This is a beautifully illustrated, hardbound book, with jacket. Slightly oversized and printed on glossy paper, it holds thirteen chapters, 131 illustrations, with a total of 280 pages of text, endnotes, bibliography, acknowledgements, and index.
Water spirits, or water beings, in this study are defined primarily as real and fabulous snakes or serpentine oriental dragons that mediate between the natural and human worlds regarding the use and control of water.
Veronica Strang argues that during the time humans lived in a shamanic relationship with serpentine “water beings,” they lived in harmony with nature. The spirits’ serpentine shape was reminiscent of the meandering courses of rivers. Some beings took attributes of other animals under their protection, such as feathers and wings for birds, horns for goats and cattle, and scales for aquatic life. The water beings were also in control of both earth and sky, which gave them dominion over food and weather, bringing rain for crops and violent storms for punishment under their purview.
Strang seeks to prove that this harmonic balance persisted as long as humans remained in small communities and negotiated with serpentine gods. The balance was disrupted by human preference for large, mega cities that required enormous amounts of water for irrigation, sewage, and consumption. She contends that humans perceived the need for more human-looking deities in charge of water protection to convince the large civic labor force needed for irrigation that humans had the right and the divine power to control both water and human activities.
Her illustrations are organized to track a change in power from snake and half-snake beings to completely human-shaped gods before the rise of the Roman Empire. This process is documented in time and art throughout the book. Strang asserts that the rise of current world religions participated in “demonizing” snakes in all forms. Particular attention is paid to the role of the snake in the fall from Eden and the medieval contest between holy knights and dragons.
Chapter 4, “Nature Beings,” draws from Strang’s own ethnographic work in indigenous Australia. It includes engaging excerpts from shamanic travels for wisdom and social harmony, including the proper relationships humans should maintain with local water beings and the use of water. It forms the core of the book’s argument, and telescopes backward to imagine the natural harmonies of our earliest religions, and reaches forward to discuss the environmental destruction made possible in the modern world ruled by gods in human form. Fundamentally, the author uses the twentieth-century practice of studying modern hunter-gatherer societies to extrapolate backwards for the interpretation of social structures in Neolithic groups and societies.
The coffee-table layout of the book, with full-page photos of artwork on nearly every facing page, encourages exploration and location of one's favorite water gods in the world—India’s Naga, China’s dragons, aboriginal snakes, and one mermaid. The illustrations are large, lovely, and sometimes ancient, providing a cross-cultural review of water gods that is rarely presented in a single text. For that alone, this is a resource. However, folklorists interested in the more familiar water beings, like mermaids and selkies, will find them mentioned as a brief moment in the downward spiral of this environmental treatise, representing the negative transition demonstrated in art toward the fully human representations of Indic and Greco-Roman pantheons.
Most interestingly, the book focuses directly on worldview and its impact on the ways humans use the environment. Folklorists may appreciate the chance to think about the consequences of shifts in worldview over several thousand years of human history and art. It is undeniable that humans were less overbearing with nature when they believed that Nature was watching! However, Strang is unclear about the role of worldview in fixing the overuse of water in the modern world.
The final chapter answers this conundrum with mention of a Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature, which in 2018 issued a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers stating that “all rivers are living entities that have legal standing in a court of law.” This moves serpentine river beings into modern courts as plaintiffs. The last pages of the book mention legal actions that have been argued in European courts, the rights of the Rhine River among them. Ultimately, the book could be seen as a study of the power of worldview and its consequences.
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[Review length: 720 words • Review posted on September 22, 2024]