Talking About Wells

A year ago I was very excited to read Celeste Ray's book on global holy well traditions, Sacred Waters, which I thought was the most important contribution to the field of study for many years, worldwide in its scope and interdisciplinary in its approach - exactly what I'd been waiting for! By pure chance I was copied in on a talk Dr Ray was giving this week for the Last Tuesday Society, all the way from the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., and really had no choice but to join in: it turned out to be as brilliant as I expected.

To a degree Dr Ray's talk was an introduction to the phenomenon of the holy well for those who might not be aware of it, but her point was that traditions related to the reverence for sacred springs often include 'folk science' that can be of relevance to the management of water resources specifically and rebalancing the human relationship with the environment generally. In this selection of images, you can see that alluded to in reference to what happened in Bali in the 1980s: traditionally, the water management of the rice fields was regulated by reference to rituals carried out at springhead temples, and when this was swept away by more modernistic, technocratic schemes of management designed to raise yields, the results were terrible. I'm not completely sure that such traditions can be maintained separate from their old religious superstructures, though I'm sure Dr Ray is right when she says that a spiritual exploration of well-traditions is 'a good way to hook people into caring for water sources'. As a result of the talk I got into a conversation with someone who'd recently visited the Swallowhead Springs at Avebury and found them dry as a bone, which brings the point home. 

During the Q&A session at the end, I was also struck by Dr Ray's description of how things have changed in Ireland since she first began researching holy well traditions there a generation and more ago:

The divide is the smartphone generation. When I started researching Irish holy wells, my best guides were the little kids on their bikes, they knew where the well was, and who the oldest person in the village was who could spell the saint’s name. .... In the 1980s people had so many terms for different types of holy well, the water … Now that’s all gone. The smartphone is the deathknell of placelore and local tradition.

Can more studied and self-conscious traditions, events, and rituals surrounding water-sources achieve real environmental results, I wonder?