On the Friendship Bench last week, Mac Bogert and I shared stories of near-death experiences, both of which happened to do with water and near drowning. Since we both reported feelings of peace and serenity during our experiences, I wondered if the spiritual and mythological significances (they’re not different) of water may have had something to do with the way we felt during those experiences.
Water holds profound spiritual and mythological significance across cultures and traditions, symbolizing life, purity, transformation, and the divine. Its universal presence in nature makes it a potent archetype in human belief systems. Consider:
- Water is essential for survival, making it a universal symbol of life, fertility, and creation. Many creation myths begin with water as the primordial source of existence.
- Rivers, rain, and springs are often associated with prosperity and growth.
- Water is a universal agent of cleansing, physically and spiritually.
- Water’s ability to flow and adapt represents renewal, transformation, and the cyclical nature of existence.
- Water is often seen as a conduit to the divine or a manifestation of divine presence.
- Water’s depths are often linked to the unknown, the subconscious, or the spiritual realm.
- Water is nurturing and destructive, embodying duality.
- Water is used in rituals for cleansing, meditation, or as a symbol of emotional healing.
There’s much more, of course. Water features prominently in Christianity, in Hinduism, in Shinto, in Taoism, in African traditions, in Yoruba, in Greek and Roman mythology, and more. It represents (among many other things) might and unpredictability, motherhood and protection, the unknown and the subconscious, the afterlife and divine judgment, renewal or cosmic reset, destruction and rebirth, or the mirror of our emotions.
The Hero’s Journey
As just one example from The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell cites the Pueblo myth of Water Jar Boy. After sharing the story, he writes this:
The child of destiny has to face a long period of obscurity. This is a time of extreme danger, impediment, or disgrace. He is thrown inward to his own depths or outward to the unknown; either way, what he touches is a darkness unexplored. And this is a zone of unsuspected presences, benign as well as malignant: an angel appears, a helpful animal, a fisherman, a hunter, crone, or peasant … the young world-apprentice learns the lesson of the seed powers, which reside just beyond the sphere of the measured and the named. The myths agree that an extraordinary capacity is required to face and survive such experience.
Since we are, by one definition or another, children of destiny, we all face that period of obscurity, even if it’s in our own estimations. We’re all thrown into the depths or the unknown (the dark night of the soul). And we all encounter our spirit guides, the archetypes, the bearers and bestowers of the seed powers we learn and with which we return to our origins bearing those seed powers as gifts.
The uniformity of that experience, which Byron Edgington and Victor Acquista pointed out during the Friendship Bench conversation, is what compelled Campbell to write this:
Looking back at what had promised to be our own unique, unpredictable, and dangerous adventure, all we find in the end is such a series of standard metamorphoses as men and woman have undergone in every quarter of the world, in all recorded centuries, and under every odd disguise of civilization.
The Significance of Water
Water’s spiritual and mythological significance lies in its multifaceted nature: it is life-giving yet destructive, purifying yet mysterious, earthly yet divine. Across cultures, it serves as a bridge between the physical and spiritual, embodying the eternal flow of existence.
And I’ll leave it Joseph Campbell to explain the importance of mythology and symbology to the universal applicability of the hero’s journey:
It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those other constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back.
