The greatness of water

“Venerated from a time before antiquity as life-giver, water has been held in the highest esteem in all cultures and eras. Water-related mythologies show as much the divine character associated with it, as its qualities that lie beyond the material. In our time, the intangible cultural heritage (ICH) and traditional knowledge that surround water still give us an entryway to a fuller understanding of the great life-giver.”

This is the introduction to my paper which has been published as a chapter in the book titled ‘Water: Interconnectivity between the Intangible Cultural Heritage and Science’, which is a joint publication by two centres, the International Information and Networking Centre for Intangible Cultural Heritage in the Asia-Pacific Region (ICHCAP) and the International Centre for Water Security and Sustainable Management (i-WSSM), both being UNESCO centres in the Asia-Pacific region and based in South Korea. The book is also part of the ‘Living Heritage Series’ published by ICHCAP.

My association with the ICHCAP centre goes back several years. As per the centre’s description of the book, it is meant to “promote the convergence of science and intangible cultural heritage (ICH) fields; to spread the value of the intangible cultural heritage of water. Nine stories on water management and water and culture were gathered in one place. It contains stories about water-related ICH elements, such as water management as the transmission of traditional knowledge and agriculture as water-related culture. Through this book, readers will be able to explore the value of water, which is an essential factor for humankind, from a cultural perspective.”

More from ‘With Okeanos and Ganga, the greatness of water’:

“But Ganga herself—for the great majority of the rivers in the Indian subcontinent are indeed feminine, a clear sign of the universal acknowledgment to be found among the very oldest cultures of the world that life-giving and life-sustaining waters are embodiments of the feminine force—has a mythic history.”

“Dispatched to the realms of man because of her transgressions in the heavenly realm, her descent to Earth would have been ruinous, an apocalypse, had she not been caught in the matted locks of the great god Shiva, the original yogi, who in so doing prevented all on Earth from being washed away by the force and volume of her waters. When set free, Ganga followed the course she currently occupies; in the mythic account it is said thereafter she descended further into the realm below that occupied by humans, and in this way Ganga watered all three worlds.”

“These accounts are very rich in allegorical symbolism, and it is the codes that have been included in the mythic retellings of the tale that signal the metaphysical consideration of the water element. These are the codes that—like so many concerning the stories of creation that abound in old cultures and within the unimaginably ancient seam of oral accounts told and retold by indigenous peoples—point to the true characteristics of what we have become used to calling the “elements,” such as water.”

“Similarly, in the ancient Greek cosmogony the Okeanos River was a great freshwater stream that encircled the flat disk of the Earth. It was considered in this cosmogony to be the source of all of the Earth’s fresh water, from the rivers and springs that drew their waters from it through subterranean aquifers, to the clouds that dipped below the horizon to collect their moisture from its stream. Okeanos also marked the outer boundary of the flat earth that it surrounded with a nine-fold stream. The Sun, Moon, and stars all rose from and set into its waters. At night the Sun god would sail around its northern reach in a golden boat to reach his rising place in the east from his setting point in the west. In a cosmological sense, the river symbolized the eternal flow of time.”

The paper can be read or downloaded from my section on Academia or on ResearchGate. The full publication can be found here.

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