Something Magic in the Water

{Learning Reflection 2}

For those of you who didn’t know, Once Upon A Time premiered season four last weekend. 

Once Upon A Time is a television show by the creators of Lost that is the story of fairytale characters, such as Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Ariel, and most recently Elsa from Frozen, who find themselves under a curse by the Evil Queen and exiled to a small town in Maine called Storybrooke.

That’s right.  Fairytales are real.  So is magic.  And it’s living in the United States of America.

I may not actually believe such things as mermaids or spinning straw into gold exist.  However, there is one quote from season one that relates to what we have been learning about water.  
Because now I can’t watch Netflix without noticing water everywhere.

In this scene, Emma (28-year-old daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming) agrees to go out for a drink with August W. Booth (whose identity had yet to be discovered) and instead finds herself by a well.  Confused and skeptical she asks August why he brought her to a supposed magical well.  In response, August says, “Water is a very powerful thing.  Cultures as old as time have worshipped it.  It flows throughout all lands connecting the entire world.  If anything had mystical properties, if anything had magic, well I’d say it would be water.”

Cultures as old as time have worshipped it.

In case you were wondering, Wikipedia boasts a list of 28 different water deities for cultures that span across the globe and time itself.  Most of these different mythologies had more than just one god or goddess representing various aspects of water.

Here are just a few cultures and deities that stood out to me in this extensive list:

The Aztecs worshipped Chalchiuhtlicue, the goddess of water, lakes, rivers, seas, streams, horizontal waters, storms, and baptism.  I suppose it’s only right that a deity with the name Chalchiuhtlicue has so much power over water.

Egyptian mythology had three different deities for the Nile River.  The Nile is the longest river in the world.  It connected the Egyptian civilization and supported their way of life.  (Huck would be proud to know that the Mississippi-Missouri River is fourth longest with about 265 miles less than the Nile River.)

In Greek mythology, the most familiar god is Poseidon, “king of the sea and lord of the sea gods; also god of rivers, storms, flood, and drought, earthquakes, and horses.”  I find it interesting that most of Poseidon’s “domain” consists of powerful disasters such as storms or droughts that would have influenced large populations.  His Roman equivalent was Neptune, king of the sea.

Among worshipping a god of the ocean and goddess of the sea, Hawaiians worshipped a shark god named Kamohoalii and Ukupanipo, a shark god who controlled the amount of fish close enough to fisherman to catch. (Please take the time to pause and imagine how menacing one shark god, let alone two, would appear.)

Water is the basis of life for all cultures in all of time supplying fish and nourishing crops for people to eat and live by.  Water can also bring death in floods or hurricanes.  Water was and still is a force to be reckoned with.

It flows throughout all lands connecting the entire world.

The best way to understand how connected we are by water is to see it.

The rivers in these maps remind me of veins, flowing through a body, keeping it alive.  Like veins transporting blood, rivers are a necessity of life.  For early civilizations, it was only natural for them to start establishing themselves along major rivers and bodies of water where they could sustain the lives of a growing population.

If anything had mystical properties, if anything had magic, well I’d say it would be water.

While water may not have the literal magic that this scene was referring to, the magic of fairytales, there is something mesmerizing about flowing water and fountains.  There is something peaceful about a quiet stream or a light rain falling on a window.  There is something beautiful about the way water carved the Grand Canyon.  There is something exciting about water slides or a water gun fight.  Maybe that something is a certain magic; maybe there is something spiritual about water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_water_deities#Incan_mythology