated with water and serve as harbingers of the summer rains.≥ Whereas flies (Muscidae) have two wings, the dragonfly has four, arranged in two pairs.
Its elongated body was a common theme in traditional religions and played a prominent role in origin narratives. It still is depicted as a vertical line with one or two horizontal beams in pottery, basketry, prayer sticks, masks, textiles, and other items of utilitarian and ceremonial material culture. The Christian patriarchal (or archiepiscopal) cross also has two horizontal beams and was carried in Roman Catholic liturgical proces-sions in front of, or by, archbishops. When the Spanish tried to impose Christianity and its universal symbol, the images fused in a powerful way that, for some, imparted ambiguity to both the iconic cross and the dragonfly, as well as to their combined identities. Forcing the cross finds symmetry in other colonial aggressions: for example, in the Hopi village Awatovi, a mission house was superpositioned over a kiva, symbolizing the succession of the new religion. Among some native peoples, as an extension of the image and symmetry, saints’ images were destroyed, crosses and rosaries were broken, and the remains were covered with ashes, feathers, and animal skins. Although in the end the Spanish largely prevailed, the dragonfly endures in contemporary expressions, being depicted in rock art, jewelry, pottery, and textiles (Bird 1992; Baxter and Bird-Romero 2000).
Classical European mythology associated water with creation and
destruction: Aphrodite was a goddess of beauty and love who protected sailors (her central imagery was ‘‘born of foam’’); water nymphs were divine spirits associated with mountain springs and rivers; mermaids and sirens captured the imagination as ‘‘irresistible women without souls’’ and represented both the dangerous and the life-affirming aspects of water. A multiheaded sea-dwelling dragon or snake that requires human sacrifices occurs in the oral traditions of disparate cultures such as Vietnam, Sene-gal, and Scandinavia. Scotland’s Loch Ness monster finds analogs in many of the world’s oceans and lakes (Croutier 1992:26). Leonardo da Vinci extolled the paradoxical qualities of water, describing it as sharp and strong, acidic and bitter, healthful and poisonous, fast and slow. ‘‘It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it flows. And as the mirror changes . . . so it alters with the nature of the place’’ (da Vinci quoted in Croutier 1992:13). Water enlivens language, which itself ‘‘has a liquid quality, a flow in its overall effect, water in its consonants’’ (Bachelard, quoted in Farber 1994:43). Farber (1994:42–43) invokes the images conveyed by the idioms ‘‘two ships passing in the night,’’ ‘‘blood is thicker than water,’’ ‘‘still waters run deep,’’ ‘‘in over your head,’’ ‘‘feel drained,’’ ‘‘an outpouring of emotion,’’ and ‘‘a free flow of ideas.’’ A timely addition is ‘‘surfing the Internet.’’
The bioscientific perspective on the origin of life also centers on water, explaining a primordial ‘‘soup’’ that contained organic materials, which evolved into complex molecules whose coordination mediated metabolic processes. The first cells that evolved, heterotrophs, fed on the organic matter; later, autotrophic cells produced their own food; and over the course of billions of years, the great diversity of life-forms evolved.