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A History of Water
before the prayer or after illness, for instance, purify the believers both physically and spiritually; they form an integral part of the religion. Terje Oestigaard analyses the qualities of fire and water as metaphors in Heaven and Hell in Christianity. The Otherworldly spheres are to a large extent represented by various types of fire and water, which have been used in purification and purgation, and as a penalty in hell. Baptism, the deluge and hell’s torments have all been described through various combined ideas of water and/or fire. Completely different processes and spheres have been visualised and materialised with water and fire because it is possible to attribute opposite qualities to these two elements. God and Satan may employ the same water and fire, just different forms of it; God’s are benevolent and life-giving whereas Satan’s are malevolent, destructive and evil both in hell and on earth. Hence, ideas of fire and water play a fundamental role in the conceptualisation of cosmic principles in Christianity. Dieter Gerten examines hydrolatry and practices of water worship in early pre-Christian religions in Europe and looks at whether, and in what form, these practices were continued in Christianity. The Christian syncretism – in which earlier Greek, Roman, Celtic and Germanic types of water worship were incorporated despite theological differences – highlights how the idea of water as a sacred element transcends religions. The author also traces pre-Christian ideas and myths of water in European folklore, literature and the arts until the nineteenth century, when the religious importance of water in culture diminished. A conclusion is that the current mechanistic and reductionist worldview is only a quite recent, and Western, phenomenon that may be too narrow a perspective for overcoming the looming global water crisis. Veronica Strang analyses water in Aboriginal Australia. Situated in ‘the Dreamtime’, Aboriginal engagements with water are holistic, with the land and waterscape shaping social, political, economic and religious institutions. Ancestral stories describe how the flow of water across the continent ‘holds’ the ancestral forces which generate life. Often represented as a serpent, ‘The Rainbow’ conceptually links all of the waters that provide the ancestral pool from which human spiritual being emerges, and to which it returns at the end of life. Water and other fluids are imbued with powerful energies, and the exchange of these is a crucial element in rituals that affirm people’s clan membership and identity, and maintain their relationships with place. Tore Sætersdal analyses rain-making in a comparative context with a particular focus on African practices in Central Mozambique and