Water Spirits

This week, I want to talk about water. I realize that I talk about water most weeks, but this one is going to be less about the water itself and more about our reaction to it. In 2003-ish, a man named Masaru Emoto published a book called The Secret Life of Water. In it, he details ‘experiments’ he ran showing that water retained emotions, responded to verbal triggers, and generally behaved less like matter and more like consciousness.

‘Ha,’ all us nerds scoff. ‘That’s ridiculous and bad science.’ And, yes, that is true. His results were cherry-picked, the water had contaminants and all kinds of non-test kosher substances in it and was exposed to environmental conditions that didn’t allow for a real control, a test that could be quantified, or even a test that could really be repeated since all of his methods look like the methods I write on napkins and leave around the house when I can’t sleep.

Not science.

But I reread The Secret Life of Water because an acquaintance of mine actually bothered to call me up, pretended to do small talk and then asked my opinion about water. This is such an unusual occurrence that it made me pause in my usual answer and actually think about why this organic was so concerned with her question. She wanted to know if putting amethyst rocks in the bottom of a glass jar could ‘purify’ the water. When I asked her what ‘purify’ meant, she started talking about chakra energy, spiritual darkness, and all kinds of ritualistic things that I had never associated with water treatment.

This intrigued me.

Here was an intelligent, college-trained woman looking for purification of the spirit with rocks and water, just like humans have been doing since…well…forever. Every culture has purification rituals. Every culture has an obsession with water and with healing. Every culture seems to look to its rivers and streams and stones for some kind of spiritual cleansing and re-making. It’s not about the science, it’s about the soul.

Again, this intrigued me.

When I asked her why she needed to be purified and why amethyst was the stone of choice, she told me that there is a whole healing-stone system out there. Garnet for purification, lapis lazuli for communication, etc. She even sent me a turquoise pendent that was supposed to increase my processing power for an upcoming professional examination/defense. Fascinating. Anyway, evidently amethyst is for spiritual awareness, enhancing psychic abilities, and opens intuition. It is supposed to help with sobriety and also provide the usual protection and healing that seem to be associated with most gemstones. I asked her if she needed her psychic/intuitive powers enhanced. I’ve always wanted to have psychic powers and I was really hoping she did have them.

Evidently, she can talk to the spirits of the dead and they were bothering her more than usual lately.

Oh my. This is incredible! Wonderful! Tell me about it, I said. She didn’t want to and seemed very uncomfortable, which was unfortunate. I told her that, no, there was no evidence that stones in water did anything like purifying souls or enhancing psychic awareness from a scientific perspective and that some rocks can help purify the water through a process called adsorption, but they weren’t gemstones and they didn’t work against things like viruses or some kinds of metals. She seemed genuinely disappointed. And, come to think of it, so was I.

I would love to see magic and the impossible in the world. According to Emoto, water has memory. It can communicate with the human psyche. It can give us messages, capture our emotions, and purify negativity. Just like mythology and magic imply with spirits of water, elementals, and alchemy. These symbols and hopes seem to have permeated our brains somewhere deeper than the cerebrum. Something about water and it’s strange properties evokes a complex, creative folklore involving all kinds of stories, half-remembered assumptions, and belief in magic. And we want desperately to believe it!

Water is an amazing substance. It can dissolve almost any (natural) substance known to the earth. It can exist frozen in rocks for billions of years, creating complicated, beautiful molecular structures that form the bedrock of the planet. These hydrates can be liberated through tremendous pressures into pure, free-flowing water again. Our cells rely on it in a common blueprint of Earth life that staggers the imagination. It’s solid form floats, unlike most other substances known to science. It forms unique, unrepeating crystalline structures in a chaotic, yet harmonious series of molecular patterns that are just as beautiful as Emoto’s without having the expectations of human meaning stapled to them. It is absolutely vital for life and our survival, and yet almost universally ignored. It is a fascinating substance. I can see why so much magic is associated with it.

As I filled up a glass today with tap water, I found myself staring into it, feeling the movement of those fluid molecules against the glass, interacting with the air, sliding against each other with their slight polarity and could sense the presence that I think my acquaintance was talking about. There is something enchanted in the observation of the substance. Something that triggers a visceral and primal need to associate meaning and depth to it. I really hope there are water spirits and that someday I can meet one.