FROM POWERFUL WATER TO WATER POWER (AND HYDRAULICS)

 

In the popular mind, water was symbolised by a powerful, magical woman creating all wealth and life and, at the same time, by a capricious, deadly woman.  (It could be both if refused or enjoyed in excess.)  Humanity lived in a world where water mysteriously fell from the sky, either beneficently or cruelly, where it mysteriously sprang from the earth or ceased to do so, where it mysteriously, powerfully coursed rivers or spread out in the perilous immensity of the mysteriously boundless ocean. 

This gave rise to awe, fear and admiration.  However, that all changed as man began to dominate water, as water was harnessed to irrigate crops productively, predictably.  Then, despite its centrality, water began to lose its mystery and magic, it began to lose its ability to awe and, to some degree, its power over life and death was less certain.  Moreover, such power, along with the capacity to make decisions of life and death, was usurped from it by the very humans who had harnessed it^[1], planned and built the irrigation ditches where—most of the time—water could only slide tamely along.  In a sort of civilising coup d’êtat, water was denied—in fact, denied itself—both such power and the generative principle.  In its place, the genuinely powerful, productive agent was taken to be the one able to harness and dominate water in a timely fashion.  And over time, water came to be overlooked as the necessary condition for all that.

 

With the great hydraulic works, water seemed to lose its power just as it was putting immense power into the hands of humanity and its institutions.  Karl Wittfogel’s thesis about the hydraulic empires of antiquity famously puts across this notion^[2].  He argued that the necessary condition for these empires and with the power which drove their growth lay in the vital tasks of planning, building, defending and managing the irrigation systems and hydraulic works on which such agrarian societies depended.  That is where the immense power of these empires and their elites took root. 

 

‘Stop grinding, ye women who toil at the mill’

 

Notably, Wittfogel stated that ’a waterfall is of little interest^[3] to primitive man, except as a limit or an object of veneration.’  Obviously hunters and gatherers saw no opportunity in it for irrigation and even less so for building a mill.  That was alien to their way of thinking, far from their way of life.  With settlement and agriculture, humans eventually harnessed water, learning to see in a waterfall the possibility of a canal, of irrigation ditches.  Finally, the riverbanks filled with mills and the transition to industry got underway.  Yet, although water was appreciated mostly as a source of propulsion energy, one might think that its significance was not on the wane but on the rise.  It is even possible, it seems, to detect a revived epic about and connected to the propulsive power of water.  One of the oldest and most beautiful examples appears in a first-century text in which Antipater of Thessalonica^[4], looking upon the first Roman watermills, sang out ingenuously:

 

Stop grinding, ye women who toil at the mill

Sleep on, though the crowing cocks announce the break of day

Demeter has commanded the water nymphs [minor deities of

          water and spring] to do the work of your hands

Jumping one wheel they turn the axle

Which drives the gears and the heavy millstones

Let us take pleasure again from the joys of primitive life

Learning to enjoy Demeter’s work without effort.

 

So it would seem that the developing symbology then was not so cruel or contemptuous of ancient water.  After all, it was still possible to imagine it brimming with divine forces whose joyful leaping could drive a mill wheel.  But the process was still in its rudimentary stages.  On the road to full industrialisation, Wittfogel reminds us, humanity would discover the ‘technical potential inherent in coal’. This later turned into total mastery of fossil fuels, relegating hydroelectric power to second place and, at the same time, undercutting the mythology of water.  A new mythology took over, with water being further pushed aside in favour of geology, the mineral extraction of the earth’s buried treasures, and the power of machines driven by carbon and petroleum^[5]. The watermill, it appears, went from being the propulsive hope that was to have freed us of all heavy work to being simply ‘a romantic memento on the industrial landscape’, as Wittfogel tells us, and a water channel that would drive a millwheel became a sort of lovely human whim.  Thus, the mill as a sign of progress and industry became merely a decorative element in country scenes, something picturesque (which literally means ‘appropriate for pictures’).

 

It is not the same ‘water‘!

 

Water was given a new chance to take its proper place among the symbol and metaphors of humanity when ‘the discovery of the productive energies of electricity’ swung attention back to waterfalls and we learned to magnify them on a scale never before thought of.  ‘Yet’, as Wittfogel notes, ‘when the engineer of the twentieth century erects a power plant on a site that supported a textile mill, he is only giving an ancient site new power^[6]. Nature takes on a new function and slowly assumes a new appearance.’  To this, we add that humanity appreciates the symbolic value of nature and water in very different ways.  At quite a remove from Heraclitus, we are definitely not speaking of the same water (source of mystery and generation) that now drives the new turbines. Water has lost its magic, it has been ‘deconsecrated’, as Weber said of the modern world.  Thus water has given up all its old, mysterious power just as a new power has—effectively, in a parallel manner—built itself upon water’s control and command.

 

Our mastery of water has grown, but water’s increasing deconsecration or banalisation remains, nevertheless, relatively less evident in Islamic culture^[7].   Because of its desert origins, Islamic culture has always placed great importance on kitchen gardens and ornamental gardens alike, while also adding in the visual and auditory pomp of water (water jets, fountains, channels etc).  After all, paradise and ‘heaven’ in the Muslim imagination are much more allied to greenery and water features than anything connected to desert mysticism (which, by contrast, holds more fascination for tourists). 

 

 Islamic culture and symbols may be especially dependent on water and sensitive to its revivifying presence—and its visual and auditory qualities as well—but it must be admitted that no culture, in fact, has remained immune to the spell of water.  All civilisations have understood and appreciated water’s necessity.  All have praised the peace inspired by its murmuring and the beauty of its falling.  Perhaps these essentially aesthetic features have been gained in currency only insofar as water has been harnessed, mastered and tamed.  Perhaps it is because water can now be played with, whereas water once ‘played with’ human lives.  In any case, it is an unarguable fact that water as a whole has progressively lost the significance given it in prehistory, by early civilisations, in cosmogonies, and by the pre-Socratics.  Its contribution was downplayed and its power forgotten as great cities were raised apart, it seemed, from nature, great rains were channelled through streets and markets, and great ships more ably plied the seas.  Without doubt, it is not the same water any more.  People today do not experience it as those of the past once did.  It seems logical that the popular imagination that resulted should respond to a quite different symbology.

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^[1]  In fairness, it should be noted that water was usurped by those who ruled over humanity, and it was, in fact, humanity that had been ‘harnessed‘.

^[2]  Oriental Despotism:  A Comparative Study of Total Power.  New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1957.  This thesis has recently come under much criticism, but the particular effects referred to here appear to remain valid.

^[3]  This lack of interest refers to what we would nowadays call economic or energy issues.

^[4]  Cited by Lewis Mumford in his book Technics and Civilization, New York: Harcourt Brace, 1934.

^[5]  The ‘oil’ mentality of Bush and those around him is not irrelevant to their incompetent reaction to experts’ pleas that the monies needed to reinforce the New Orleans levees not be cut back.   Apparently, it didn’t enter their way of thinking that seawater and wind could threaten the conquests of industrial society.

^[6]  Based, though, on the same physical principle.

^[7]  It should be asked, though, whether and to what extent the petroleum-based, industrial development of some Muslim peoples has brought about the same change in perspective.

“Metaphorologism of Water (a Praise)” de Gonçal Mayos, Capítulo 2 de Disasters  and Socio-environmental Conflicts: violence, damage and resistance de André Luiz Freitas Dias; Maria Fernanda Salcedo Repolês; Brunello Stancioli e Lucas Furiati de Oliveira (Organizadores), Rio de Janeiro, MC & G Editorial, Fundo PROAP do Ministério Público Estadual – MG, 2020, 272 pp. ISBN: 978-65-89369-08-0