[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Okay. Good. Uh, evening and afternoon and morning, everyone.
And special welcome to Professor Veronika Strong.
We are very grateful for you being here with us today. Uh, professor Veronika Strong is a cultural anthropologist.
Her work is concerned with human environmental relations, in particular society's engagement with the water.
And she recently completed a major comparative study examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water deities.
As well as working with Unesco and the UN.
Uh, Veronika has held a kind of mic posts, uh, in Oxford at the University of Wales, Goldsmiths University and the University of Auckland.
Her most recent role was the executive director of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study.
She has served as the chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth,
and Assistant Research England's National Advisory Panel on Interdisciplinarity.
In 2019, she was elected as fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences,
and further details about her research and her many publications are available on her website.
Hey. Thank you and welcome. Thank you, Anna.
And thank you also Robert and Cathy for inviting me, um, to come and talk to this group.
But it encouraged me to tease out an aspect of my favourite research topic, uh,
which I haven't really explored much previously, which is always the best thing about such invitations.
So today I'm going to talk about supernatural water deities and how and why these serpentine
beings have a historically recurrent role as the guardians of cultural treasures.
And I'll be drawing on several decades of research on water beings, as these appear ubiquitously in early human history.
A minor obsession with them, beginning with the Rainbow Serpent in Australia back in the 80s,
somehow grew into this massive comparative study examining their role in different cultural and historical context.
So the findings of this research were published last year by Reaction Press in a book
called As You See Water Beings From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis.
And this is a fundamentally Durkheim in study, in its theoretical approach, it takes as a given that society's,
um, religious beliefs mirror the political, social and and, uh, relations.
So it also adds to Durkheim's thinking.
The proposal, we should look closely at the recursive ity of their material practices and how these affect religious ideas.
And the study suggests that major advancement in technological control over the material
environment tend to encourage notions of dominion and power over the non-human realm.
And I'll come back to this point.
The research also accepts the conventional view of theologians and historians that belief systems like cultural landscapes,
a palimpsest that build on and borrow from earlier layers.
Cosmological explanations. Deities of ritual practices often persist, appearing in new forms,
but remain traceable back to very early foundations, and this is particularly relevant to our discussion today,
because I want to suggest to you that the association between serpentine beings and treasure is quite literally fundamental,
in that it appears in the earliest human religious beliefs, then recurs, albeit shapeshifting, along the way in each layer of the ideas that follow.
And tracing these connections is the advantage of risking one's colleagues anxieties about, and sometimes disapproval of,
comparative research and disciplinary preferences for the safety of more specific case studies.
But today, with the rich ethnographic and historical research that's now readily available,
it's possible to have both depth and breadth and to make use of high quality,
in-depth studies, and also to tease out meta narratives and make comparative analyses.
And I'll bet this does take time. I've been working on this topic for decades,
but it's worth it because it reveals larger patterns and recurrences that close up perspectives cannot provide.
And I personally think that this is exciting. Now.
In essence, the study shows how aquatic deities reflect key social and political changes over time in people's relationships with water.
And it gives us some idea as to how some societies have arrived at exploitative and
unsustainable practices that are now impacting very heavily on aquatic ecosystems.
It reveals some intriguing connections between technological and religious changes,
and it looks at how water beings are now being deployed very effectively by
many indigenous communities and environmental activists to promote alternate,
more reciprocal relationships with water.
So today, I want to use this comparative study to consider how water beings recurrent connections with treasure have come about.
So not everyone's obsessed about them as I am.
So I'm going to start with a little bit of water beings want over and about what they are and what they do.
Aquatic deities appear ubiquitously in human history,
and this is quite simply because they manifest and personify the generative and potentially destructive properties of water,
which of course, is universally central to human lives.
So in this sense, they're composed of water. They reflect its material properties and behaviours.
So while, of course they had culturally and geographically and historically particular,
they reflect these specificities and they also incorporate local species that they generate.
They're generally serpentine and fluid in form.
They dwell in water bodies, rivers, aquifers, lakes and seas.
They ascendant, descend from clouds and mountains or celestial sky rivers,
and they represent peoples understandings of waters, hydrological flows and cycles.
And it's here that we can see the connection between these understandings and common
interpretations of rainbows as visible manifestations of water's movement between,
uh, earthly and celestial realms.
Often, as we can see with an implicit underground rainbow completing the invisible half of the hydrological cycle.
So in morphological terms, as you can see from these gorgeous pictures,
water beings comprise a vast policy family in serpentine and essentially watery objects and images.
And as well as sharing for more material characteristics.
Aquatic deities share the creative. And as I said, sometimes destructive agency of water.
Many of fear appear as key figures in stories of cosmic genesis.
They emerge from primal seas to form the world, often from their own bodies, and this parthenogenesis establish them as primary ancestral beings.
In the process, they create order in various ways.
Their bodies stabilise the primal chaos in separating land and water.
And often light and dark, they form land and water scapes.
They generate the living kind to inhabit them. They bring consciousness and enlightenment to humankind,
and they are the source of laws governing behaviour and in performing hydro theological cycles between material and non-material realms.
They carry persons, or, if you like, the human spirit into and out of material incarnation.
But the central role is to bring the rain and to control the flows of water so that it arrives in orderly and timely cycles,
or when they're being punitive in enforcing the law or creating disorder and chaos, they withhold it and send overwhelming floods.
So in this sense, water beings are key fertility deities.
They responsible for the production and reproduction of all biological organisms and maintaining the health of ecosystems,
as well as ensuring that societies maintain orderly processes of reproduction and production.
So what's most pertinent here is that health and wealth are both conceptually and etymologically related.
Both words spring from a Proto-Indo-European term kalo, which means whole.
And this segues into Proto Germanic highly so, Old English help, which also means wholeness, being whole, sound and well.
And these link with related terms healthy, hail, holy and heal.
And in these terms in particular well, and [INAUDIBLE] lead etymological to will as in wealth.
So we can see that the base layers of the term for wealth are concerned with health, wholeness, and the integrity of things,
bodies, persons, ecosystems, social systems, and their capacities to be fertile and generative.
So water beings, literally, in essence, flowing between earth and sky in rainbow art, provide the most fundamental form of wealth.
And this idea has persisted, not least in the idea of treasure or wealth being found, for example, at the end of the rainbow.
But in only hunter gatherer societies, where material culture was necessarily minimal,
wealth was comprised of three interrelated things the resources generated by local ecosystems,
the vast lexicon of knowledge that allowed people to reproduce themselves over time,
and to live successfully in many different kinds of environments, and their capacities to do so.
So in ranging from the icy Arctic regions to the most arid regions of Australia,
in Africa, water beings represented and produced every aspect of this well.
So to give you an example, in some of the world's oldest narratives,
the Australian Rainbow Serpent having emerged and populated the world from the dreaming with the ancestors of all living kinds,
remains present in aquifers and other water bodies, constantly generating water and resources and persons.
It resides primarily in the waters of the land, which simultaneously represent the non-visible,
non-material world of the dreaming, but are also present in celestial waters.
The totemic ancestral power that it represents is concentrated in sacred sites, which are often water places.
So what we have, in fact, is a cultural landscape inhabited by ancestral beings and the imminent presence of the Rainbow Serpent,
which is sentient, watching and responsive to human actions.
And the Rainbow Serpent provides us with a classic example of a hydro theological cycle, because it's also the source of the human spirit.
The spirit jumps up from a water source in a clan, a state,
from this pool of ancestral force that's held in the land, and it enlivens the foetus in a woman's womb.
And this gives that person a spatial and social location in clan land and kin, and a network of collective songlines.
These rights to rights and resources, then when that person dies, the spirit has to be some back to its home,
to be reunited with its totemic ancestors and reabsorbed into the dreaming, and to be reincarnated in due course.
So new babies are often referred to as little grandmother or Little grandfather,
and the Rainbow Serpent is also the source of what Indigenous Australians call the law,
and this is their lexicon of knowledge and wisdom,
which provides an entire cosmological explanation of how the world green came into being, how it's meant to function, and so forth.
And this body of knowledge is transmitted inter-generational via songs, stories, dances, rituals, art and material culture,
and the law governs every aspect of human life, prescribing who should marry whom, who must be avoided.
How to live according to social rules. How to conduct rituals, progress through rites of passage.
How to recognise, harvest and sustain resources, and how to manage activities in concert with a cycle of seasons.
And it defines clan estate by maintaining an enduring relationship between people and place, and affirming their ownership of land and resources.
And as this implies, the Rainbow Serpent has a key role in protecting the interests of indigenous people.
While generally beneficent to its descendant clans, it punishes failures to respect the law, sometimes by bringing home to the transgressors,
and it also acts as an autochthonous force that will deal harshly with strangers
who trespass into sacred places without being baptised by local people,
so that it can recognise them, and who take resources without permission or who harm the environment.
And in extreme cases it will swallow wrongdoers so that they never return.
So this is a very powerful guardian role. In a recent legal case that I was involved in,
the TV Islanders just north of Darwin argued that their marine Rainbow Serpent and to Ji would be angered
by proposals to drill into nearby reefs for hydrocarbons and therefore into the realm of the dreaming,
and would take revenge on the perpetrators. And for quite a long time, they succeeded in preventing a multinational oil company from drilling,
and forced them to the go with them to take care when they did so.
So what we have in the Rainbow Serpent is an omnipresent guardian ancestral being,
which resides primarily in the deep or hidden world of the dreaming.
But it has agency in the material world.
And the Guardian role of water beings is equally clear in New Zealand, where Maori water beings or tiny far.
Are explicitly described as living ancestors and as guardians kaitiaki.
Thus,
the tiny FA who originally formed Hokianga Harbour is said to remain there with her partner niya as a guardian of the waters and freshwater bodies.
Tiny falls are said to live at every bend in the river and their river,
regularly deployed in the opposition to proposed developments such as waterways that might threaten to disrupt and harm waterways.
And in conjunction with sea dwelling deities, they connect people to regenerative watery underworld.
At the end of life, human spirits must travel to the very tip of the North Island in New Zealand and slide
down a particular route into the sea and make their way to their undersea home in Hawaiki.
So Maori water beings like those in Australia and in many other places,
also articulate on indigenous peoples close observations about how the how the
hydrological cycle functions to create annually regenerative flows of water,
as well as beliefs about space time matter and how these circulate hydro theologically through time and space.
So in performing this vital flow, carrying water and the spirit between visible and invisible domains, water beings act as conduits for the celestial,
earthly, and underground worlds, and the capacity to express all parts of this cycle are equally explicit in very different styles around the world.
So if we turn to another example, we go to Central America to look at Mayan beliefs and Chichen Itza, for example.
We've got the great feathered serpent cuckoo Kahn,
who represents the flow of water between the sacred mountains and represented by the pyramids and the earthly realm and the watery Mayan,
all the world of the album. So the summer solstice Cuzco can apparently writhes with power as the summer sun meets the mountain.
And like the wings that are often seen on serpentine beings,
Cuckoo Kahn's feathers indicate an association with the airborne, the celestial half of the water cycle,
and the bright green feathers of the sacred quetzal, but which also gives its name to the more famous plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl,
who, like cuckoo, can connect earthly and celestial waters.
And Quetzalcoatl is said to be able to delve into the realm of the dead, to recover the bones of the ancestors, and therefore to regenerate humankind.
And Central America also gives us many waterlily serpents, and they are rather like the sort of lower half of the hydrological cycle.
They reside in Jabalpur, and they reach upwards into the material world.
And it brings us lightning serpents. And this is actually an Aztec, uh, serpent, which is contiguous.
But there are many such lightning serpents which bring the rain.
And these underline a recurrent association between water beings and fire as well.
And you also get these wonderful venu water beings in the Pueblo and in the Pueblo area of America.
And this is an image, you can see where the lightning is coming out of the serpent's mouth in our own part of the world, of course.
Uh, stories about dragons and serpents still locate them in water bodies and swamps and caves and marshes and so forth.
And many have wings representing the water in airborne form.
But since their demonisation in the medieval period,
they were often associated with punitive fire and pestilence rather than with the lightning that brings beneficent rain.
Because that role, uh, had been appropriated by the Christian God.
Across Asia.
However, serpentine deities as beneficent water bringers remains more consistent, and in Vietnam and China, for example, this is from Beijing.
They are typically depicted ascending and descending, and therefore are very clearly part of the hydrological cycle.
And this lovely Japanese dragon, uh, is is materialising out of the cloud and expresses so very nicely that these beings are manifestations of water.
They're actually just composed of water. And they descend in Japan from the Misty mountains, inhabited the depths of seas and rivers.
So this elemental role as water beings, as manifestations of hydrological cycles and hydro theological cycles,
shows that they embody the generative capacities of water.
They are fundamentally the source of fertility, wealth and health,
and they're also major authority figures who enforce the law and guard things on an everyday basis.
They have to be respected, venerated, celebrated, propitiate, and with rituals and offerings.
And if displeased, they can always be punitive.
And in this sense that the guardians of the most precious treasure, the substance of life itself, and the spirit that enlivens humankind.
And as well as guarding water bodies. Water bodies are often the source and guardians of the sacred and secret knowledge,
which, as I noted, is the basic form of wealth and power in early human societies.
So. For example, in the Aboriginal groups I work with in Cape York.
Gaining this deeper knowledge requires the would be clever doctor, as they called to perform a dangerous ritual known as passing through the rainbow.
And this entails immersion in a sacred water body, i.e. the body of the serpent.
And as in many shamanic rituals, this permits the actor to enter an alternate dimension and to acquire sacred knowledge and therefore power.
So this is a very recurrent motif in engagement with water beings.
So if we go back to Central America, for example, we have here the serpent's mouth at Chicana,
which provides entry to a temple, and so to the sacred underworld.
Further south in Amazonia, you find giant anaconda canoes carrying those willing to endanger themselves to other dimensions of being.
And all across Asia, uh, serpent beings, dragons,
nagas and mackerels go to the entrances to shrines and temples, marking a transition into sacred spaces.
And it's worth recalling that in Buddhism and other eastern religions, uh,
serpentine beings are very typically cast as tutelary deities able to convey wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.
So what we have here is a foundational layer of religious narratives in which water beings bring and control water, the stuff of life and fertility.
They carry the human spirit in and out of material and conscious being, and they provide and guard the most sacred and powerful forms of knowledge.
So from their earliest imaginings, they're the guardian guardians of wealth and treasure, as it was understood by early human societies.
But then we come to a key shift in human water relations.
About 10,000 years ago, societies begin to try to control water flows themselves with farming and so forth.
And there had previously been some subtle efforts to do this, for example, with little water channels, feeling taro gardens and so forth.
But moved toward greater reliance on agriculture even in small scale society.
Entails some adaptations to the forms of local water deities and in their role.
So, for example, we go back to these horned serpents from the pueblos, and they acquire little maize colours,
um, that indicate their focus more on providing rain for annual crops.
Then in some societies, people begin building bonds to capture annual inundations, to grow rice,
and then they invent water wheels or noria, and they start to construct canal canals.
So we can see the emergence of irrigation society, for example, in the Indus Valley and the Levant.
And as Holkar has observed, these larger infrastructural endeavours require a lot of human labour and and coordination.
So they tend to lead to greater political centralisation and the creation of new social hierarchies, and they allow for population growth.
And most critically,
religious leaders and divine rulers begin to take over from supernatural water beings the responsibility to provide the rain and control water flows.
So over time, previously, serpentine gods begin to gain more human forms.
They require human heads and torsos and then they sometimes humanise entirely.
So it was Iris called the great green God.
The right great round one transitions from serpentine form into more human representation, and the curious,
rather than representing the power and authority of water,
becomes a symbol of power of human pharaohs who, like supreme leaders elsewhere, acquire divine powers.
So you can see here it becomes a kind of accessory.
An agriculture supported by irrigation allows populations to grow very rapidly
and therefore to require much more material control over the environment.
And increasingly, they compete with each other for the control of territory, and new religions with entirely humanised deities emerge,
bringing notions of human exceptionalism and dominion, and appropriating aquatic being role in generating water in life.
And in these contexts, much more adversarial relations start to develop with what we might now call nature beings,
representing the powers of the non-human domain.
And so cosmological stories change.
It's a humanised supreme leader who makes, you know, calms primal seas and separates light and dark and names everything and so forth.
And, of course, serpentine beings as the key personification of non-human powers,
are demonised and slain by new culture heroes determined to impose the patriarchal authority of supreme father gods.
And in the process, nature becomes a dual separated thing from culture.
Uh, it's alienated, it's feminised, and water is cast either as a recalcitrant chaos or as properly domesticated and compliant source of production.
And this led to what Matt Edgeworth, the archaeologist, describes as a wrestle for control in which larger society stopped making uh,
major attempts to impose human order on water flows through the imposition of water infrastructure,
which Rogers and O'Neill describe as infrastructural violence.
And even in cultural context, where water being such as Nargis was still venerated,
deities emerging in human form, um are keen to exert their authority over them.
And a nice example is provided by this very well known story of Krishna and Kalia from the Bhagavata Purana,
which describes how because Kalia was said to be poisoning the human,
a river, Krishna in human form makes himself vast and dances on the serpent's heads until his wives beg for mercy.
And you also find new representations of serpentine beings subservient to new humanised deities.
So we have Krishna and Lakshmi reclining on the great serpent here, and the goddess Ganga being carried on, on my car.
Um, and um. This new human water dynamic, in which power and agency shift to humanised deities,
is very nicely illustrated in a well well-known story of how, shortly after his enlightenment,
the Buddha was meditating in a forest when a great storm blew up and the Naga
king Mother Linda shelters the Buddha from the storm with his seven heads,
and the Naga then took the form of a young Brahman and paid homage to the Buddha, in other words accepting his primacy.
And as well as illuminating a pattern of deity humanisation in conjunction with social and technological changes.
One of the most intriguing findings of this study is that it reveals how, in displacing water beings, uh,
even the most fully humanoid gods have to take over their central role in providing reliable and sufficient flows of water.
They have to lay down the law by either withholding water or sending punitive floods.
They have to provide consciousness and enlightenment, and they guide the spirit through material and non material realms.
And I love this. But in order to maintain these hydrological and hydro theological cycles,
the new gods also have to ascend and descend successfully through visible and invisible celestial, earthly and underworld domains.
So the stories of gods ascending to heaven or descending to rescue souls from underworld, of the dead or from [INAUDIBLE],
can be seen to be reflective of much earlier beliefs in non-human water deities and their hydrological circulations.
This pattern also revealed in many societal trajectories, a critical shift in power away from the nature of beings embodying, um,
the generative agency of water and the non-human world,
to deities representing a much greater expectation of human control over the material environment.
Based on the development of sophisticated farming and irrigating technologies and new social and political arrangements,
we don't have time to explore these, but in different ways and in different times and places.
What emerges among, um, formal, varied relationships with water beings ranging from in smaller, traditional, place based societies,
great continuity in their veneration through to extremely adversarial relationships where they find themselves in competition with militantly,
militantly evangelical new religions determined to assert the authority of Supreme Father deities.
And in between, of course, both culturally and historically, there are many more ambiguous relationships with water beings,
characterised by shifting tensions between the veneration of water and its supernatural personifications,
and society's growing desires to assert power and control over the material world.
And so we see. Emergence of narratives in which, rather than being the proper supernatural authorities with the right to control water and knowledge,
serpentine beings are accused of illicitly hoarding these things.
And a nice example is the Hindu story from the Rigveda, about 15,000 BCE,
in which the humanised god Indra battles with Vitra, a serpentine being who's known as the suppressor,
who causes drought by enveloping and containing the primordial waters, and like Zeus at his battle with Typhon,
Indra uses a thunderbolt to slave it, releasing the waters from his grasp.
And if we turn to classical European narratives, one of the earliest Greek heroes, Cadmus, slays a dragon to gain access to a sacred spring,
and in sowing the dragon's teeth, creates the Spartans, who assisted in founding the city of Thebes.
So he gains control of the water and the capacity to generate human beings.
The ancient Greeks also give us the term for dragon, which arises from the term dukkha,
meaning to watch, or, as Apollonius puts it, to have restless eyes,
and this resonates with earlier beliefs in which serpentine water beings compose sentient ancestral landscapes,
which, as I noted before, are always watching and responding to human actions.
And there are lots of Greek and Roman narratives describing serpent beings hoarding or guarding forbidden or sacred knowledge and treasure.
For example, Ladon, who according to Ptolemy, is a manifestation of the celestial dragon gods, the golden apples of wisdom in the garden.
If the Hesperides, until Herakles comes along to slay him and steal the apples, uh,
we get a similar, uh, story in Jason and the Argonauts, with versions by Homer and others.
This is more directly about stealing power, since the Golden Fleece,
located in the Sacred grove and guarded by the dragon, is a symbol, is a symbol of kingship and authority.
And so, with the help of Medea, who hypnotises the dragon, or in some version of Athena's help in drugging it,
Jason succeeds in stealing the Golden Fleece and therefore gains the throne.
A wild course in Thessaly.
And I note that in both of these cases, the stolen objects are golden and there are multiple interpretations of what the Golden Fleece represents.
And some scholars have noted that the Greek philosopher and writer Strabo refers to a
practice in the fifth century BCE in which sheep fleeces we use to sieve gold from streams.
So this brings us more directly around to the subject of treasure.
And it seems reasonable, suggest that a process in which ideas shift away from seeing water beings as sentient personifications of non-human powers,
and the source of all wealth and well-being to a vision of the world in which humankind is seen to have,
um, uh, semi-autonomous power required new visions of what constitutes treasure and wealth and reproductive
capacity are no longer simply located in water bodies as sources of power and fertility.
In fact, with the widespread engineering of water and science, there's an increasingly disenchanted re categorisation of water as a material resource.
And nor were the vast lexicons of ecological knowledge necessary for successful hunter gatherers.
Still a major source of social capital and wealth.
With advancing technologies and new forms of knowledge, people could accumulate all kinds of material wealth,
just not just in land, water and slaves, but also in art, artefacts and material culture.
So we get a sense of how the larger wrestle for direct control over water flows,
and empowering knowledge segways into competition for the possession of more material treasures.
And this helps to explain the multiple stories in which serpentine deities, formerly seen as the direct generators of wealth and health,
become the guardians of sacred relics and glittering heaps of treasure,
but is also worth drawing attention to the interesting resonance between relics and early and often notions of parthenogenesis.
As we've seen in many early stories, serpentine creator beings form the earth and so forth,
often out of their own bodies, establishing themselves as primary ancestral beings.
And this kind of primary primogeniture can be seen in the Mesopotamian Elish,
and in the illusion which heaven and earth are made from two halves of Tiamat body.
You can see it in Chinese creation narratives about the creator Pan GU, whose body forms all of the parts of the world,
and the Aztec stories of the androgynous only child tool who gives birth to the first race of gods,
and also the Aztec serpent twins who make the world out, a third serpent being.
We also have Norse tales of Cosmo Genesis, in which the hermaphrodite creator,
being Ymir, emerges from a chaotic abyss, composes the world from his body.
So the power of the ancestral body is transferred to humanised deities through
the creation of relics seen to hold the vital force of holy antecedents.
So Gillard Yak, here, writing about the stupa of Ram and Gramma in Nepal,
notes that it's believed that any place the Buddha was present physically is imbued with his presence and is thus considered a relic, and vice versa.
The site enshrining his relics such as Rama Groner, still imbue presence.
He put his presence. And you get very similar beliefs around the world when it comes to relics.
Uh, ancestral bodies abound in other major religions.
So, for example, as well as a more conventional piece of the True Cross,
the reliquary in Padua in Italy contains parts of a number of saints, including the incorrupt tongue and jawbone of Saint Anthony.
And as in other religions, these relics draw pilgrims to these holy places to engage with and venerate them.
So there's this rather interesting link, I think, a conceptual link between the parthenogenesis of ancestral serpent beings creating
a sentient landscape in which they concentrate their vital supernatural powers,
and the ways in which material relics of holy ancestral beings of various kinds are seen to retain the power and presence of deities,
prophets, and saints. But of course, relics are far from being the only form of treasure.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the transition of power from water beings and the non-human domain to
humanised deities is that wealth and power is subsequently embodied in treasure that is made from shining,
glittering materials extracted from the earth.
And I want to propose to you that this is to some extent a momentous process, and I'll explain alongside my obsession with water beings, my,
through graphic research on human water relations,
has regularly included gathering data on people's phenomenological engagements with water bodies, and these are often deeply affective.
In fact, I'm currently working on a piece for Current Ontology about the anthropology of wonder,
which explores human responses to water and light, and this area of research brings together.
Um, ethnography, material culture studies, as well as evolutionary anthropology and the science of vision and cognition.
To consider why shimmering animated water surfaces mesmerise people and induce feelings of wonder and awe.
And this is also required me to engage with a range of work on how people respond to things that shine are all intense in colour and hue,
and how such objects are seen to contain immanent power.
So if we go back to Australia for a moment, we consider the Aboriginal belief systems I described.
We get a very nice example from Donald Taylor, who relates how the long new people in Arnhem Land describe an ancestral power called billion.
As being like the light shimmering on water, and is explained by Howard and Francis Morphy.
This notion of animation is similarly applied to the Bach paintings, which, as you can see,
a cross hatched with colourful ochres and can also be seen in explanations of the dot paintings of the central desert groups.
And these artworks are believed to shimmer with, and more specifically to emanate ancestral power,
which then acts upon the viewer, and then from other visual anthropologists and material culture folk such as Nicole Boivin,
Paul Tack on Alfred Joe, Jeremy Coote, Mike O'Hanlon, who've worked on the meanings of stones and minerals,
swirling and dappled patterns, and colourful body painting.
We know that this appreciation of bling, the magnetism of glitter and shine, and the notion that this represents vitality and power,
runs through human history across diverse cultures, and can be seen in multiple forms of art and material culture.
And of course, this is clearly relevant in understanding how societies define a treasure which is so often glittering and shiny and precious.
So what I'd like to suggest is that we're looking at a mimetic developmental process from which an appreciation
of a glittering animation of water bodies containing what every society knew to be a vital essence of life.
There's a logical transition to that create and value mimetic ornaments that reproduce the aesthetics and animating shimmer of water and light.
And it's perhaps not entirely coincidental that, more often than not,
highly prized treasure or object signifying wealth are composed of materials that, like water, are held within the earth in underground domains.
And people have to be make a little effort to enter these quite dangerous realms.
So like the enlightening knowledge gained by shamans willing to visit underworld domains,
these magmatic treasures extracted from the Earth empower their owners in those societies that still venerated water beings,
and these valuable objects are often used, in fact, as votive offerings to celebrate or propitiate water deities,
to ensure reliable and timely rainfall, or to appeal to them for aid in the time of flood.
And in some religious context we find more distributed forms of identity and ownership.
So as well as, um, appearing in half human, half serpentine forms or shapeshifting between the two.
Um knockers often act as custodians of Buddhist treasures,
and this collaborative relationship can be seen in many parts of India, Golia, Tibet and Nepal.
And I know that your group has a lot of experts who dealt with know a great deal more about this than I do, but it does seem that in these areas,
as elsewhere, the dynamics of this relationship are quite fluid and shift in accord with events, and sometimes tensions emerge.
Uh, we could go to almost any cultural geographic direction for stories of humans seeking to take treasure away from guardian water beings.
For example, in Japan, Princess Tama Tori attempts to take the treasure away from an ocean dwelling dragon King Renjun,
who in as well as being a to tell a tutelary deity, controls the tides with magical jewels.
Um, a tide ebbing jewel and a tide flowing jewel.
And you might like to note that in this instance, the object is, uh, Pearl.
As it is in this Chinese dragon with the moon.
And this occurs recurrently as a symbol of the moon water, femininity and fertility in Japanese and Chinese depictions of water beings.
But if we come back to Europe, plenty of stories about culture heroes taking treasure from grasping serpentine beings.
The story from the Icelandic Volsung saga has Sigurd slaying Faf near to steal his treasure.
And a Danish story in the 13th century, um tells how King Frother refills his war treasury by slaying a dragon and appropriating its treasure.
And of course, then we have the famous both the Old English sagas, which suggests that dragons have an innate love of gold, though little use for it.
And Seamus Heaney gives us a nice translation of, uh, of this saga.
He's driven to hunt out hordes underground to God heathen gold through age long vigils, though to little avail.
And of course, this was a major influence on Tolkien.
The story of Smaug, and this subsequently has influenced many narratives about dragons in 20th century fantasy literature,
in which serpentine beings crouch over glittering hoards of treasure in underworld domains,
guarding them and taking punitive action when impudent humans try to steal from them.
But more often than not, human power triumphs, and the greedy and jealous dragon is slain,
providing repeated assertions of human dominion over the evil and untamed features of nature and human rights to own the world's treasures.
Let's make a visit to one of my favourite water bank stories, which is from my hometown of Durham.
And this is the story of the lamb to worm. Uh, worm comes from, um, the Norse word for dragon.
We don't have time for details anyway, I'm sure you're believed. Be relieved to hear, uh, no time for a rendition of the well-known folk song either.
But very briefly, this is a story about Sir John Lampton, who, in the crusading period bunked off from Sunday School,
fishes in the river where pulls out an awful queer worm, and he joins the work worm into a well rather than taking it home.
And then he goes off to fight in the Crusades while he's away slaying infidels,
the worm grooves and brews to an awful size and having started by milking cows, then start to take children, first sheep and then the bands.
So the locals write to Sir John in Palestine, and he gallops home to cut the beast into two halves.
Well, it's particularly interesting about this story. Uh.
Very typical. It's that there's been a light hearted revival of a ritual by which the any bishop, new Bishop of Durham,
is required to begin his term by entering the dioceses at Croft on Tees, where he is met on a bridge over the river by local deities.
And he's handed this medieval falchion a sword, and he has to swear to slay the dragon.
And Justin Welby, who's now the Archbishop of Canterbury, did this and his enthronement seven.
He noted the need to bring Christianity into every community and put a stop to the worship of false idols.
And when his successor, Paul Butler, seen here, was preparing for this ritual, I asked him what the dragon meant to him, and he said no.
Dramatically, I thought, um, it's all the evil in the world.
So the reason I like this story is that it provides a rather nice illustration of the ongoing contestation of power in human non-human relations.
Except, of course, that the wisdom of this stance is now very much in question.
Many societies are asking increasingly anxious questions as to whether alienating humankind from nature
and asserting patriarchal dominion and imposing neoliberal forms of capitalism is really a good idea,
given that these beliefs and practices have led to highly unsustainable practices which are driving climate change and environmental destruction.
So there has been a rather interesting shift in recent decades.
Narratives about serpent beings in popular art and literature have shifted,
reflecting these concerns, and that we're seeing more sympathetic portrayals of, um.
Uh, serpentine beings and their powers as wise, sympathetic partners to humankind, sometimes telepathic and as guardians of the environment.
So we get new culture heroes, women developing collaborative relationships with these beings, seeking to restore and protect the powers of nature.
And this shift, of course, has been very influenced, um, by the contemporary deployment of indigenous water beings in political debates,
where as manifestations and personifications of water and its creative powers,
they serve to critique the practices of colonising societies, to assert the rights of indigenous people,
and to articulate more convivial, more alternate visions of human non-human relations.
Um, these worldviews, of course, have had a major influence on contemporary scholarship and activism relating to nonhuman rights and the need to
address the major inequities in power that lead to habitat destruction and the mass extinction of other species.
So many groups are seeking new forms of law that uphold the rights of other species to flourish,
and which seek to provide democratic representation of these rights in governance and decision making processes.
And along with the resurfacing of ancient water beings to speak for the interests of water bodies,
artists and activist groups are collaborating to create new ones.
So here's a nice example, um, which I was involved in, created by the artist Sasha Constable, who's John Constable's granddaughter.
And this was an otter dragon made for the May Day Festival in Cerne Abbas in 2023,
and it was explicitly designed to celebrate the agency and the rights of local waterways.
So to conclude what I hope this tiny foray into a vast history of serpentine water beings
has provided is a sense of how they've always been linked to some form of treasure.
That they were, from the very beginning, the providers of wealth, health,
fertility and knowledge, and authoritative guardians of social and ecological well-being.
So while respect for the co co-creative role of the non-human domain has waxed and waned,
they have remained inextricably connected to ideas and objects expressing what we value.
With luck, we're now performing a cycle that recognises that co-creative role and the need to protect water bodies.
But this also requires us to rethink what we mean by treasure today, and whether wealth lies in accumulating and guarding shiny stuff.
Or in the capacity of societies and ecosystems to regenerate themselves and flourish over time.
Thank you.