In many religions, the beginning is also aquatic. Water flows through creation narratives, from Iroquois to Yoruba, Mongolian to Incan. The sea is there first; then, a God emerges. When Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, shimmered out of chaos, she danced lonely upon the waves. The epics of Sumeria and Babylon, whence sprang the Judeo-Christian Bible, describe the two primordial gods as entities made of water, Abzu being fresh, Tiamat salty. Blue water was the basic ingredient of creation, explained Moses. Allah created man and animals from water. Brahma, the Hindu progenitor, was self-born in dreamwater. The universe came into being when a Bindu drop coalesced into the Word.
Science, too, incorporates water into its creation myths. The Big Bang may have been the beginning of it all, but what about life on Earth? Some theories suggest that life originated in volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean floor. But how did oceans get here? Were they always here, or were they delivered from outer space upon comets and asteroids? The world’s oceans contain enough deuterium for us to hypothesize that they are made up of at least some melted comet ice. The ratios of hydrogen isotopes in lunar rocks are also an indication that cometary water was battered into the Moon. The Moon itself used to be part of Earth (it is thought) until a shattering impact with a protoplanet called Theia broke it off into orbit. And despite its dusty appearance, the Moon is covered with so much hydroxyl (one hydrogen atom bound to one oxygen atom) that astronomers speculate it might be possible to extract water simply by heating the Moon’s soil.
Western philosophy begins with Thales saying everything starts with water. The oldest sources of Hellenistic thought traced the generation of all life to Okeanos, the body of water encircling the globe. This river was also a god: “he from whom all gods arose.” In classical antiquity, to be alive was to be in a state of watery wetness. Young people were described as “abounding in liquid.” As they aged, the moisture dried up. Death was waterlessness. The expression during one’s water referred to one’s allotted life span. Richard B. Onians’s analysis of ancient Greek attitudes and behavior, The Origins of European Thought, argues how “in this thought, that life is liquid, and the dead are dry, we have found the reason for the widespread conception of a ‘water of life.’” This conception began before Athens, though, and before philosophy, even before history. It is hardwired into our hearts, as is the hunt for its this-worldly equivalent, the fountain of youth.
The hunch that some real liquid might prevent death has always been part of humanity’s lore. The earliest Mesopotamian cosmogonies suggested that the fountain that cures any ailment was located at the source of all rivers. The Aleutian islanders who lived between Alaska and Siberia believed that early men were immortal: when they grew old, they only had to dive off a mountain peak into waters that renewed their youth. The Hindu idea of soma—a drink granting godlike immortality—is at least three thousand years old. Sikhism tells of amrita (a means “not,” and mrita means “mortal”), a creamy liquid of deathlessness skimmed from the milky ocean of life everlasting.
Bronze Age Greeks called dead bodies “the thirsty.” Parched souls ended up in a place called “the dry country.” To protect themselves from ending up in a liquidless afterlife, Mycenaeans and Minoans worshipped Dionysus—a suffering god who dies, disappears beneath the waves of the sea, and then returns to life. They believed that the god’s fate was their fate, that they, too, would find another life in death, that each of them was Dionysus: the one who dies yet does not die. His presence saturated early theater, with its contrasting masks representing the tragedy of death and dismemberment and its attenuating comedy of rebirth and renewal.
Ancient Greek thinkers distinguished between two forms of existence: bios and zoe. Bios is the life of the flesh, as in biography, the story of a life, or biology, the study of what we can know about life. Bios is finite. Zoe, on the other hand, is endless, indestructible, ongoing. Zoe is “nondeath,” untouched by mortality. We all die; a part of our soul life lives on. The zoe continues after the bios ends. “Zoe is the thread upon which every individual bios is strung like a bead,” as one description has it. Even the Bible uses the term aionios zoe to refer to eternal life. In symbolic terms, zoe has wet qualities, to contrast it with the aridity of death in bios. The god of zoe was Dionysus. Worshipped as a sea deity, he was the “lord of all moist nature.” Today he is better known as the god of wine and intoxication, but at the outset, he was the mystery of liquidity itself.
Actual initiation into the Greek Eleusinian mysteries required—before the tasting of death and the divine encounter—a purifying bath. The mystai (initiates) came to see the end as just another beginning. The inevitable could then be embraced with amor fati, the “love of fate.” Christianity was in direct competition with pagan cults for the first few centuries, and their sacraments also revolved around aquatic immersion. Those who’d been baptized were fearless in the face of death. As Elaine Pagels has shown, the peacefulness of Christians when thrown to the lions became a major impetus for the spread of monotheism.
Just as holy water connects the faithful today to their God, and as born-again Christians submerge themselves in purifying baptismal water, in classical times water was a connection to the sacred depths. Greco-Roman sanctuaries invariably boasted flowing fountains or mineral springs. When Jesus performed a miraculous healing at the pool of Bethesda, it was still an asklepieion, a sort of hospital-temple devoted to the ancient Greek god of medicine, Asklepios. Sick patients seeking cures checked in and soaked in the medicinal baths. Long before Christianity, water was turned to wine in the mystery cults. In Dionysus’s presence, streams would miraculously gush forth from rocks, as they also do in the Bible. In tearing animals apart and devouring them, the bacchants were doing what is done today at mass: drinking the blood of Christ and eating his body, a symbolic participation in God’s pain, demise, and rebirth. Their actions had—and have—healing powers.
For much the same reasons, Indians still drink water from the Ganges. Having one’s ashes scattered into that river helps secure an auspicious afterlife. The whole essence of the Hindu religion is to reassure followers that there is no reason to worry about dying—as long as the correct oblations are performed. As a result, the subcontinent is rife with rites meant to allay or alleviate believers’ fears of death. Even the most devout may find themselves doubting the efficacy of their offerings, which is where mythology comes in. Stories bring an extra layer of protection. The Brahmanas are, according to Sanskritist Wendy Doniger, “myths that attempt to tame the ritual that attempts to tame the fears.”
In Hinduism, death is itself merely a pit stop. In the words of Lord Vishnu, man “is not born, nor does he die. Having lived, he does not cease to exist. He is not slain when the body is slain but is unborn, eternal and ancient.” The Hindu soul is an imperishable selfhood temporarily occupying a perishable body as it shuttles through successive cycles of death and rebirth (samsara means “to flow on”) until it attains soul liberation (moksha) in a reunion with Supreme Reality. To arrive there is to conquer recurring death, to experience freedom from the trammels of existence.
The deathright of immortality helps worshippers come to terms with mortality. Hindu karma theory states that every person alive has lived previous lives. We are all reincarnations. Rebirth is a forgetting. What we can remember of past lives (if anything) are traces of prior experience that sometimes surface into our conscious minds. Each of these traces is called a vasana, meaning “perfume,” an almost imperceptible reminder that we’ve possibly been here before.
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The suggestion that there’s something more to come after death is built into the fossil record. Tens of thousands of years ago, Neanderthals dug premeditated gravesites. Dead kinsmen were intentionally arranged in the fetal position, indicating some hunch about posthumous rebirth. Food was placed next to entombed bodies, so they’d have something to snack on when they awoke. And the same Paleolithic humans who painted on cave walls reverentially buried their kin alo
ngside objects to be used in the afterlife.
In evolution, human verbalization began with grunts or signals and became a way of transmitting information, of conveying wishes and thoughts, of saying that something not presently here had at one point been here, of saying that tomorrow will happen. Talking about the past entails a shared assumption: even though it is not in front of us, in speaking of it we conjure it and believe that it occurred, that it was and therefore is real. It’s a natural leap to speaking about the future, about what will happen. We began naming intangibles, using words to explain the inexplicable: life, time, eternity. Having coevolved, communication and credulity became codependent.
We can’t survive without convictions that allow the brain to navigate time. Any relationship with the future is a belief. There are no guarantees that things will occur again the way they happened today, but we make assumptions about continuities in order to survive. Predicting is believing.
We’ve grown so accustomed to the sun rising each morning that we take it for granted. Early humans, who worshipped nature, considered this occurrence deeply miraculous. We can imagine them gazing out at the empurpled horizon, trying to make sense of it. If the deadening sun, extinguished each night by the sea, bursts back to life the following morning—why can’t we? In 1887, E. B. Tylor, who founded the scientific discipline of anthropology, pointed out that every early civilization that contemplated the sunset near a body of water came up with their iteration of a fountain-of-youth tale. To see a similarity between ourselves and our environment is the foundation of what Tylor called “associative thinking,” a way of projecting our magical fantasies onto real phenomena. We still do it. Genuine aging discoveries are being made; that doesn’t mean we’re about to cure the disease of aging once and for all. We have no idea why we age, let alone why we’re here, or why our minds evolved consciousness. Such is life. And part of it is dying.
The reality of death is something we all have to face or story away, whether through science or faith. We’ll never understand.
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Water is a symbol of all we don’t know. The ocean, with its impenetrable fathoms, contains unknowable mysteries. But it’s also a source of revelation. Water represents the subconscious, the simultaneity of knowing and unknowing. “As every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever,” wrote Melville. “We ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.”
Water’s basic attributes are already astounding: it vanishes into steam, freezes into crystals, melts into gas, and fluffs into clouds. That ice floats is an utter abnormality. Perpetually changing, water’s very mutability suggests indestructibility. To our ancestors, it must have seemed capable of anything. We deemed it the mysterium tremendum, the substance from which all else is formed, the understandably incomprehensible essence of creation, the primal secret, the protean escape from finality.
Whatever we think of the ocean is what we think of death. Is it formless terror, the chaos of endless tumult, the violence of flux; or is it calming, entrancing to gaze upon, perfect in its limitlessness? The choice is ours. The sea is not quite a blank slate, more like an undulating surface rippling with potentiality. Gems of light, dissolving glass. We can be terrified by bodies of water, or we can revere them, but it is impossible to remain indifferent. Unending waves are reminders of our insignificance.
The motion of the ocean—it rolls uncontrollably, with a rhythm of its own, pulsating to melodies beyond our comprehension. Are we at peace riding the oceanic precipices and abysses, or does its senseless churning give us motion sickness? Whitecaps are fingers reaching out for our souls, trying to pull us under. Can we feel a sense of acceptance about those watery hands summoning us, about the inevitability, the inconsequentiality? We can’t control a sea. We can only follow its movements, tremble before its swells, admire its mute constellations of silvery foam.
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Nobody knows exactly when the idea of immortality-inducing waters first trickled into consciousness. Perhaps it started with the realization that there is so much water it will never run out. The illimitability suggested immortality. Gazing out at the ocean, at that unarticulated space, we must have suspected that it has always been there, that it is endless and eternal. Water grants a perception of something indestructible that reflects back the perceiving subject’s own indestructibility. On the open sea, we still feel the timeless circumference of infinity around us.
Early humans couldn’t help noticing that water is in everything that lives. Water allows things to grow, to thrive, to survive. It replenishes and refreshes, renews and rescues. It brings fecundity. We feel like ourselves again after drinking it, or when immersed in it. These prosaic powers of regeneration are mirrored by their poetic double: rebirth. Water keeps us alive, our ancestors realized, maybe it can keep us from dying?
Water has long been what religious anthropologists call a hierophany, an element of the physical world that reveals something of the divine world. As rain, it passes from the heavens to the earth, a nourishing messenger of the gods. Evaporating, it transmits our prayers up on high. Its transparent depths help us contemplate the inconceivable. Something about water transposes infinity into the finite.
Water is hydrogen and oxygen, but it is also a third thing that completes it, as D. H. Lawrence wrote, “and nobody knows what that thing is.” That three-in-one conjunction of two H’s and an O is its own unity within a trinity. Without those molecules, there is no existence. All biochemical processes occur in an aqueous medium.
The ocean boils with life, and just as terra firma bursts out of it, so did we. Humankind evolved from sea creatures. The tide remains in our blood. Babies in the womb don’t breathe oxygen, they breathe fluid. The sound in the placenta is the sound of the ocean. We are all, like the world, primarily water. Water enters us, courses its way through our system, enriching and being enriched. It is then passed on to the earth. The entire biomass operates through water’s circulating. It is constantly moving through the soil and the sky. It uses flora and fauna as filtration devices, as means of traveling from sea to stream, as temporary containers, rest stops on a never-ending journey. The earth is a planet-size water-transformation system. Flowing, changing, cycling through clouds to flesh and vaporizing back again, eternally dying into new life.
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In Western civilization, medicine begins as a water-delivered gift of the gods. At his mineral-water temples, Asklepios would appear to the sick in dreams, offering prescriptions or banishing ailments with his magical staff. The Rod of Asklepios, still used as an insignia for the medical profession today, consisted of a snake coiled around a stick. It was a symbol of transformation, representing the way believers “undergo a process similar to the serpent in that they, as it were, grow young again after illnesses and slough off old age.” Asklepios was a manifestation of Apollo, the god as sunrise. He emblematized the notion that we, too, can rise from darkness, from illness, rejuvenated by the waters. And just as we can recuperate after getting sick, Asklepios suggested the possibility of dying’s being a new beginning. Healing waters and serpents shedding their skin were linked to the mystery of rebirth, itself indicative of the promise of life after death.
That premise still resonates in homeopathy. Tinctures dilute active medication to infinitesimal levels, yet the memory of water is enough to cure some patients. It makes no sense scientifically, yet here we are. We’ve wanted to comprehend water’s powers forever. In the fifteenth century, seeking to understand the medicinal attributes of hot springs, Italian physicians called balneologists started systematically investigating mineral baths, performing experiments in hopes of explaining the waters’ curative powers. (The term “spa” goes back to the Roman acronym for Salus Per Aquam, meaning health by water.)
Dondi, Savonarolo, and Ugolini of Montecatini each tried to develop a way of testing different springs’ properties. Their efforts are what we today speak of as the
scientific method—a notion not yet extant then. Their treatises, often written in the first person, are early examples of nonfiction books. But they couldn’t find any satisfactory explanation for what caused the mineral baths to have healing attributes. The subject, Savonarolo concluded, “is not conducive to demonstration.” It wasn’t—and still isn’t—something amenable to scientific grasp.1 They could note observables, but these didn’t explain why one spring had therapeutic effects on a certain ill patient and another didn’t. Their empirical inquiries, he noted, were never fully reliable. All they could do was “give knowledge approaching the truth.”
We’re still in that boat today. In countless ways we can’t achieve certainty; but we can live with uncertainty. This faculty of accepting our not-knowingness, of not needing resolution, of simply allowing reality to be all it is without attempting to reduce it to human comprehension, is what’s known as negative capability. Keats employed the term to describe that headspace wherein one is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” To be in uncertainty is to be in a transitional state, inhabiting a question without answering it, embracing paradox and realizing that any response is destined to be incomplete.
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