Introduction to the History of Religions Handbooks on the...

306. To early man waters, fire, winds, are interesting because of their relation to his life, and sacred because of their power and mysteriousness.571 They are regarded by him not as "elements" of the world, but as individual phenomena that affect well-being. His conception of them is not cosmogonic or analytic, but personal; they are entities with which he has to deal.

307. The mobility of masses of water, seeming to be a sign of life, naturally procured them a definite place among sacred things. Any spring, pond, lake, or river with which a tribe was brought into intimate relations was regarded as a source of life or of healing, and of divination. Dwellers by the sea regarded it with awe; its depths were mysterious and its storms terrible.

308. As in the case of animals, plants, and stones, so here: the earliest conception of water masses is that they are divine in themselves (every one, of course, having its own soul), and are potent for bodily help or harm, and for divination. The waters of the Nile, the Ganges, the Jordan, were held to heal the diseased and purify the unclean; and a similar power is now ascribed to the water of the well Zamzam in the Kaaba at Mecca. Hannibal swore, among other things, by the waters,572 and the oath by the river Styx was the most binding of oaths, having power to control even the gods; the thing by which an oath is taken is always originally divine. In the Hebrew ordeal of jealousy the sacred water decides whether the accused woman is guilty or not.573 The sea is treated as a living thing, whose anger may be appeased by gifts; it is a monster, a dragon.574 The Spartan Cleomenes, about to start on a voyage, sacrifices a bull to the sea.575 Offerings to the sea are made in the Maldive Islands.576

309. Water is abundantly employed in religious ritual as a means of purification from ceremonial defilement, and in services of initiation. A bathing-place often stood by a shrine (as in pre-Islamic Arabia and in Islam now), and immersions came to play a prominent part in highly developed systems (Jewish, Christian, Mithraic). The purification was generally symbolic, but in some forms of Christian belief the water of baptism is held to have regenerating power577—a survival of the ancient conception of the divinity of water.

310. It is often hard to say whether a body of water is regarded simply as itself a living thing, or is conceived of as the dwelling place of an isolated or independent spirit. In savage systems the details on this point are hardly ever recorded or obtainable; but the beliefs involved in later folk-lore make it probable that this latter stage of the construction of creeds is passed through in savage life. The water maidens of Greek mythology and the Germanic nixies and water kelpies are developed forms of spirits. Sacred springs and wells are still believed to be inhabited by beings that are not gods, but possess superhuman power.

311. While wells and streams of a domestic character (such as are freely used by human beings) are generally friendly, they have their unfriendly side. The spirits that dwell in them are sometimes regarded as being hostile to man. They drag the incautious wanderer into their depths, and then nothing can save him from drowning. Fear of these malignant beings sometimes prevents attempts to rescue a drowning person; such attempts are held to bring down the vengeance of the water-demon on the would-be rescuer.578

312. In the course of time true water-gods appear. In Greece every river had its deity, and in India such deities are found in the Mahabharata.579 When in the Iliad the river Xanthos rises to seize and drown Achilles, it may be a question whether the stream or the god of the stream is the actor. Nor is it always possible to say whether the extrahuman Power inhabiting a water mass is a true god or a spirit; the latter form may pass by invisible gradations into the former.

313. Waters originally divine tend to become the abodes of the deity of the place, or sacred to him, and healing or other power is ascribed to his presence or agency.580 Sacred water, being unwilling to retain anything impure, thus becomes a means of detecting witches and other criminals, who, when thrown in, cannot sink, but are rejected by the divine Power.

314. Deities of streams and springs do not play an important part in worship or in mythology; their physical functions are not definite enough, and their activities are naturally merged in or subsumed under those of the greater or more definite local gods. If, for example, the Canaanite Baals are gods or lords of underground irrigation,581 this is because they, as divine lords of the particular regions, control all phenomena; they are, in fact, also gods of rain and thunderstorms, harvests and war. So rain-gods in general are to be regarded as local deities, among whose functions that of bestowing rain was regarded as specially important. In the lowest systems the rain-giver may be a sacred stone, dipped in a stream,582 or a royal or priestly magician who is held responsible and is punished if the expected result is not attained.583 In such cases the procedure is often one of imitative magic.584

315. If there be, in the next higher stratum of belief, a local or tribal god, it is he who is looked to for the rain supply; so the early Hebrews looked to Yahweh,585 and the Canaanites, doubtless, to the Baals. The economic importance of rain led, even in low tribes, to the conception of a special deity charged with its bestowal.586 In more elaborate mythologies various deities are credited with rain-making power. In India, for example, Dyaus, the Maruts, Parjanya, Brihaspati, Indra, Agni,587 all concerned with rain, have, all except Agni, evidently grown from local figures with general functions; this appears from the great variety of parts they play. The same thing is true, perhaps, of Zeus and Jupiter in their character of rain-gods—as all-sufficient divine patrons they would be dispensers of all blessings, including rain; they seem, however, to have been originally gods of the sky, and thus naturally the special guardians of rain.588

316. Great masses of water have given rise to myths, mostly cosmogonic. The conception of a watery mass as the primeval material of the world (in Egypt, Babylonia, India, Greece, Rome) belongs not to religion but to science; in a relatively advanced period, however, this mass was represented as a monster, the antagonist of the gods of light and order, and from this representation has come a whole literature of myths. In Babylonia a great cosmogonic poem grew up in which the dragon figures of the water chaos (Tiamat, Mummu, Kingu) play a great part,589 and echoes of this myth appear in the later Old Testament books.

317. In the more elaborate pantheons the local deities of streams and springs tend to disappear, and gods of ocean appear: in Babylonia, Ea; in Greece, Okeanos and Poseidon; in Rome, Neptune; and along with these are numerous subordinate figures—attendants on the great gods, and intrusted with various particular duties.