How water has been worshipped, understood and used spiritually from healing springs to modern spas, in a journey through holiness, health and hedonism.
Water has long been associated with magical, mysterious, sacred and life-enhancing properties. This book explores the changing ways in which water's health-giving and restorative powers have been conceived, packaged and marketed in an essentially spiritual way.
It begins with a consideration of the importance of water in primal religions and in Taoist, Vedic and Celtic traditions. With the coming of Christianity, water was incorporated into Christian ritual and tradition through baptism and the cult of holy wells. From the 16th century onwards, the benefits of water came to be seen more in terms of therapeutic healing than the miraculous. A more secular and scientific understanding of the curative properties of water was developed, expressed through the development of drinking and bathing cures, spas and hydrotherapy. Spas and watering places acquired their own enchanted and mysterious quality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to some extent replacing medieval pilgrim shrines. Now a new, more hedonistic kind of pilgrim comes to modern spas to experience a potent post-modern elixir of self-oriented well-being.
