Water: A Spiritual History (el. knyga) (skaityta knyga) | knygos.lt

Aprašymas

Water has long been associated with magical, mysterious, sacred and life-enhancing properties. In pre-Christian times, springs and rivers were seen as the dwelling places of deities with magical life-giving and curative properties, associated especially with the feminine, and sexuality, and with ritual cleansing and re-birth. The booming contemporary spa culture which is such a major feature of the leisure industry uses quasi-religious language, with whirlpools and thermal treatments promoted as 'heavens for holistic sybarites'. This book explores the changing ways in which water's health-giving and restorative powers have been conceived, packaged and marketed in an essentially spiritual way. It draws on the disciplines of history, literature, anthropology, religious studies and music. It begins with a consideration of the importance of water in primal religions and in the classic texts of Taoism and the Vedic tradition and the Celtic cults of water sprites and divinities. With the coming of Christianity, water was incorporated into Christian ritual and tradition through the sacrament of baptism and the cult of holy wells which became significant places of pilgrimage.
In addition to all the Biblical references to water and 'watery' sites and the importance of Christian wells and springs in Celtic and medieval tradition, there are a series of interesting church history dimensions, eg the way British spas were established to prevent people going to Catholic Europe; the way in which Bath, Cheltenham and Tunbridge Wells became centres of Evangelicalism; the fact that the great 19th century advocate of hydrotherapy was a German priest, Kneipp; the tie-up between hydros and muscular Christianity, and the huge importance of water in shrines like Holywell and Lourdes, where it is the prime medium for effecting miraculous cures.
From the 16th century onwards (partly as a result of the Reformation), the benefits of water came to be seen more in terms of medical/therapeutic healing than in terms of the miraculous. Medical science developed a more secular and scientific understanding of the curative properties of water, expressed through the development of drinking and bathing cures, spas and hydrotherapy. Spas and watering places came to acquire their own enchanted and mysterious quality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and to some extent came to replace the pilgrim shrines of the Middle Ages. Now a new and more hedonistic kind of pilgrim comes to modern spas to be pampered and experience a potent post-modern elixir of self-oriented satisfaction and well-being.