As human beings
became city dwellers, urbanisation turned water into just another
resource. Offering potable water to the
citizenry became a political task and a public service. And who, after all, would still be able to
worship something supplied as a public resource? The myth of Athens
The election of the patron of Athens is known to have been disputed by Poseidon (god of
the sea, to whom the city owed practically all of its splendour since Athens
Our reading of the
legend points to the fact that, symbolically but significantly, it is the
city’s citizens who use their political power to marginalise the old god of the
sea. Moreover, there is something
childishly cruel about Poseidon’s alleged mistake in presenting them a
saltwater spring as gift, since such water is of no value. It is not even of use for drinking. We can see through the legend to the
conceited pride of the polis feeling completely safe behind its two
’walls’. There were, on the one hand,
walls ‘of stone’ that had been built to separate the city from nature so as to
command it better. On the other hand,
there were the ‘walls of wood’ which the oracle had foretold would always
protect the city as long as they stood; these walls were none other than the
ships that guaranteed Athen’s mastery of the seas. These two walls had weakened the city’s
self-interested devotion to Poseidon, the more chthonian god of the sea,
whereas they had strengthened the equally self-interested worship of the
military and political goddess, who was cunning and capable of domesticating bios
(life) and fisis (nature) to the greater glory of both nomos
(political law) and anthropos (man) at the same time. Fear of storms, shipwrecks and being cast
adrift on the sea (recall how Homer recounted the punishment inflicted on wily,
conceited Ulysses) has given way to the spread of agriculture.
An unfulfilled hope
The above process
continued apace as agriculture and livestock ceased to be the primary sources
of wealth. Long-distance trading managed
to preserve the myth of the ocean and the seven seas (at least until sailing
became technically sound), but it could not even minimally preserve the myth of
their lowly ingredient: water. Moreover,
its deconsecration became banalisation as societies became industrial. Nevertheless, centuries passed, and industry
and the Baconian notion of dominating nature continued to go hand in hand with
water. After all, the first great human
machine was the watermill. Conveniently
harnessed, water drove a wheel that could move enormous stones. Anything could be ground or pressed as
required: wheat or olive oil, rice or
wine, and so forth. Later on, hydraulic
presses served as the first great sources of electricity, and the famous steam
engine was driven by water, or rather by water’s expansive force as it is
turned into vapour. However, in terms of society’s symbols and metaphors, such
virtues were no longer attributed to water and its creative power or
mystery. Instead, they were seen as
proud products of the power of reason, the reason which had engineered such
machines and made the water flow, evaporate, drive turbines and so on. Apparently, technology and applied reason
were no fans of the fourth element either.
Examples are
widespread and well-known of rivers being dammed and harnessed, with harmful
side-effects, for example, on the migration of fishes. They have been made dirty. They have often been used as a principal way
to get rid of waste of all kinds. That
is, they have become sewers! It is truly
astounding to see how, over centuries and all around, the same river has served
both ‘as a source of drinking water and as an outlet for sewage’ (and without
any hygienic treatment of the water![2]). Regrettably, Catalonia
Today such situations are everywhere apparent to
us. Without dwelling on them, there is
nevertheless no question that, behind them, another very different relationship
exists between humanity and rivers, along with the water such rivers
carry. It is both qualitatively and
quantitatively different, yet it has merely accentuated an old trend tending to
drive water out of the popular mind and its symbols, or at least to slight or
belittle its significance. Despite its
vast debt to water and waterways, industrialisation seems to have betrayed its
early hopes and expectations of them, as so beautifully formulated by Antipater
of Thessalonica in the previously cited text.
Waterfalls and watermills were to have freed humanity of the heaviest
manual labour, and this has undoubtedly happened for part of the world‘s population. However, not all the hopes put in this
process have been fulfilled, despite far outstripping anything anyone could
have ever imagined. Once harnessed and
deconsecrated, dirtied and made trivial, water has been reduced to a mere bit
player in the modern storms of iron, fire and blood[3].
[1] There are various versions regarding whether
the election was made by the people or decided by the powerful Athenian ruler
of the day: Creorop. There is even a
version that states that the woman’s vote decided the election in favour of
Athena, who later withdrew the right to vote from those very same women.
[2] Carefully separating sewage from the water
supply played a key role in improving public health and leading to population
growth. Unfortunately, it only began in
large Western cities in the second half of the eighteenth century, using
vitrified clay pipes. This step was
crucial so that, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, cities in the
advanced world would stop experiencing chronic population loss, from higher
mortality rates. Until that point, the
countryside had had to compensate with constant flows of people to the
cities. See J.R. and W.H. McNeill’s The
Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of the
World. New York
[3] Without being able to go into detail here, we
can see the contrary myths conveyed by Herman Melville in Moby Dick and,
on the other hand, Ernst Jünger’s The Storm of Steel and The Worker:
Dominion and Gestalt. While these
last two books do relate multiple, epic struggles between opposing forces,
there is no doubt that any complex symbolism essentially related to water and
the ocean has been totally replaced by one based on fire and steel.
“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
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