Water Ritual

This chapter focuses on obvious, tangible, and social features of baptism and places them in the context of culturally important water rites, namely, Roman bathing practices and the use of miqva’ot or stepped water installations in Hellenistic and Roman Palestine. In this context, the prominence of a water rite in emergent Christianity signalled accommodation to Roman culture. At the same time, restricting baptism to a one-time event (versus daily Roman bathing) expressed resistance to Roman hegemony. The rite inverted Roman practice. Besides employing water, two other obvious features of baptism are these: baptism marked the crossing of a boundary, and it was administered. Baptism enabled both entry into the circle of Christ-followers and entry into the spirit world or an alternate state of conscious (ASC), described in the sources as receipt of the Holy Spirit. The baptizand’s place in the community was established by who conducted the baptism; the administrator and recipient formed a parent-child kinship tie.

Light on the water: ritual deposit of lamps in Lake Nemi

Lake Nemi, in a crater of volcanic origins, lies along the via Appia c.30 km south of Rome in the region of the Alban Hills. The basin as a whole has a high density of archeological evidence, most noticeably the sanctuary of Diana on the NE and the imperial villa on the SW sides. Famously, two large ships belonging to Caligula were long preserved in the lake bed. Following repeated attempts beginning in Renaissance times, in 1927 the recovery of the two ships became a matter of national prestige and propaganda for the Fascist government. The decision was taken to lower the level of the lake by c.22 m to the lake floor where the hulls lay, using powerful pumps that sucked and directed the water through the ancient emissary that was re-opened (figs. 2-3). These operations, conducted between 1928 and 1932, concluded in 1936 with the grand opening on the NW shore of the Museo Nazionale delle Navi Romane, where the ships were displayed. But the tragic epilogue came just a few years later in 1944 during the Second World War when the ships, symbols of a régime that was as boastful as it was fragile, were completely destroyed.

Water, Ritual, and Power in the Inca Empire

Archaeological, ethnohistoric, and ethnographic evidence provides ample indication that water was a key symbol in Andean thought. During the late precolumbian era, the attention lavished on waterworks and features by the Inca emphasizes a clear concern with control over water and its movement. This paper examines the way in which specific relations of power and identity were constructed through Inca management of water. To this end, I offer a comparative analysis of water-related features from different sectors of the Empire, representing different moments in its historical development. The intent is to further our understanding of how the manipulation of water figured in the imperializing process and how its use and meaning may have evolved over time. The architectural evidence from the sites included in the study suggests that conspicuous exercise of control over the movement and flow of water may have been more critical to the establishment of Inca hegemony than to its subsequent maintenance.