1 00:00:15,290 --> 00:00:19,639 [Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] Okay. Good. Uh, evening and afternoon and morning, everyone. 2 00:00:19,640 --> 00:00:23,390 And special welcome to Professor Veronika Strong. 3 00:00:23,390 --> 00:00:30,880 We are very grateful for you being here with us today. Uh, professor Veronika Strong is a cultural anthropologist. 4 00:00:30,890 --> 00:00:37,700 Her work is concerned with human environmental relations, in particular society's engagement with the water. 5 00:00:38,180 --> 00:00:45,440 And she recently completed a major comparative study examining historical and contemporary beliefs about water deities. 6 00:00:46,820 --> 00:00:49,220 As well as working with Unesco and the UN. 7 00:00:49,850 --> 00:00:59,900 Uh, Veronika has held a kind of mic posts, uh, in Oxford at the University of Wales, Goldsmiths University and the University of Auckland. 8 00:01:00,410 --> 00:01:07,010 Her most recent role was the executive director of Durham University's Institute of Advanced Study. 9 00:01:07,550 --> 00:01:12,920 She has served as the chair of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth, 10 00:01:13,250 --> 00:01:18,470 and Assistant Research England's National Advisory Panel on Interdisciplinarity. 11 00:01:19,130 --> 00:01:24,470 In 2019, she was elected as fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences, 12 00:01:25,340 --> 00:01:31,730 and further details about her research and her many publications are available on her website. 13 00:01:33,320 --> 00:01:38,160 Hey. Thank you and welcome. Thank you, Anna. 14 00:01:38,160 --> 00:01:43,800 And thank you also Robert and Cathy for inviting me, um, to come and talk to this group. 15 00:01:44,040 --> 00:01:49,829 But it encouraged me to tease out an aspect of my favourite research topic, uh, 16 00:01:49,830 --> 00:01:55,320 which I haven't really explored much previously, which is always the best thing about such invitations. 17 00:01:55,740 --> 00:02:03,569 So today I'm going to talk about supernatural water deities and how and why these serpentine 18 00:02:03,570 --> 00:02:09,480 beings have a historically recurrent role as the guardians of cultural treasures. 19 00:02:10,020 --> 00:02:19,320 And I'll be drawing on several decades of research on water beings, as these appear ubiquitously in early human history. 20 00:02:19,680 --> 00:02:25,260 A minor obsession with them, beginning with the Rainbow Serpent in Australia back in the 80s, 21 00:02:25,500 --> 00:02:34,110 somehow grew into this massive comparative study examining their role in different cultural and historical context. 22 00:02:34,680 --> 00:02:40,709 So the findings of this research were published last year by Reaction Press in a book 23 00:02:40,710 --> 00:02:45,300 called As You See Water Beings From Nature Worship to the Environmental Crisis. 24 00:02:45,750 --> 00:02:54,840 And this is a fundamentally Durkheim in study, in its theoretical approach, it takes as a given that society's, 25 00:02:55,200 --> 00:03:02,790 um, religious beliefs mirror the political, social and and, uh, relations. 26 00:03:03,210 --> 00:03:05,910 So it also adds to Durkheim's thinking. 27 00:03:05,910 --> 00:03:14,490 The proposal, we should look closely at the recursive ity of their material practices and how these affect religious ideas. 28 00:03:14,850 --> 00:03:20,489 And the study suggests that major advancement in technological control over the material 29 00:03:20,490 --> 00:03:27,260 environment tend to encourage notions of dominion and power over the non-human realm. 30 00:03:27,270 --> 00:03:28,650 And I'll come back to this point. 31 00:03:29,780 --> 00:03:37,460 The research also accepts the conventional view of theologians and historians that belief systems like cultural landscapes, 32 00:03:37,700 --> 00:03:42,950 a palimpsest that build on and borrow from earlier layers. 33 00:03:43,640 --> 00:03:50,660 Cosmological explanations. Deities of ritual practices often persist, appearing in new forms, 34 00:03:50,990 --> 00:03:58,069 but remain traceable back to very early foundations, and this is particularly relevant to our discussion today, 35 00:03:58,070 --> 00:04:06,620 because I want to suggest to you that the association between serpentine beings and treasure is quite literally fundamental, 36 00:04:06,620 --> 00:04:17,690 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. 37 00:04:18,760 --> 00:04:26,920 And tracing these connections is the advantage of risking one's colleagues anxieties about, and sometimes disapproval of, 38 00:04:27,100 --> 00:04:34,480 comparative research and disciplinary preferences for the safety of more specific case studies. 39 00:04:35,230 --> 00:04:40,180 But today, with the rich ethnographic and historical research that's now readily available, 40 00:04:40,480 --> 00:04:45,820 it's possible to have both depth and breadth and to make use of high quality, 41 00:04:45,820 --> 00:04:52,390 in-depth studies, and also to tease out meta narratives and make comparative analyses. 42 00:04:52,660 --> 00:04:56,620 And I'll bet this does take time. I've been working on this topic for decades, 43 00:04:56,920 --> 00:05:04,360 but it's worth it because it reveals larger patterns and recurrences that close up perspectives cannot provide. 44 00:05:04,360 --> 00:05:08,909 And I personally think that this is exciting. Now. 45 00:05:08,910 --> 00:05:18,660 In essence, the study shows how aquatic deities reflect key social and political changes over time in people's relationships with water. 46 00:05:19,080 --> 00:05:24,569 And it gives us some idea as to how some societies have arrived at exploitative and 47 00:05:24,570 --> 00:05:31,560 unsustainable practices that are now impacting very heavily on aquatic ecosystems. 48 00:05:31,950 --> 00:05:36,660 It reveals some intriguing connections between technological and religious changes, 49 00:05:37,170 --> 00:05:42,059 and it looks at how water beings are now being deployed very effectively by 50 00:05:42,060 --> 00:05:46,920 many indigenous communities and environmental activists to promote alternate, 51 00:05:47,130 --> 00:05:50,220 more reciprocal relationships with water. 52 00:05:51,510 --> 00:05:58,210 So today, I want to use this comparative study to consider how water beings recurrent connections with treasure have come about. 53 00:05:58,230 --> 00:06:01,379 So not everyone's obsessed about them as I am. 54 00:06:01,380 --> 00:06:06,420 So I'm going to start with a little bit of water beings want over and about what they are and what they do. 55 00:06:08,390 --> 00:06:12,379 Aquatic deities appear ubiquitously in human history, 56 00:06:12,380 --> 00:06:20,660 and this is quite simply because they manifest and personify the generative and potentially destructive properties of water, 57 00:06:20,960 --> 00:06:24,020 which of course, is universally central to human lives. 58 00:06:24,530 --> 00:06:30,980 So in this sense, they're composed of water. They reflect its material properties and behaviours. 59 00:06:31,310 --> 00:06:36,560 So while, of course they had culturally and geographically and historically particular, 60 00:06:36,950 --> 00:06:42,950 they reflect these specificities and they also incorporate local species that they generate. 61 00:06:43,280 --> 00:06:47,330 They're generally serpentine and fluid in form. 62 00:06:47,570 --> 00:06:51,890 They dwell in water bodies, rivers, aquifers, lakes and seas. 63 00:06:52,250 --> 00:06:57,590 They ascendant, descend from clouds and mountains or celestial sky rivers, 64 00:06:57,950 --> 00:07:03,710 and they represent peoples understandings of waters, hydrological flows and cycles. 65 00:07:04,040 --> 00:07:09,049 And it's here that we can see the connection between these understandings and common 66 00:07:09,050 --> 00:07:15,140 interpretations of rainbows as visible manifestations of water's movement between, 67 00:07:15,510 --> 00:07:19,460 uh, earthly and celestial realms. 68 00:07:19,790 --> 00:07:28,220 Often, as we can see with an implicit underground rainbow completing the invisible half of the hydrological cycle. 69 00:07:29,210 --> 00:07:33,110 So in morphological terms, as you can see from these gorgeous pictures, 70 00:07:33,740 --> 00:07:43,160 water beings comprise a vast policy family in serpentine and essentially watery objects and images. 71 00:07:44,220 --> 00:07:47,360 And as well as sharing for more material characteristics. 72 00:07:47,370 --> 00:07:53,880 Aquatic deities share the creative. And as I said, sometimes destructive agency of water. 73 00:07:54,420 --> 00:07:59,910 Many of fear appear as key figures in stories of cosmic genesis. 74 00:08:00,270 --> 00:08:10,950 They emerge from primal seas to form the world, often from their own bodies, and this parthenogenesis establish them as primary ancestral beings. 75 00:08:11,550 --> 00:08:15,390 In the process, they create order in various ways. 76 00:08:15,390 --> 00:08:20,040 Their bodies stabilise the primal chaos in separating land and water. 77 00:08:20,340 --> 00:08:24,870 And often light and dark, they form land and water scapes. 78 00:08:24,880 --> 00:08:32,340 They generate the living kind to inhabit them. They bring consciousness and enlightenment to humankind, 79 00:08:32,670 --> 00:08:42,330 and they are the source of laws governing behaviour and in performing hydro theological cycles between material and non-material realms. 80 00:08:42,600 --> 00:08:49,230 They carry persons, or, if you like, the human spirit into and out of material incarnation. 81 00:08:50,770 --> 00:08:58,839 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, 82 00:08:58,840 --> 00:09:07,240 or when they're being punitive in enforcing the law or creating disorder and chaos, they withhold it and send overwhelming floods. 83 00:09:08,320 --> 00:09:12,790 So in this sense, water beings are key fertility deities. 84 00:09:12,850 --> 00:09:21,310 They responsible for the production and reproduction of all biological organisms and maintaining the health of ecosystems, 85 00:09:21,670 --> 00:09:27,790 as well as ensuring that societies maintain orderly processes of reproduction and production. 86 00:09:28,420 --> 00:09:36,970 So what's most pertinent here is that health and wealth are both conceptually and etymologically related. 87 00:09:37,330 --> 00:09:42,310 Both words spring from a Proto-Indo-European term kalo, which means whole. 88 00:09:42,760 --> 00:09:52,330 And this segues into Proto Germanic highly so, Old English help, which also means wholeness, being whole, sound and well. 89 00:09:52,690 --> 00:09:57,610 And these link with related terms healthy, hail, holy and heal. 90 00:09:58,150 --> 00:10:05,020 And in these terms in particular well, and [INAUDIBLE] lead etymological to will as in wealth. 91 00:10:06,250 --> 00:10:14,680 So we can see that the base layers of the term for wealth are concerned with health, wholeness, and the integrity of things, 92 00:10:14,680 --> 00:10:22,630 bodies, persons, ecosystems, social systems, and their capacities to be fertile and generative. 93 00:10:24,280 --> 00:10:32,800 So water beings, literally, in essence, flowing between earth and sky in rainbow art, provide the most fundamental form of wealth. 94 00:10:33,100 --> 00:10:40,720 And this idea has persisted, not least in the idea of treasure or wealth being found, for example, at the end of the rainbow. 95 00:10:42,910 --> 00:10:48,130 But in only hunter gatherer societies, where material culture was necessarily minimal, 96 00:10:48,310 --> 00:10:56,620 wealth was comprised of three interrelated things the resources generated by local ecosystems, 97 00:10:57,070 --> 00:11:03,670 the vast lexicon of knowledge that allowed people to reproduce themselves over time, 98 00:11:03,670 --> 00:11:09,670 and to live successfully in many different kinds of environments, and their capacities to do so. 99 00:11:10,990 --> 00:11:16,540 So in ranging from the icy Arctic regions to the most arid regions of Australia, 100 00:11:16,540 --> 00:11:23,230 in Africa, water beings represented and produced every aspect of this well. 101 00:11:28,160 --> 00:11:31,760 So to give you an example, in some of the world's oldest narratives, 102 00:11:32,630 --> 00:11:40,700 the Australian Rainbow Serpent having emerged and populated the world from the dreaming with the ancestors of all living kinds, 103 00:11:41,270 --> 00:11:49,220 remains present in aquifers and other water bodies, constantly generating water and resources and persons. 104 00:11:49,490 --> 00:11:55,459 It resides primarily in the waters of the land, which simultaneously represent the non-visible, 105 00:11:55,460 --> 00:12:00,800 non-material world of the dreaming, but are also present in celestial waters. 106 00:12:01,370 --> 00:12:08,180 The totemic ancestral power that it represents is concentrated in sacred sites, which are often water places. 107 00:12:08,720 --> 00:12:17,390 So what we have, in fact, is a cultural landscape inhabited by ancestral beings and the imminent presence of the Rainbow Serpent, 108 00:12:17,630 --> 00:12:22,730 which is sentient, watching and responsive to human actions. 109 00:12:24,790 --> 00:12:34,030 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. 110 00:12:34,390 --> 00:12:38,800 The spirit jumps up from a water source in a clan, a state, 111 00:12:39,610 --> 00:12:45,820 from this pool of ancestral force that's held in the land, and it enlivens the foetus in a woman's womb. 112 00:12:46,300 --> 00:12:54,820 And this gives that person a spatial and social location in clan land and kin, and a network of collective songlines. 113 00:12:56,680 --> 00:13:04,850 These rights to rights and resources, then when that person dies, the spirit has to be some back to its home, 114 00:13:05,120 --> 00:13:13,520 to be reunited with its totemic ancestors and reabsorbed into the dreaming, and to be reincarnated in due course. 115 00:13:13,550 --> 00:13:18,680 So new babies are often referred to as little grandmother or Little grandfather, 116 00:13:19,430 --> 00:13:24,230 and the Rainbow Serpent is also the source of what Indigenous Australians call the law, 117 00:13:24,530 --> 00:13:27,469 and this is their lexicon of knowledge and wisdom, 118 00:13:27,470 --> 00:13:35,510 which provides an entire cosmological explanation of how the world green came into being, how it's meant to function, and so forth. 119 00:13:35,810 --> 00:13:44,360 And this body of knowledge is transmitted inter-generational via songs, stories, dances, rituals, art and material culture, 120 00:13:44,750 --> 00:13:50,810 and the law governs every aspect of human life, prescribing who should marry whom, who must be avoided. 121 00:13:51,110 --> 00:13:56,780 How to live according to social rules. How to conduct rituals, progress through rites of passage. 122 00:13:57,020 --> 00:14:05,120 How to recognise, harvest and sustain resources, and how to manage activities in concert with a cycle of seasons. 123 00:14:05,570 --> 00:14:15,530 And it defines clan estate by maintaining an enduring relationship between people and place, and affirming their ownership of land and resources. 124 00:14:16,310 --> 00:14:22,940 And as this implies, the Rainbow Serpent has a key role in protecting the interests of indigenous people. 125 00:14:23,240 --> 00:14:32,510 While generally beneficent to its descendant clans, it punishes failures to respect the law, sometimes by bringing home to the transgressors, 126 00:14:33,140 --> 00:14:37,850 and it also acts as an autochthonous force that will deal harshly with strangers 127 00:14:37,850 --> 00:14:42,590 who trespass into sacred places without being baptised by local people, 128 00:14:42,710 --> 00:14:48,350 so that it can recognise them, and who take resources without permission or who harm the environment. 129 00:14:48,350 --> 00:14:53,120 And in extreme cases it will swallow wrongdoers so that they never return. 130 00:14:54,110 --> 00:15:00,549 So this is a very powerful guardian role. In a recent legal case that I was involved in, 131 00:15:00,550 --> 00:15:08,170 the TV Islanders just north of Darwin argued that their marine Rainbow Serpent and to Ji would be angered 132 00:15:08,170 --> 00:15:14,830 by proposals to drill into nearby reefs for hydrocarbons and therefore into the realm of the dreaming, 133 00:15:15,220 --> 00:15:25,450 and would take revenge on the perpetrators. And for quite a long time, they succeeded in preventing a multinational oil company from drilling, 134 00:15:25,450 --> 00:15:29,500 and forced them to the go with them to take care when they did so. 135 00:15:30,890 --> 00:15:35,900 So what we have in the Rainbow Serpent is an omnipresent guardian ancestral being, 136 00:15:35,900 --> 00:15:40,700 which resides primarily in the deep or hidden world of the dreaming. 137 00:15:40,900 --> 00:15:44,390 But it has agency in the material world. 138 00:15:46,420 --> 00:15:52,030 And the Guardian role of water beings is equally clear in New Zealand, where Maori water beings or tiny far. 139 00:15:53,030 --> 00:15:59,030 Are explicitly described as living ancestors and as guardians kaitiaki. 140 00:15:59,780 --> 00:16:00,049 Thus, 141 00:16:00,050 --> 00:16:09,230 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. 142 00:16:09,270 --> 00:16:13,640 Tiny falls are said to live at every bend in the river and their river, 143 00:16:13,670 --> 00:16:23,660 regularly deployed in the opposition to proposed developments such as waterways that might threaten to disrupt and harm waterways. 144 00:16:25,110 --> 00:16:31,110 And in conjunction with sea dwelling deities, they connect people to regenerative watery underworld. 145 00:16:31,440 --> 00:16:37,469 At the end of life, human spirits must travel to the very tip of the North Island in New Zealand and slide 146 00:16:37,470 --> 00:16:43,980 down a particular route into the sea and make their way to their undersea home in Hawaiki. 147 00:16:45,420 --> 00:16:49,200 So Maori water beings like those in Australia and in many other places, 148 00:16:49,200 --> 00:16:54,989 also articulate on indigenous peoples close observations about how the how the 149 00:16:54,990 --> 00:17:00,840 hydrological cycle functions to create annually regenerative flows of water, 150 00:17:01,200 --> 00:17:09,150 as well as beliefs about space time matter and how these circulate hydro theologically through time and space. 151 00:17:10,860 --> 00:17:21,720 So in performing this vital flow, carrying water and the spirit between visible and invisible domains, water beings act as conduits for the celestial, 152 00:17:22,050 --> 00:17:32,010 earthly, and underground worlds, and the capacity to express all parts of this cycle are equally explicit in very different styles around the world. 153 00:17:32,220 --> 00:17:38,520 So if we turn to another example, we go to Central America to look at Mayan beliefs and Chichen Itza, for example. 154 00:17:38,970 --> 00:17:42,150 We've got the great feathered serpent cuckoo Kahn, 155 00:17:42,150 --> 00:17:51,959 who represents the flow of water between the sacred mountains and represented by the pyramids and the earthly realm and the watery Mayan, 156 00:17:51,960 --> 00:18:02,610 all the world of the album. So the summer solstice Cuzco can apparently writhes with power as the summer sun meets the mountain. 157 00:18:03,210 --> 00:18:06,780 And like the wings that are often seen on serpentine beings, 158 00:18:06,780 --> 00:18:15,059 Cuckoo Kahn's feathers indicate an association with the airborne, the celestial half of the water cycle, 159 00:18:15,060 --> 00:18:24,660 and the bright green feathers of the sacred quetzal, but which also gives its name to the more famous plumed serpent Quetzalcoatl, 160 00:18:24,660 --> 00:18:29,250 who, like cuckoo, can connect earthly and celestial waters. 161 00:18:29,640 --> 00:18:39,690 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. 162 00:18:40,170 --> 00:18:48,870 And Central America also gives us many waterlily serpents, and they are rather like the sort of lower half of the hydrological cycle. 163 00:18:48,870 --> 00:18:53,670 They reside in Jabalpur, and they reach upwards into the material world. 164 00:18:54,210 --> 00:19:00,840 And it brings us lightning serpents. And this is actually an Aztec, uh, serpent, which is contiguous. 165 00:19:01,320 --> 00:19:04,410 But there are many such lightning serpents which bring the rain. 166 00:19:04,680 --> 00:19:09,750 And these underline a recurrent association between water beings and fire as well. 167 00:19:10,650 --> 00:19:19,230 And you also get these wonderful venu water beings in the Pueblo and in the Pueblo area of America. 168 00:19:19,470 --> 00:19:26,310 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. 169 00:19:26,880 --> 00:19:34,080 Uh, stories about dragons and serpents still locate them in water bodies and swamps and caves and marshes and so forth. 170 00:19:34,440 --> 00:19:38,940 And many have wings representing the water in airborne form. 171 00:19:39,450 --> 00:19:42,540 But since their demonisation in the medieval period, 172 00:19:42,540 --> 00:19:50,670 they were often associated with punitive fire and pestilence rather than with the lightning that brings beneficent rain. 173 00:19:50,880 --> 00:19:55,140 Because that role, uh, had been appropriated by the Christian God. 174 00:19:56,500 --> 00:19:57,309 Across Asia. 175 00:19:57,310 --> 00:20:06,520 However, serpentine deities as beneficent water bringers remains more consistent, and in Vietnam and China, for example, this is from Beijing. 176 00:20:07,300 --> 00:20:15,190 They are typically depicted ascending and descending, and therefore are very clearly part of the hydrological cycle. 177 00:20:15,670 --> 00:20:25,990 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. 178 00:20:26,170 --> 00:20:34,360 They're actually just composed of water. And they descend in Japan from the Misty mountains, inhabited the depths of seas and rivers. 179 00:20:35,750 --> 00:20:43,190 So this elemental role as water beings, as manifestations of hydrological cycles and hydro theological cycles, 180 00:20:43,400 --> 00:20:47,220 shows that they embody the generative capacities of water. 181 00:20:47,240 --> 00:20:52,340 They are fundamentally the source of fertility, wealth and health, 182 00:20:52,850 --> 00:20:59,140 and they're also major authority figures who enforce the law and guard things on an everyday basis. 183 00:20:59,150 --> 00:21:05,840 They have to be respected, venerated, celebrated, propitiate, and with rituals and offerings. 184 00:21:06,050 --> 00:21:08,630 And if displeased, they can always be punitive. 185 00:21:09,260 --> 00:21:18,590 And in this sense that the guardians of the most precious treasure, the substance of life itself, and the spirit that enlivens humankind. 186 00:21:19,610 --> 00:21:27,169 And as well as guarding water bodies. Water bodies are often the source and guardians of the sacred and secret knowledge, 187 00:21:27,170 --> 00:21:34,010 which, as I noted, is the basic form of wealth and power in early human societies. 188 00:21:34,400 --> 00:21:38,850 So. For example, in the Aboriginal groups I work with in Cape York. 189 00:21:38,850 --> 00:21:48,930 Gaining this deeper knowledge requires the would be clever doctor, as they called to perform a dangerous ritual known as passing through the rainbow. 190 00:21:49,380 --> 00:21:54,360 And this entails immersion in a sacred water body, i.e. the body of the serpent. 191 00:21:54,840 --> 00:22:04,260 And as in many shamanic rituals, this permits the actor to enter an alternate dimension and to acquire sacred knowledge and therefore power. 192 00:22:04,830 --> 00:22:09,780 So this is a very recurrent motif in engagement with water beings. 193 00:22:09,930 --> 00:22:15,960 So if we go back to Central America, for example, we have here the serpent's mouth at Chicana, 194 00:22:16,140 --> 00:22:20,970 which provides entry to a temple, and so to the sacred underworld. 195 00:22:21,510 --> 00:22:30,690 Further south in Amazonia, you find giant anaconda canoes carrying those willing to endanger themselves to other dimensions of being. 196 00:22:31,620 --> 00:22:35,309 And all across Asia, uh, serpent beings, dragons, 197 00:22:35,310 --> 00:22:44,190 nagas and mackerels go to the entrances to shrines and temples, marking a transition into sacred spaces. 198 00:22:44,730 --> 00:22:48,299 And it's worth recalling that in Buddhism and other eastern religions, uh, 199 00:22:48,300 --> 00:22:57,810 serpentine beings are very typically cast as tutelary deities able to convey wisdom and spiritual enlightenment. 200 00:22:58,530 --> 00:23:08,130 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. 201 00:23:08,550 --> 00:23:19,650 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. 202 00:23:20,370 --> 00:23:29,160 So from their earliest imaginings, they're the guardian guardians of wealth and treasure, as it was understood by early human societies. 203 00:23:30,660 --> 00:23:34,260 But then we come to a key shift in human water relations. 204 00:23:34,260 --> 00:23:42,180 About 10,000 years ago, societies begin to try to control water flows themselves with farming and so forth. 205 00:23:42,510 --> 00:23:49,470 And there had previously been some subtle efforts to do this, for example, with little water channels, feeling taro gardens and so forth. 206 00:23:50,280 --> 00:23:55,530 But moved toward greater reliance on agriculture even in small scale society. 207 00:23:55,920 --> 00:24:02,100 Entails some adaptations to the forms of local water deities and in their role. 208 00:24:02,550 --> 00:24:08,880 So, for example, we go back to these horned serpents from the pueblos, and they acquire little maize colours, 209 00:24:09,180 --> 00:24:15,300 um, that indicate their focus more on providing rain for annual crops. 210 00:24:16,600 --> 00:24:22,900 Then in some societies, people begin building bonds to capture annual inundations, to grow rice, 211 00:24:23,200 --> 00:24:29,299 and then they invent water wheels or noria, and they start to construct canal canals. 212 00:24:29,300 --> 00:24:34,810 So we can see the emergence of irrigation society, for example, in the Indus Valley and the Levant. 213 00:24:35,290 --> 00:24:43,810 And as Holkar has observed, these larger infrastructural endeavours require a lot of human labour and and coordination. 214 00:24:43,990 --> 00:24:53,740 So they tend to lead to greater political centralisation and the creation of new social hierarchies, and they allow for population growth. 215 00:24:54,400 --> 00:24:55,540 And most critically, 216 00:24:55,930 --> 00:25:06,820 religious leaders and divine rulers begin to take over from supernatural water beings the responsibility to provide the rain and control water flows. 217 00:25:08,510 --> 00:25:14,960 So over time, previously, serpentine gods begin to gain more human forms. 218 00:25:16,560 --> 00:25:22,049 They require human heads and torsos and then they sometimes humanise entirely. 219 00:25:22,050 --> 00:25:25,370 So it was Iris called the great green God. 220 00:25:25,380 --> 00:25:33,660 The right great round one transitions from serpentine form into more human representation, and the curious, 221 00:25:33,660 --> 00:25:36,900 rather than representing the power and authority of water, 222 00:25:37,200 --> 00:25:46,050 becomes a symbol of power of human pharaohs who, like supreme leaders elsewhere, acquire divine powers. 223 00:25:46,350 --> 00:25:49,650 So you can see here it becomes a kind of accessory. 224 00:25:51,260 --> 00:25:55,640 An agriculture supported by irrigation allows populations to grow very rapidly 225 00:25:55,790 --> 00:26:01,400 and therefore to require much more material control over the environment. 226 00:26:01,730 --> 00:26:10,309 And increasingly, they compete with each other for the control of territory, and new religions with entirely humanised deities emerge, 227 00:26:10,310 --> 00:26:20,330 bringing notions of human exceptionalism and dominion, and appropriating aquatic being role in generating water in life. 228 00:26:20,750 --> 00:26:28,400 And in these contexts, much more adversarial relations start to develop with what we might now call nature beings, 229 00:26:28,580 --> 00:26:32,780 representing the powers of the non-human domain. 230 00:26:33,020 --> 00:26:35,209 And so cosmological stories change. 231 00:26:35,210 --> 00:26:44,000 It's a humanised supreme leader who makes, you know, calms primal seas and separates light and dark and names everything and so forth. 232 00:26:44,990 --> 00:26:50,270 And, of course, serpentine beings as the key personification of non-human powers, 233 00:26:50,750 --> 00:26:59,810 are demonised and slain by new culture heroes determined to impose the patriarchal authority of supreme father gods. 234 00:27:00,260 --> 00:27:05,390 And in the process, nature becomes a dual separated thing from culture. 235 00:27:05,940 --> 00:27:17,900 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. 236 00:27:18,500 --> 00:27:27,020 And this led to what Matt Edgeworth, the archaeologist, describes as a wrestle for control in which larger society stopped making uh, 237 00:27:27,110 --> 00:27:34,339 major attempts to impose human order on water flows through the imposition of water infrastructure, 238 00:27:34,340 --> 00:27:38,120 which Rogers and O'Neill describe as infrastructural violence. 239 00:27:39,710 --> 00:27:44,300 And even in cultural context, where water being such as Nargis was still venerated, 240 00:27:44,630 --> 00:27:51,210 deities emerging in human form, um are keen to exert their authority over them. 241 00:27:51,230 --> 00:27:57,500 And a nice example is provided by this very well known story of Krishna and Kalia from the Bhagavata Purana, 242 00:27:57,680 --> 00:28:02,509 which describes how because Kalia was said to be poisoning the human, 243 00:28:02,510 --> 00:28:11,210 a river, Krishna in human form makes himself vast and dances on the serpent's heads until his wives beg for mercy. 244 00:28:12,600 --> 00:28:19,830 And you also find new representations of serpentine beings subservient to new humanised deities. 245 00:28:19,840 --> 00:28:27,479 So we have Krishna and Lakshmi reclining on the great serpent here, and the goddess Ganga being carried on, on my car. 246 00:28:27,480 --> 00:28:40,390 Um, and um. This new human water dynamic, in which power and agency shift to humanised deities, 247 00:28:40,570 --> 00:28:45,280 is very nicely illustrated in a well well-known story of how, shortly after his enlightenment, 248 00:28:45,610 --> 00:28:49,810 the Buddha was meditating in a forest when a great storm blew up and the Naga 249 00:28:49,820 --> 00:28:55,090 king Mother Linda shelters the Buddha from the storm with his seven heads, 250 00:28:55,480 --> 00:29:04,450 and the Naga then took the form of a young Brahman and paid homage to the Buddha, in other words accepting his primacy. 251 00:29:06,530 --> 00:29:12,680 And as well as illuminating a pattern of deity humanisation in conjunction with social and technological changes. 252 00:29:12,860 --> 00:29:21,259 One of the most intriguing findings of this study is that it reveals how, in displacing water beings, uh, 253 00:29:21,260 --> 00:29:30,170 even the most fully humanoid gods have to take over their central role in providing reliable and sufficient flows of water. 254 00:29:30,530 --> 00:29:36,110 They have to lay down the law by either withholding water or sending punitive floods. 255 00:29:36,560 --> 00:29:45,320 They have to provide consciousness and enlightenment, and they guide the spirit through material and non material realms. 256 00:29:45,830 --> 00:29:53,000 And I love this. But in order to maintain these hydrological and hydro theological cycles, 257 00:29:53,270 --> 00:30:04,070 the new gods also have to ascend and descend successfully through visible and invisible celestial, earthly and underworld domains. 258 00:30:04,640 --> 00:30:10,520 So the stories of gods ascending to heaven or descending to rescue souls from underworld, of the dead or from [INAUDIBLE], 259 00:30:11,090 --> 00:30:19,190 can be seen to be reflective of much earlier beliefs in non-human water deities and their hydrological circulations. 260 00:30:20,250 --> 00:30:29,030 This pattern also revealed in many societal trajectories, a critical shift in power away from the nature of beings embodying, um, 261 00:30:29,240 --> 00:30:33,080 the generative agency of water and the non-human world, 262 00:30:33,620 --> 00:30:39,650 to deities representing a much greater expectation of human control over the material environment. 263 00:30:39,890 --> 00:30:47,780 Based on the development of sophisticated farming and irrigating technologies and new social and political arrangements, 264 00:30:48,500 --> 00:30:53,630 we don't have time to explore these, but in different ways and in different times and places. 265 00:30:54,020 --> 00:31:03,260 What emerges among, um, formal, varied relationships with water beings ranging from in smaller, traditional, place based societies, 266 00:31:03,500 --> 00:31:13,430 great continuity in their veneration through to extremely adversarial relationships where they find themselves in competition with militantly, 267 00:31:13,430 --> 00:31:21,650 militantly evangelical new religions determined to assert the authority of Supreme Father deities. 268 00:31:22,730 --> 00:31:30,049 And in between, of course, both culturally and historically, there are many more ambiguous relationships with water beings, 269 00:31:30,050 --> 00:31:37,010 characterised by shifting tensions between the veneration of water and its supernatural personifications, 270 00:31:37,220 --> 00:31:43,160 and society's growing desires to assert power and control over the material world. 271 00:31:43,940 --> 00:31:54,180 And so we see. Emergence of narratives in which, rather than being the proper supernatural authorities with the right to control water and knowledge, 272 00:31:54,450 --> 00:31:59,010 serpentine beings are accused of illicitly hoarding these things. 273 00:31:59,130 --> 00:32:04,440 And a nice example is the Hindu story from the Rigveda, about 15,000 BCE, 274 00:32:05,100 --> 00:32:12,390 in which the humanised god Indra battles with Vitra, a serpentine being who's known as the suppressor, 275 00:32:12,660 --> 00:32:21,540 who causes drought by enveloping and containing the primordial waters, and like Zeus at his battle with Typhon, 276 00:32:21,810 --> 00:32:28,140 Indra uses a thunderbolt to slave it, releasing the waters from his grasp. 277 00:32:28,590 --> 00:32:37,830 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, 278 00:32:38,070 --> 00:32:44,640 and in sowing the dragon's teeth, creates the Spartans, who assisted in founding the city of Thebes. 279 00:32:44,760 --> 00:32:49,380 So he gains control of the water and the capacity to generate human beings. 280 00:32:50,070 --> 00:32:55,980 The ancient Greeks also give us the term for dragon, which arises from the term dukkha, 281 00:32:56,310 --> 00:33:02,520 meaning to watch, or, as Apollonius puts it, to have restless eyes, 282 00:33:03,000 --> 00:33:09,659 and this resonates with earlier beliefs in which serpentine water beings compose sentient ancestral landscapes, 283 00:33:09,660 --> 00:33:15,240 which, as I noted before, are always watching and responding to human actions. 284 00:33:15,900 --> 00:33:25,650 And there are lots of Greek and Roman narratives describing serpent beings hoarding or guarding forbidden or sacred knowledge and treasure. 285 00:33:25,950 --> 00:33:35,330 For example, Ladon, who according to Ptolemy, is a manifestation of the celestial dragon gods, the golden apples of wisdom in the garden. 286 00:33:35,340 --> 00:33:41,930 If the Hesperides, until Herakles comes along to slay him and steal the apples, uh, 287 00:33:41,940 --> 00:33:47,430 we get a similar, uh, story in Jason and the Argonauts, with versions by Homer and others. 288 00:33:47,880 --> 00:33:51,480 This is more directly about stealing power, since the Golden Fleece, 289 00:33:51,780 --> 00:33:58,740 located in the Sacred grove and guarded by the dragon, is a symbol, is a symbol of kingship and authority. 290 00:33:59,100 --> 00:34:05,400 And so, with the help of Medea, who hypnotises the dragon, or in some version of Athena's help in drugging it, 291 00:34:06,180 --> 00:34:10,680 Jason succeeds in stealing the Golden Fleece and therefore gains the throne. 292 00:34:10,680 --> 00:34:12,570 A wild course in Thessaly. 293 00:34:13,970 --> 00:34:21,980 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. 294 00:34:22,280 --> 00:34:27,589 And some scholars have noted that the Greek philosopher and writer Strabo refers to a 295 00:34:27,590 --> 00:34:34,610 practice in the fifth century BCE in which sheep fleeces we use to sieve gold from streams. 296 00:34:35,910 --> 00:34:39,810 So this brings us more directly around to the subject of treasure. 297 00:34:40,110 --> 00:34:49,500 And it seems reasonable, suggest that a process in which ideas shift away from seeing water beings as sentient personifications of non-human powers, 298 00:34:49,740 --> 00:34:56,970 and the source of all wealth and well-being to a vision of the world in which humankind is seen to have, 299 00:34:57,300 --> 00:35:06,480 um, uh, semi-autonomous power required new visions of what constitutes treasure and wealth and reproductive 300 00:35:06,840 --> 00:35:12,840 capacity are no longer simply located in water bodies as sources of power and fertility. 301 00:35:13,230 --> 00:35:23,820 In fact, with the widespread engineering of water and science, there's an increasingly disenchanted re categorisation of water as a material resource. 302 00:35:24,450 --> 00:35:30,150 And nor were the vast lexicons of ecological knowledge necessary for successful hunter gatherers. 303 00:35:30,420 --> 00:35:34,260 Still a major source of social capital and wealth. 304 00:35:34,860 --> 00:35:40,860 With advancing technologies and new forms of knowledge, people could accumulate all kinds of material wealth, 305 00:35:41,130 --> 00:35:47,250 just not just in land, water and slaves, but also in art, artefacts and material culture. 306 00:35:47,610 --> 00:35:54,030 So we get a sense of how the larger wrestle for direct control over water flows, 307 00:35:54,210 --> 00:36:01,440 and empowering knowledge segways into competition for the possession of more material treasures. 308 00:36:02,040 --> 00:36:09,270 And this helps to explain the multiple stories in which serpentine deities, formerly seen as the direct generators of wealth and health, 309 00:36:09,570 --> 00:36:15,060 become the guardians of sacred relics and glittering heaps of treasure, 310 00:36:16,230 --> 00:36:25,260 but is also worth drawing attention to the interesting resonance between relics and early and often notions of parthenogenesis. 311 00:36:25,650 --> 00:36:31,350 As we've seen in many early stories, serpentine creator beings form the earth and so forth, 312 00:36:31,710 --> 00:36:36,270 often out of their own bodies, establishing themselves as primary ancestral beings. 313 00:36:36,930 --> 00:36:43,350 And this kind of primary primogeniture can be seen in the Mesopotamian Elish, 314 00:36:43,350 --> 00:36:48,270 and in the illusion which heaven and earth are made from two halves of Tiamat body. 315 00:36:48,630 --> 00:36:55,230 You can see it in Chinese creation narratives about the creator Pan GU, whose body forms all of the parts of the world, 316 00:36:55,740 --> 00:37:01,980 and the Aztec stories of the androgynous only child tool who gives birth to the first race of gods, 317 00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:07,860 and also the Aztec serpent twins who make the world out, a third serpent being. 318 00:37:08,400 --> 00:37:13,049 We also have Norse tales of Cosmo Genesis, in which the hermaphrodite creator, 319 00:37:13,050 --> 00:37:18,630 being Ymir, emerges from a chaotic abyss, composes the world from his body. 320 00:37:19,710 --> 00:37:26,460 So the power of the ancestral body is transferred to humanised deities through 321 00:37:26,460 --> 00:37:33,240 the creation of relics seen to hold the vital force of holy antecedents. 322 00:37:33,780 --> 00:37:38,099 So Gillard Yak, here, writing about the stupa of Ram and Gramma in Nepal, 323 00:37:38,100 --> 00:37:48,150 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. 324 00:37:48,690 --> 00:37:54,299 The site enshrining his relics such as Rama Groner, still imbue presence. 325 00:37:54,300 --> 00:37:59,220 He put his presence. And you get very similar beliefs around the world when it comes to relics. 326 00:37:59,580 --> 00:38:03,450 Uh, ancestral bodies abound in other major religions. 327 00:38:03,450 --> 00:38:07,590 So, for example, as well as a more conventional piece of the True Cross, 328 00:38:07,890 --> 00:38:17,250 the reliquary in Padua in Italy contains parts of a number of saints, including the incorrupt tongue and jawbone of Saint Anthony. 329 00:38:17,640 --> 00:38:25,800 And as in other religions, these relics draw pilgrims to these holy places to engage with and venerate them. 330 00:38:26,850 --> 00:38:34,709 So there's this rather interesting link, I think, a conceptual link between the parthenogenesis of ancestral serpent beings creating 331 00:38:34,710 --> 00:38:39,900 a sentient landscape in which they concentrate their vital supernatural powers, 332 00:38:40,290 --> 00:38:49,410 and the ways in which material relics of holy ancestral beings of various kinds are seen to retain the power and presence of deities, 333 00:38:49,680 --> 00:38:55,830 prophets, and saints. But of course, relics are far from being the only form of treasure. 334 00:38:57,040 --> 00:39:03,459 One of the most fascinating aspects of the transition of power from water beings and the non-human domain to 335 00:39:03,460 --> 00:39:11,410 humanised deities is that wealth and power is subsequently embodied in treasure that is made from shining, 336 00:39:11,800 --> 00:39:14,830 glittering materials extracted from the earth. 337 00:39:15,370 --> 00:39:26,979 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, 338 00:39:26,980 --> 00:39:29,440 through graphic research on human water relations, 339 00:39:29,440 --> 00:39:37,629 has regularly included gathering data on people's phenomenological engagements with water bodies, and these are often deeply affective. 340 00:39:37,630 --> 00:39:42,940 In fact, I'm currently working on a piece for Current Ontology about the anthropology of wonder, 341 00:39:43,210 --> 00:39:50,770 which explores human responses to water and light, and this area of research brings together. 342 00:39:52,510 --> 00:39:59,980 Um, ethnography, material culture studies, as well as evolutionary anthropology and the science of vision and cognition. 343 00:40:00,430 --> 00:40:09,940 To consider why shimmering animated water surfaces mesmerise people and induce feelings of wonder and awe. 344 00:40:10,480 --> 00:40:20,230 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, 345 00:40:20,530 --> 00:40:25,510 and how such objects are seen to contain immanent power. 346 00:40:25,990 --> 00:40:31,780 So if we go back to Australia for a moment, we consider the Aboriginal belief systems I described. 347 00:40:32,020 --> 00:40:41,290 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. 348 00:40:42,430 --> 00:40:49,210 As being like the light shimmering on water, and is explained by Howard and Francis Morphy. 349 00:40:49,510 --> 00:40:55,569 This notion of animation is similarly applied to the Bach paintings, which, as you can see, 350 00:40:55,570 --> 00:41:03,790 a cross hatched with colourful ochres and can also be seen in explanations of the dot paintings of the central desert groups. 351 00:41:04,120 --> 00:41:11,950 And these artworks are believed to shimmer with, and more specifically to emanate ancestral power, 352 00:41:12,190 --> 00:41:20,019 which then acts upon the viewer, and then from other visual anthropologists and material culture folk such as Nicole Boivin, 353 00:41:20,020 --> 00:41:27,820 Paul Tack on Alfred Joe, Jeremy Coote, Mike O'Hanlon, who've worked on the meanings of stones and minerals, 354 00:41:28,030 --> 00:41:31,570 swirling and dappled patterns, and colourful body painting. 355 00:41:31,810 --> 00:41:41,830 We know that this appreciation of bling, the magnetism of glitter and shine, and the notion that this represents vitality and power, 356 00:41:42,220 --> 00:41:49,960 runs through human history across diverse cultures, and can be seen in multiple forms of art and material culture. 357 00:41:50,530 --> 00:41:59,620 And of course, this is clearly relevant in understanding how societies define a treasure which is so often glittering and shiny and precious. 358 00:42:00,750 --> 00:42:09,340 So what I'd like to suggest is that we're looking at a mimetic developmental process from which an appreciation 359 00:42:09,340 --> 00:42:16,690 of a glittering animation of water bodies containing what every society knew to be a vital essence of life. 360 00:42:17,200 --> 00:42:28,300 There's a logical transition to that create and value mimetic ornaments that reproduce the aesthetics and animating shimmer of water and light. 361 00:42:28,690 --> 00:42:32,890 And it's perhaps not entirely coincidental that, more often than not, 362 00:42:33,130 --> 00:42:42,670 highly prized treasure or object signifying wealth are composed of materials that, like water, are held within the earth in underground domains. 363 00:42:42,940 --> 00:42:47,800 And people have to be make a little effort to enter these quite dangerous realms. 364 00:42:51,920 --> 00:42:57,229 So like the enlightening knowledge gained by shamans willing to visit underworld domains, 365 00:42:57,230 --> 00:43:04,790 these magmatic treasures extracted from the Earth empower their owners in those societies that still venerated water beings, 366 00:43:05,090 --> 00:43:12,499 and these valuable objects are often used, in fact, as votive offerings to celebrate or propitiate water deities, 367 00:43:12,500 --> 00:43:19,340 to ensure reliable and timely rainfall, or to appeal to them for aid in the time of flood. 368 00:43:21,480 --> 00:43:26,549 And in some religious context we find more distributed forms of identity and ownership. 369 00:43:26,550 --> 00:43:33,870 So as well as, um, appearing in half human, half serpentine forms or shapeshifting between the two. 370 00:43:34,410 --> 00:43:38,250 Um knockers often act as custodians of Buddhist treasures, 371 00:43:38,460 --> 00:43:44,790 and this collaborative relationship can be seen in many parts of India, Golia, Tibet and Nepal. 372 00:43:44,790 --> 00:43:52,499 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, 373 00:43:52,500 --> 00:44:02,220 as elsewhere, the dynamics of this relationship are quite fluid and shift in accord with events, and sometimes tensions emerge. 374 00:44:02,670 --> 00:44:11,760 Uh, we could go to almost any cultural geographic direction for stories of humans seeking to take treasure away from guardian water beings. 375 00:44:11,760 --> 00:44:19,380 For example, in Japan, Princess Tama Tori attempts to take the treasure away from an ocean dwelling dragon King Renjun, 376 00:44:19,680 --> 00:44:26,460 who in as well as being a to tell a tutelary deity, controls the tides with magical jewels. 377 00:44:26,910 --> 00:44:30,060 Um, a tide ebbing jewel and a tide flowing jewel. 378 00:44:30,720 --> 00:44:35,880 And you might like to note that in this instance, the object is, uh, Pearl. 379 00:44:36,900 --> 00:44:39,270 As it is in this Chinese dragon with the moon. 380 00:44:39,750 --> 00:44:49,080 And this occurs recurrently as a symbol of the moon water, femininity and fertility in Japanese and Chinese depictions of water beings. 381 00:44:50,080 --> 00:44:58,570 But if we come back to Europe, plenty of stories about culture heroes taking treasure from grasping serpentine beings. 382 00:44:58,990 --> 00:45:06,430 The story from the Icelandic Volsung saga has Sigurd slaying Faf near to steal his treasure. 383 00:45:06,670 --> 00:45:17,050 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. 384 00:45:17,440 --> 00:45:27,010 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. 385 00:45:27,340 --> 00:45:32,350 And Seamus Heaney gives us a nice translation of, uh, of this saga. 386 00:45:32,750 --> 00:45:42,190 He's driven to hunt out hordes underground to God heathen gold through age long vigils, though to little avail. 387 00:45:42,730 --> 00:45:46,010 And of course, this was a major influence on Tolkien. 388 00:45:46,010 --> 00:45:53,740 The story of Smaug, and this subsequently has influenced many narratives about dragons in 20th century fantasy literature, 389 00:45:54,040 --> 00:45:59,559 in which serpentine beings crouch over glittering hoards of treasure in underworld domains, 390 00:45:59,560 --> 00:46:06,010 guarding them and taking punitive action when impudent humans try to steal from them. 391 00:46:07,180 --> 00:46:13,059 But more often than not, human power triumphs, and the greedy and jealous dragon is slain, 392 00:46:13,060 --> 00:46:23,890 providing repeated assertions of human dominion over the evil and untamed features of nature and human rights to own the world's treasures. 393 00:46:25,340 --> 00:46:30,680 Let's make a visit to one of my favourite water bank stories, which is from my hometown of Durham. 394 00:46:31,040 --> 00:46:37,820 And this is the story of the lamb to worm. Uh, worm comes from, um, the Norse word for dragon. 395 00:46:38,600 --> 00:46:46,520 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. 396 00:46:47,060 --> 00:46:54,230 But very briefly, this is a story about Sir John Lampton, who, in the crusading period bunked off from Sunday School, 397 00:46:54,230 --> 00:47:02,000 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. 398 00:47:02,450 --> 00:47:07,070 And then he goes off to fight in the Crusades while he's away slaying infidels, 399 00:47:07,430 --> 00:47:18,110 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. 400 00:47:18,470 --> 00:47:25,340 So the locals write to Sir John in Palestine, and he gallops home to cut the beast into two halves. 401 00:47:25,850 --> 00:47:29,329 Well, it's particularly interesting about this story. Uh. 402 00:47:29,330 --> 00:47:38,309 Very typical. It's that there's been a light hearted revival of a ritual by which the any bishop, new Bishop of Durham, 403 00:47:38,310 --> 00:47:47,370 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. 404 00:47:47,370 --> 00:47:54,570 And he's handed this medieval falchion a sword, and he has to swear to slay the dragon. 405 00:47:54,900 --> 00:47:59,460 And Justin Welby, who's now the Archbishop of Canterbury, did this and his enthronement seven. 406 00:47:59,880 --> 00:48:07,800 He noted the need to bring Christianity into every community and put a stop to the worship of false idols. 407 00:48:08,700 --> 00:48:17,650 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. 408 00:48:17,700 --> 00:48:22,200 Dramatically, I thought, um, it's all the evil in the world. 409 00:48:23,550 --> 00:48:32,790 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. 410 00:48:34,060 --> 00:48:38,900 Except, of course, that the wisdom of this stance is now very much in question. 411 00:48:38,980 --> 00:48:46,000 Many societies are asking increasingly anxious questions as to whether alienating humankind from nature 412 00:48:46,300 --> 00:48:53,650 and asserting patriarchal dominion and imposing neoliberal forms of capitalism is really a good idea, 413 00:48:53,950 --> 00:49:03,490 given that these beliefs and practices have led to highly unsustainable practices which are driving climate change and environmental destruction. 414 00:49:04,650 --> 00:49:09,540 So there has been a rather interesting shift in recent decades. 415 00:49:09,630 --> 00:49:14,520 Narratives about serpent beings in popular art and literature have shifted, 416 00:49:14,850 --> 00:49:21,530 reflecting these concerns, and that we're seeing more sympathetic portrayals of, um. 417 00:49:22,250 --> 00:49:34,410 Uh, serpentine beings and their powers as wise, sympathetic partners to humankind, sometimes telepathic and as guardians of the environment. 418 00:49:35,160 --> 00:49:45,510 So we get new culture heroes, women developing collaborative relationships with these beings, seeking to restore and protect the powers of nature. 419 00:49:46,050 --> 00:49:55,379 And this shift, of course, has been very influenced, um, by the contemporary deployment of indigenous water beings in political debates, 420 00:49:55,380 --> 00:50:00,720 where as manifestations and personifications of water and its creative powers, 421 00:50:01,080 --> 00:50:08,970 they serve to critique the practices of colonising societies, to assert the rights of indigenous people, 422 00:50:09,150 --> 00:50:16,080 and to articulate more convivial, more alternate visions of human non-human relations. 423 00:50:16,650 --> 00:50:26,610 Um, these worldviews, of course, have had a major influence on contemporary scholarship and activism relating to nonhuman rights and the need to 424 00:50:26,610 --> 00:50:33,960 address the major inequities in power that lead to habitat destruction and the mass extinction of other species. 425 00:50:34,380 --> 00:50:41,280 So many groups are seeking new forms of law that uphold the rights of other species to flourish, 426 00:50:41,280 --> 00:50:48,810 and which seek to provide democratic representation of these rights in governance and decision making processes. 427 00:50:51,860 --> 00:50:57,290 And along with the resurfacing of ancient water beings to speak for the interests of water bodies, 428 00:50:57,470 --> 00:51:02,240 artists and activist groups are collaborating to create new ones. 429 00:51:02,420 --> 00:51:11,360 So here's a nice example, um, which I was involved in, created by the artist Sasha Constable, who's John Constable's granddaughter. 430 00:51:11,780 --> 00:51:18,230 And this was an otter dragon made for the May Day Festival in Cerne Abbas in 2023, 431 00:51:18,530 --> 00:51:24,740 and it was explicitly designed to celebrate the agency and the rights of local waterways. 432 00:51:26,280 --> 00:51:32,370 So to conclude what I hope this tiny foray into a vast history of serpentine water beings 433 00:51:32,370 --> 00:51:37,680 has provided is a sense of how they've always been linked to some form of treasure. 434 00:51:38,100 --> 00:51:42,330 That they were, from the very beginning, the providers of wealth, health, 435 00:51:42,570 --> 00:51:49,140 fertility and knowledge, and authoritative guardians of social and ecological well-being. 436 00:51:49,560 --> 00:51:54,810 So while respect for the co co-creative role of the non-human domain has waxed and waned, 437 00:51:55,320 --> 00:52:01,800 they have remained inextricably connected to ideas and objects expressing what we value. 438 00:52:03,280 --> 00:52:10,989 With luck, we're now performing a cycle that recognises that co-creative role and the need to protect water bodies. 439 00:52:10,990 --> 00:52:21,670 But this also requires us to rethink what we mean by treasure today, and whether wealth lies in accumulating and guarding shiny stuff. 440 00:52:23,130 --> 00:52:30,450 Or in the capacity of societies and ecosystems to regenerate themselves and flourish over time. 441 00:52:30,600 --> 00:52:31,290 Thank you.