User:Mary Sadorus/Water and Religion

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In many religions around the world, water plays a significant role in different practices, rituals, and beliefs. This can come in the form of weather, such as rain or snow, or bodies of water such as oceans, rivers, lakes, etc. While water is considered a purifier in most religions, it is also considered a sacred resource that possesses many powerful properties and connections to different gods and deities. The different properties that water holds within different religions include as mentioned before, sacred, as well as neutral, and even evil. The determining factors of what properties the water holds are ecological, sociological, theological, and eschatological.

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Rituals

Water plays a significant role in many religious rituals around the world. Within Christianity, Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy and some other churches, holy water is used to baptize members of the church. Hinduism utilizes water to clean the tools used for different rituals. Water is also the focus of many different festivals and celebrations throughout the world and is, for the most part, respected and coveted. The Ganges River in India is considered very sacred to the Hindu religion. It is believed by those who practice Hinduism that the river is a personification of the Goddess Ganga and if you are to bathe in the river on specific occasions your transgressions will be forgiven, and you will be able to attain salvation.

Water Deities

Deities are sacred figures within many religions and are often times on the same level as gods and goddesses. For many religions, different deities and gods are connected to different forms of water. In a polytheistic animistic religion, the type of religion practiced by the native Hawaiians, Lano is the god of rain, among other things, and Kanaloa is the god of the ocean. Other religions and mythologies have countless deities that are connected or related to oceans, rain, rivers, lakes, and other forms of water. In many coastal South American areas where the religion known as Candomblé is practiced, an African goddess of the ocean by the name of Iemanjá is celebrated through a Festival of Iemanjá.

Mythology

Various mythologies view water as a separate entity entirely. The different oceans of the world are often seen as a separate world than the one we live in. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that the oceans were a kingdom presided over by the god Poseidon and Neptune, respectively. Within Paganism, lakes and rivers are home to different spirits who can be called upon for guidance and other various purposes.

In many religions that practice polytheism, it is believed that rain has significance over the state of the world or the emotions of the gods.

References

https://oxfordre.com/anthropology/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780190854584.001.0001/acrefore-9780190854584-e-477

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=ZX42AAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP3&dq=water+and+religion&ots=K1bImcJyh_&sig=YEMgeGkZmlbdVPhr8LAliyl7XM4#v=onepage&q=water%20and%20religion&f=false

[https://www.uib.no/en/rs/bsrs/95760/religion-and-water#:~:text=Water%20in%20religions&text=Water%20is%20used%20in%20religious,festival%20%E2%80%93%20is%20a%20water%20ritual. https://www.uib.no/en/rs/bsrs/95760/religion-and-water#:~:text=Water%20in%20religions&text=Water%20is%20used%20in%20religious,festival%20%E2%80%93%20is%20a%20water%20ritual.]

https://www.hakaimagazine.com/article-short/ceremonies-sea/[https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/116ganges.htm#:~:text=The%20Ganges%20River%20is%20most,transgressions%20and%20helps%20attain%20salvation. https://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/~rfrey/116ganges.htm#:~:text=The%20Ganges%20River%20is%20most,transgressions%20and%20helps%20attain%20salvation.]