ERS265 Chapter Notes - Chapter 0: Comparative Religion, Natural Philosophy, Classical Antiquity
10 Jan 2017
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Document Summary
Master narratives in water history and their implications for contemporary water policy. Water is never found pure in nature. Waters had qualities or properties that went far beyond taste and salubrity and even beyond the poorly marked borders of the natural. The paradigm change involved the secularizing, materializing, and disenchantment of water. Folklorists and historians of comparative religion have argued that water is universally a numinous substance, historians have pretty well neglected the subject. We know relatively little about how the concept of water differed among pre- modern cultures or about the relations between natural and supernatural properties of waters. Water could change to other elements and other elements could change to water. The qualities that characterized water were relatively unique in the aristotelian cosmology in their inherent dynamism: coldness and wetness were self active, wetness and coldness tended to transform whatever they touched with those qualities.
