Water
partial reprint from the publication; encyclopedia of african religion: asante, mazama
present, water, in the form of primeval water, has been at the center of the explanation of the origins of existence. In this world, water is the ultimate cleansing agent, both internally and externally. It is also the ultimate agent and symbol of spiritual purification and a most important offering to the Creator, to other divinities, to the ancestors, and to other cosmic forces that are propitiated by libation and other rituals. In Africa, if humans cannot live by the proverbial bread alone, it is even more certain that all life, human or not, in its physical, social, and ritual aspects, will perish, swiftly, if there is no water.
The ancient African fluvial environment had a profound impact on the African spiritual system, which in turn impacted back on African humanity by giving order, meaning, significance, and higher purpose to daily life. Nowhere is this more dramatic and obvious than in Kemet. It is here that the River Nile and an imaginary underground river, of which the Nile was undoubtedly the archetype, respectively ordered and regulated the life of the living and that of the Dead and, in fact, profoundly influenced all existence and all conceptions of existence.
The Nile is the longest and one of the most dominant rivers in the world. It runs for more than 4,000 miles from south to north through East Central and North East Africa, from its source in the region of the Great Lakes to its estuary on the Mediterranean; from the place of the beginnings of humans through to the places of the beginnings of civilization, in Kush, also called Ta-Seti, literally “Land of the Bow” or Nubia. People as well as progress also flowed northward, following this waterway along its valley from the heart of Africa. The Nile was the world’s first transcontinental cultural highway. But it was not only water, people, and their culture that this river has carried as it arose in the highlands of Africa and journeyed across varied terrain to empty itself into the Mediterranean. There is another gift. Fertile silt, eroded from upland, has always been transported in its yearly floods and deposited in places that would have been part of the largest desert in the world but for this annual replenishing nourishment from the longest river in the world.
The Nile has run through Africa and the lives of Africans for millennia. In Kemet, at first it brought devastating and fearful floods to vulnerable settlements that clung precariously along its banks to thin margins of land with agricultural possibilities. Then as human knowledge and skill developed, and predictability and flood control evolved, threat became promise, and the Nile flood a welcome deluge to provide for an increasingly more productive and secure future. Here the river provided water for irrigation, transportation, communication, drinking, washing, and sewage disposal. It also yielded large quantities of fish, birds, and other edible animals. That part of the Nile Valley had become a magnet that attracted more and more settlers from all directions. So was born the foremost country in the ancient world, owing much of its life to water in the form of the then foremost river in the world.
Water is perhaps the single most important liquid in the world. Composed of two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen (H2O), it is not possible for any form of life to survive without it. Water covers about three quarters of the Earth’s surface and makes up roughly the same portion of the human body by mass. This liquid dominated the physical, social, and spiritual environment of ancient Africa. It still does in most of Africa today, as well as in African communities outside of the continent. In the African world, from as early as ancient Kemet to the
The ancient African fluvial environment had a profound impact on the African spiritual system, which in turn impacted back on African humanity by giving order, meaning, significance, and higher purpose to daily life. Nowhere is this more dramatic and obvious than in Kemet. It is here that the River Nile and an imaginary underground river, of which the Nile was undoubtedly the archetype, respectively ordered and regulated the life of the living and that of the Dead and, in fact, profoundly influenced all existence and all conceptions of existence.
The Nile is the longest and one of the most dominant rivers in the world. It runs for more than 4,000 miles from south to north through East Central and North East Africa, from its source in the region of the Great Lakes to its estuary on the Mediterranean; from the place of the beginnings of humans through to the places of the beginnings of civilization, in Kush, also called Ta-Seti, literally “Land of the Bow” or Nubia. People as well as progress also flowed northward, following this waterway along its valley from the heart of Africa. The Nile was the world’s first transcontinental cultural highway. But it was not only water, people, and their culture that this river has carried as it arose in the highlands of Africa and journeyed across varied terrain to empty itself into the Mediterranean. There is another gift. Fertile silt, eroded from upland, has always been transported in its yearly floods and deposited in places that would have been part of the largest desert in the world but for this annual replenishing nourishment from the longest river in the world.
The Nile has run through Africa and the lives of Africans for millennia. In Kemet, at first it brought devastating and fearful floods to vulnerable settlements that clung precariously along its banks to thin margins of land with agricultural possibilities. Then as human knowledge and skill developed, and predictability and flood control evolved, threat became promise, and the Nile flood a welcome deluge to provide for an increasingly more productive and secure future. Here the river provided water for irrigation, transportation, communication, drinking, washing, and sewage disposal. It also yielded large quantities of fish, birds, and other edible animals. That part of the Nile Valley had become a magnet that attracted more and more settlers from all directions. So was born the foremost country in the ancient world, owing much of its life to water in the form of the then foremost river in the world.
The people of Kemet, not coincidentally the most bountiful recipients of this annual act of nature, certainly recognized the importance of the river in their life. They made the Nile in flood the divinity they called Hapi. The Nile was sacred. Its running water was a sacred thing: To dam up Nile water and so detain or prevent it from flowing all over the land was an offense under the Declarations of Innocence, an ancient Egyptian guide to moral living that was to be recited flawlessly by the justified dead before the seat of judgment. So too was wrongfully diverting water in the season of inundation when the flow was strongest. Social ideals arising from the best daily practice surrounding the use of the Nile were invested with the highest sanction, restated as religious and moral norms or as dogma, and so a population was encouraged to aspire to the highest standards of humanity- and to behaviors that tended to keep an elite in power.
Human habitation dominated the east bank of the river; the west bank was the preserve of cemeteries, mortuary temples, and other things to do with the departed. People had to cross the river to bury their dead. These material conditions strongly influenced images of life and death in ancient Egypt. The east bank of the Nile became synonymous with this world, with the rising sun and transformation, rejuvenation, and resurrection; the west bank with the setting sun, death, and the underworld. Crossing the river became symbolic of making the transition into the underworld. The Dead were called the westerners. Apart from the boat and the mythical river, the entire notion of the transition came to be dominated by images of ferrying and the ferryman, the archetype of that now ubiquitous conductor of souls across the Great Divide first attested in the Nile Valley those multiple millennia ago. This symbolic significance of crossing the river has also been retained by many African people in an unbroken tradition down into contemporary times. Examples include the Akan of Ghana and the Igbo in Nigeria.
Every people have their story of the beginning. In the first known African account of the beginning, water is fundamental. In the creation story of Kemet, the nun, or primordial waters, is the oldest and most fundamental substance in the cosmos, containing all the possibilities of existence. Hence, before life, there was water. The first life forms were resident in water, and all life forms, for the first stage(s) of their lives or for all of their lives, are resident in water. All life is conceived in water, develops in water, and is then born out of water and often inside water. Without water, no form of life is possible.
Human habitation dominated the east bank of the river; the west bank was the preserve of cemeteries, mortuary temples, and other things to do with the departed. People had to cross the river to bury their dead. These material conditions strongly influenced images of life and death in ancient Egypt. The east bank of the Nile became synonymous with this world, with the rising sun and transformation, rejuvenation, and resurrection; the west bank with the setting sun, death, and the underworld. Crossing the river became symbolic of making the transition into the underworld. The Dead were called the westerners. Apart from the boat and the mythical river, the entire notion of the transition came to be dominated by images of ferrying and the ferryman, the archetype of that now ubiquitous conductor of souls across the Great Divide first attested in the Nile Valley those multiple millennia ago. This symbolic significance of crossing the river has also been retained by many African people in an unbroken tradition down into contemporary times. Examples include the Akan of Ghana and the Igbo in Nigeria.
Every people have their story of the beginning. In the first known African account of the beginning, water is fundamental. In the creation story of Kemet, the nun, or primordial waters, is the oldest and most fundamental substance in the cosmos, containing all the possibilities of existence. Hence, before life, there was water. The first life forms were resident in water, and all life forms, for the first stage(s) of their lives or for all of their lives, are resident in water. All life is conceived in water, develops in water, and is then born out of water and often inside water. Without water, no form of life is possible.
So profound was the impact of water on the psyche of the people of Kemet that, for them, every manifestation of water in the Duat or underworld was in fact an aspect of the nun, the great primeval water that was before creation and surrounds the world on all sides. There were many manifestations of this water in this Kemetic afterlife. One of its branches, in the form of a river, separated this world of the living from the Duat, the place of the departed. Another branch formed the route of the sun in the sky. The sun rode along this river in a wia, a boat- an occurrence that provided the associated explanations of the nightly disappearance of the sun, death, decay, transformation, rejuvenation, and creation.
The Kemetyu certainly did not imagine any world in which water was not a predominant and determining presence. Perhaps they could not imagine a world without water at the center precisely because of the profound impact of water on their lives and so on their worldview. It is likely that this fundamental role of water in the cosmology and cosmogony of Kemet was at least a contributory factor to the Kemetyu understanding of pure water as a sacred substance, a view enhanced by the mystique of fertility and power attributed to water because of the annual rejuvenatory role of the Nile in the agricultural cycle and therefore in the entire society indeed. Water from a certain part of the Nile was regarded as pure and so the best for Libation. It is therefore scarce wonder that the Kemetyu called water a neter, meaning “a divinity,” and referred to the Nile River as “the water of life.” It was also believed that objects could be purified with water and that water that had been poured over statues and other sacred objects was considered to have thus been imbued with magical and healing properties. This idea of sanctification through running water is one of the fundamental ideas in African spirituality.
In Kemet, water was universally recognized as the supreme agent of both spiritual and physical purification. The latter is a practical necessity for proper human hygiene and therefore of tremendous daily importance. All humans, by the act of living, accumulate impurities: sweat, dirt, and other pollutants obtained through work, play, and the basic biological fact of constant respiration. Therefore, everyone needs periodic physical purification. It is a necessary part of the forever alternating cycle of pollution and purification, which is an intimate aspect of the human reality. Water is fundamental for respiration; water is also fundamental for getting rid of the pollutants built up during respiration, work, and play. The importance of water in Kemet appears to have been further emphasized in medicine: Water was the base of the majority of medical remedies in Kemet, certainly of most of those known to the modern world. The African people in Kemet knew the tremendous importance of water and other liquids. They recognized that to drink water is a sacred act.
These understandings and beliefs, widespread in Kemet, constitute the foundation of the great importance of water in contemporary African spirituality. The waters of the Niger, Senegal, Kongo-Ubangi, and Zambezi River systems serve the same cosmic, social, economic, and other functions today as those of the Nile did yesterday. Water figures prominently in the creation stories of most contemporary African people. Examples include the Yoruba, Dogon, Bambara, Akan, and Edo in West Africa and the Bapedi, Venda, and other Bantu Africans in Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa. There is also great reverence for designated portions of naturally occurring running water in rain, rivers, creeks, falls, lakes, and seas. Water is the agent for cleansing persons of physical and spiritual impurities. Water is important to African religion in a number of other ways.
Water divinities populate the spiritual system of people all aver Africa and, naturally, in African communities abroad. Such divinities abound in West Africa. Tano or Ta Kora is a major river divinity in the Ivory Coast and Ghana. Ta Gbu is the sea divinity of the Ga people in Ghana. Ta Tale is the Ga female lagoon divinity. To Nu or Ta Nu is an Egun river divinity. Otaomi is a Yoruba river divinity. Yewa and Oshun are Yoruba female river divinities. Yemoja (Yemonja) is the Ypruba female sea divinity; Olokun is the male. Ota Miri is an important male water divinity in Igboland; Nne Mmiri is the female, the mother of a number of female water divinities with different names in varying Igbo localities. Mami Water covers a number of water divinities of both genders in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean.
In Brazil, Candomblé initiates worship two female water divinities: Yemanjá (Yemonja) and Oshun. Yemanjá is Orisha of the Sea and patroness of fishermen. Oshun was originally a divinity of a river of the same name in Nigeria. Today, Oshun is the Orisha of sweet waters; she symbolizes love and fertility. These divinities are also worshipped in Santería and Shango in many areas of the Western Hemisphere. In Guyana and other places, Water Mamma or Water Mumma, the female divinity of water, is an important divinity.
The use of water in many rituals is common all over Africa. As in Kemet long ago, water is the supreme agent and symbol of both physical and spiritual cleansing and purification. A major use of water in African spiritual practice is to rid a person of mystical impurities that may be contracted through breaking taboos, commitment of crime, or contamination by evil, whether magic or curse. When used in these ways, water transcends its normal utility as a quencher of thirst, a physical cleanser, and the major and indispensable presence in respiration. It becomes transformed into a religious object, the foremost agent in many rituals in the African spiritual system.
Water is indeed the supreme agent of purification in African practice, whether it is in Libation, offerings, outdoorings or naming ceremonies, the dedication of a building, ritual baths, baptism, or the laying out of an altar or a shrine. Another example of the ritual use of water in African practice occurs in the elaborate ritual of initiation of a babalawo or Yoruba priest, which includes a “ceremony of purification by water.”
From the earliest known times, water has been the quintessential expression of a “pure” drink offering in the African spiritual system. That is why almost every African altar, even the simplest, invariably contains a glass of water for the divinities and the sacred ancestors to drink. That is why, too, from time immemorial, water is often sprinkled on shrines (while incense is burnt and appropriate chants made) as part of ritual cleansing and renewal rites.