Sacred Waters
The Sacred Trinity Well at the Headwaters of the River Boyne, Ireland.
On the Study of Sacred Waters
The impulse to study sacred water chemistry and related cultural phenomenon came to me in the back of a crammed dolmuş driving away from the site of Pergamum in Western Turkey. I was perfectly healthy at the time, but the potential for natural waters to pack the potency to actually heal people magnetized my soul. I was about to begin my graduate studies in geoarchaeology with a renowned water chemist and upon entering I knew exactly what I wanted to focus on. Why does humanity celebrate some water sources and not others? Is there anything chemically unique about the waters people believe have healing properties? How have societies coped with naturally caustic and toxic groundwater systems in the past? Is there such a thing as prophetic water? Are or were water rituals present in every society?
From that Turkish afternoon onwards, I began to see the world through a different lens, one of elemental chemistry. Then after years of running the Environmental Water Quality lab at the University of Texas, I could no longer see water as the transparent medium it once was; Austin’s Colorado River had transformed into a moving matrix of molecules carrying cations and pharmaceuticals, cigarette butts and anions as bluegill and snapping turtles slithered their way through the trillion-linked chain of gyrating compounds and beer cans that slowly paraded to Matagorda Bay compelled by gravity. Cold glasses of water were no longer simple pleasures on a hot day. I could taste the sweetness of the calcium, the tang of extra hydrogen ions, the smoothness of sulfates coating my tongue, and feel the metals on my teeth. I began letting tap water evaporate on purpose in order to collect the mineral precipitate to analyze it with XRF and XRD. I began running as many samples as I could afford through the Jackson School’s Quadrupole ICM-MS with the purpose of detecting the concentration of every compound, mineral, and trace element in a water sample.
Sure, some things were lost and new concerns arose with this watery passion and outlook. Showers are now less enjoyable, I am very suspicious of most tap water, I am more vehemently opposed to fracking than some, I no longer abide by the 5-second rule for fallen food items, and my idea of a great vacation is driving all over tarnation to watch water squirt from rocks (my fiancé is hanging in there… bless her). But what has taken its place is the closest thing to magic the natural world has yet revealed to me. What I have become privy to is an ever-growing testament to humankind’s deeply rooted and extraordinarily sensitive awareness of the subtleties of natural environmental chemistry. Even without a periodic table, our ancestors knew that lithium was present in some spring waters, arsenic imbued certain streams, and that the blood-colored iron staining in specific wells could make one feel strong when before they walked weak.
As fate would have it, my life (and likely yours too) is unfolding at a time and in a culture that seems to have collectively lost all environmental sensitivity. Poof, like smoke out a smokestack. My culture knows more about operating systems, twitter, and video games than about trophic cascades, mycorrhiza, isotopes, or pedogenesis. Paradoxically, this is also a social moment when tools for deep chemical understanding and environmental realization are broadcast through society and buzz words like sustainability echo like empty drums across college campuses. Most importantly it is the global moment when we recognize (some are still ignorant or in denial) that the bumbling and hubristic industrial activities of the recent past and present have altered the geochemistry of Earth’s atmosphere, pedosphere, cryosphere, biosphere, lithosphere, and of course hydrosphere. Our engineered chemistry has been found in the gut of crustaceans inhabiting the deepest ocean trench (Jamieson et. al., 2017). You can’t get further from humanity and still be on this planet, yet there we are and plastic too. Even off planet, in the vacuous void surrounding this Pale Blue Dot is the junk, space stations, and chemistry of our species (Crowther, 2002).
In recognition of this incidental proliferation of our chemistry across the globe, we created a new geologic epoch, The Anthropocene. As the Pleistocene was defined by glaciers advancing and retreating, the Anthropocene will be defined by the waxing and eventual waning of our bomb chemistry, the chemistry of our automobile emissions, our pesticide chemistry, our pharmaceutical chemistry, our plastic chemistry, our jet chemistry, our home chemistry, our Walmart chemistry, our oil-spill chemistry, our septic tank chemistry, our couch chemistry, our feedlot chemistry, our embalmed corpse chemistry. It may also come to a more pleasant close through restoration chemistry and a reassembling of the natural mosaic of geochemistry shattered in the olden days when coal was king, soil was dirt, and leaders thought climate change a Chinese hoax.
What can engaging with sacred waters of the past do for you at present? Well, first of all you can use it to reconnect to the sensorial world of environmental chemistry. You should be naturally good at it, it’s engrained in our species. Begin by truly tasting your next glass of water. Don’t gulp it down. Notice the smell of it. Oh, there is some chlorine poured in at your local water treatment plant. Now see it, don’t just look at how much you poured. Notice the few O2 bubbles it picked up as it traveled from your faucet to your cup. See the mist of macro-particles swirling and the Fe3 precipitate falling to the bottom of the glass. Now taste it. The human tongue is designed for this, not for shoving food down our throats, those are called spoons. The calcium cations might give it a sweet taste. Yum. The chloride elements bouncing around invisible in the matrix might give it a bitter, flat taste. Yuck. Water at room temp will give you a more complex sensorial bouquet than an ice cold glass. Related note: always drink bad water cold and quickly if you must.
Secondly, engaging with sacred water will connect you to landscapes in ways you may have yet to experience. Sacred waters are place-based phenomenon. They are deemed special by humans who have noticed that the amalgamation of elements in an area combine to produce a special and unique cocktail of elements. Remember that the water from the spring you visit is chemically cast in the mineral image of the surrounding geology, with roots and organism contributing some delicate elements. When you sup the spring or well water, you are tasting and taking in the fine distillate of the landscape. The world and you are one.
Thirdly, engaging with sacred waters will keep you hydrated. Seriously, it’s important. Take a moment to think about what that means. Like me, you are a big sack of water supported by a stone-like framework of calcium, phosphorus, and proteins. The firing of your synapses, the production of your fingernails, the fluid that fills your cochlea and keeps us feeling upright while spinning upside down on a planet in space… all water products. What is more, water’s ionic property and flowability is the transport mechanism for all life. How does calcium move from a limestone rock into your bones? How does iron move from soil to plant to your hemoglobin and myoglobin? Water. It is why NASA’s motto in the search for life is follow the water. Polarity, flowability, and phase changes.
Lastly, expand your freshly honed chemical understanding to the rest of the environment. Especially the atmosphere. It probably needs the most attention right now. Do me a favor, swipe your hand infront of your face and feel the air cool against your palm. What the heck is in that air that you can’t see? There is something there otherwise you wouldn’t feel a thing. What you are feeling are billions of grains of nitrogen, oxygen, methane, CO2, and a vast array of emphemeral volatiles that create little plumes of odor, some sweet some not. Some more benign than others. If you find yourself loving healing and sacred waters, remember that you do in no small part because of the chemistry. This environmental chemistry encapsulates and reflects the world you live in and love, and unites the spheres of life. It also extends to the atmosphere. Keep close to your chemical awareness and check the daily CO2 and CH4 (https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/). Take the opportunity to lessen our collective chemical impact on the planetary spheres and perhaps we can more gracefully, more happily transition from The Anthropocene to a more equitable epoch, The Equicene or perhaps The Ecocene.
What follows is a brief exploration of some of the main facets of my sacred water research. Because much the detailed information from the sites below is either in publications or is in the process of being published, I can only give you a general report on what I have found in these amazing wells, fountains, and springs. My list of sites is far from exhaustive, but I give you a representative sample of the types of sources I have been fortunate enough to study and fall in love with. Enjoy and let me know what you think. Please feel free to contact me about sacred and special waters in your neck of the woods :-)
