Part 3 — CHAPTER XIX. ANIMAL DEITIES OF WATER.

The western practices and customs we have noticed show that the cult of water-worship prevailed and survived throughout the west in a primitive form, evidently in a coarser form than in the east. The most remarkable feature of this rude worship is the belief in the presence of animals or fish as the presiding spirits or tutelary deities of the wells and it affords a very curious illustration of the savagery of those days in Europe. Originally, the worship was established for one great divinity of water. Later, however, both in the east and in the west, the inhabitants of different places came to believe in different spirits of water. Thus did the wells and rivers and pools and tanks of India come to be peopled by fairies and genii, goblins and witches, sayyids and saints. All these are represented in the guardian spirits of the wells and rivers and pools and tanks on the Continent. But our western friends go a step further and fill these wells with numerous animal gods which are very imperfectly represented in the waters of the east.

We find a general belief amongst the Hindus that the nether regions are inhabited by water snakes called Nags. Such were the Kaliya Nag, who resided at the bottom of the Jumna and attacked the infant Krishna by whom he was driven from that place, also the Serpent King of Nepal, Karkotaka, who dwelt in the lake Nagarasa when the divine lotus of Adi Buddha floated on its surface. It is believed that a pool at the temple or Treyugi Narayana in Garhwal is full of snakes of a yellow colour which emerge from water to be worshipped on the Nagpanchami day. Another belief equates the Nags with a species of semi-divine beings, half men and half serpents, who possess magnificent palaces under water. The Puranas are full of traditions relating to princes who visited these palaces in watery regions and brought back beautiful Nagkanyas, or daughters of Nags, therefrom. For instance, Arjuna married a Nagkanya named Ulupi when he was living in exile with his brothers.

No other animal water-gods are found in Hindu mythology. In the west, however, the guardian spirits of pools and wells are frogs and trouts and worms and flies. At the well on the Devil’s Causeway, between Ruckley and the Acton, the devil and his imps appear in the form of frogs; three frogs are always seen together, and these are the imps; the largest frog, representing the devil, appearing but seldom. The Fount of Tober Kieran, near Kells, County Meath, in Ireland, rises in a diminutive rough-sided basin of limestone of natural formation and evidently untouched by a tool. In the water are a brace of miraculous trout “which, according to tradition, have occupied their narrow prison from time immemorial. They are said never in the memory of man to have altered in size, and it is said of them that their appearance is ever the same.”

In Galway there is a deep depression in the limestone called “Pigeon Hole,” and the sacred rivulet running at the base of the chasm is believed to contain a pair of enchanted trout, one of which is said to have been captured some time ago by a trooper and cooked, but upon the approach of cold steel “the creature at once changed into a beautiful woman,” and was returned to the stream. The well at Tullaghan, County Sligo, also harbours a brace of miraculous trout, not always visible to ordinary eyes. Similarly, at Bally Morereigh, in Dingle, County Kerry, is a sacred well called Tober Monachan, where a salmon and eel appear to those devotees whom the guardian spirits of the well wish to favour. In Scotland at Kilbride in Skye was a well with one trout. “The natives are very tender of it,” says Martin, “and though they often chance to catch it in their wooden pails, they are very careful to preserve it from being destroyed.” In the well at Kilmore, in Lorn, were two fishes, black in colour, never augmenting in size or number nor exhibiting any alteration of colour, and the inhabitants of the place “doe call the saide fishes Easg Saint, that is to say, holie fishes.”

Sir Laurence Gomme records other examples of a still more interesting nature. If, says Dalyell, a certain worm in a medicinal spring on the top of the hill in the parish of Strathdon were found alive, it augured the recovery of a patient, and in a well of Ardnacloich, in Appin, the patient, “if he bee to dye shall find a dead worme therein or a quick one, if health bee to follow.” These, there can be little doubt, are the former deities of the spring thus reduced in status.

Mention has already been made of the presiding genius of the well of St. Michael near the Church of Kirkmichael, in Banffshire, who assumes the semblance of a fly, and who is immortal and always present in the water. “To the eye of ignorance,” says the local account, “he might sometimes appear dead, but it was only a transmigration into a similar form, which made little alteration to the real identity.” “It seems impossible,” remarks Sir Laurence Gomme, “to mistake this as an almost perfect example where the guardian deity of the sacred spring is represented in animal form. More perfect than any other example to be met with in Britain and its isles is this singular description of the traditional peasant belief, it lifts the whole evidence as to the identification of wells in Britain as the shrine of ancient local deities into close parallel with savage ideas and thought.” Professor Robertson Smith points out that the divine life of the waters is believed to reside in the sacred fish that inhabits them, and he gives numerous examples analogous to the Scottish and Irish, but whether represented by fish, or frog, or worm, or fly, in all their various forms, the point of the legends is that the sacred source is either inhabited by a demoniac being or imbued with demoniac life.

Here we may bring to a close our analysis of water-worship in East and West. Enough evidence has been adduced to establish the identity of ideas and usages connected with the worship of water in India with those prevailing in Europe, particularly in the British Isles. Of all the great objects of nature water impressed people the most. It came to be worshipped everywhere. The foundation of the cult everywhere was the same. The forms and rituals were, therefore, part and parcel of the same common cult. There is, however, a difference in the degree in which they have survived in different places according to the stage of culture attained by the inhabitants of the place. These variations enable us to compare the stages of culture of different communities at different intervals, stages of culture which are practically lost to history, but to which folklore affords many a clue. In the legendary lore and traditional materials known as folklore there are precious fragments of information from which can be reared enduring monuments of history if these are carefully handled and scientifically sifted. The value, therefore, of these seemingly unmeaning beliefs and customs to the student of ethnology and folklore cannot be over-estimated, and this, if nothing else, may be pleaded in justification of the author’s attempt to revive the dying fame of the miraculous pools and rivers and their wonder-working denizens.