Your Water's More Valuable Than Diamonds

Which is more valuable: diamonds or water? The seems obvious, but splash some holy water into the mix and you’ll see that this answer is a lot messier than you might at first think. Join your new favorite historian-podcaster guy on a journey through time and around the world to better understand why holy water defies most economic logic. Along the way you’ll discover about why people in the diamond industry have mangled the English language. You’ll have an epiphany about how the laws of supply and demand don’t really apply to the Moscow River. You’ll meet multiple condescending British travel writers. And, as always, you’ll find out that plunging into the past helps you to better comprehend the strangeness of now.

Pre-episode stuff: Keep up with the strangeness of now by signing up for the totally free YAAW email list. Just fill out the form at the top of the page at findyourselfinhistory.com . Thanks!

Transcript

YAAW Podcast | S2: Ep2 | © 2023 Doug Sofer

Your Water’s More Valuable Than Diamonds

Cold Open

[Fade in theme]

Welcome back precious Listener to this podcast about how history helps you make sense of the Strangeness of Now!

[pause]

Hey before we get started I want to thank you, Listener, for your patience during the sometimes long gaps in between episodes.

Being a Full-Time-History-Professor-Guy means that I can’t always put out new content at the pace I’d like.

[pause]

Luckily, my podcast’s marketing department has been hard at work promoting previous episodes of my show and recruiting new audiences, so I bet this podcast has gone downright viral by now.

[pause]

Hey speaking of which, I’d better check in with my team. We’ll walk on over [fade in footsteps] to the You-Are-A-Weirdo Marketing-And-Outreach Center in the FindYourselfInHistory.com Suite, over in the Temporal Dimension Media business facilities complex.

[louder footsteps, whistling in cavernous room, panning R to L, walking down stairs to a door opening]

[To self] All right, opening the door and let’s see what these guys are up to.

Oh no! Those ungrateful jerks abandoned me! It looks like they just up and left—like months ago!

No wonder You Are A Weirdo hasn’t made it into the top-five podcasts on planet earth yet!

[pause]

Aw and it’s even worse! Those frickin’ weenies stole all the office equipment and left their trash everywhere!

[sticky floor noise] Mlyeuch! They spilled a bottle of Doctor Mountain’s Soda-Flavored Energy Cola all over the floor! [sticky footprint sound]

[Pause]

[Annoyed sigh] Hang on. Better get this all mopped up before we can start today’s episode. Bear with me listeners.

[narrating to self] Let’s see: Filling up our mop bucket [refill sound] …mixing in a capful of Splurt N’ Gleam Gluten-Free Flooring Cleanser [Capful-tossing ‘blurp’ noise]

…now mopping [Mopping sounds]

…aaannd sparkly clean! [Sparkle sound]

[Pause]

You know folks, as I’m dumping out my bucket full of repulsive mop sludge, it’s got me thinking about water.

[Pause]

One of the most important, life-saving technological marvels that we present-day human beings have access to is treated water—water that’s pure and clean and safe to drink.[1]

[pause]

And it took humankind many thousands of years to understand and assure people’s access to this necessity of life.

Centuries of scientific knowhow, engineering wizardry—not to mention a lot of political wrangling and popular agitation—led to our ability today to just turn a little handle and produce crystal clean, ready-to-pour-down-our-esophaguses-at-any-moment water.

[Pause. Then loud and emphatic:]

…Which I just mixed up with floor-crud, and dumped down the drain. [Drain sound]

You know, it almost seems like we forget sometimes just how precious water is.

And that qualifies for sure as a sign of the strangeness of now.

[pause]

Which brings up today’s pressing question [sponge pressing sound]:

[slowly, deliberately] What is water worth?

In this episode, we’re going to answer that question by exploring the most valued kind of water in history: Holy water.

When we do that, you’ll find that assessing the value of holy water runs against the current of how many people think value should be measured.

[pause]

In fact, this exploration promises to be so profound that it could make you feel like you’ve just been tossed into the deep end.

But there’s nothing to fear. I’m a professional historian and I’ve been trained to keep folks from getting in over their heads.

My name is Doug Sofer—and I’m a weirdo, just like you.

[theme]

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If you’re finding this podcast to be of value, tell your peeps all about it! And don’t forget to dive in to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to learn how you too can become a Patron of Past Peculiarity and get some top swag.

[fade out theme]

Value Smackdown: Water vs. Diamond

What is water really worth?

At first glance, water seems cheap. In fact it’s so cheap here in the USA that the average family actually wastes 9,400 gallons annually—literally tossing this precious, life-essential liquid down the drain without doing anything useful with it at all.[2]

And you are a weirdo! [divebomb]

—is the name of this podcast where we reflect on our unexamined assumptions about today’s bizarre world—like how we sometimes treat water as if it’s nearly worthless.

In fact, this episode is called “Your Water’s More Valuable than Diamonds.” 

[pause]

One really useful way to think about why water seems to be underappreciated—is by asking how it compares to something that’s extremely valuable, like, say, a diamond.

Actually, that seems like such a good comparison that surely someone must have asked this question before.

[Pause]

In fact, many someones—in many different ways and at many different times—did.

The most important such someone who first compared these things was the Scottish economist, philosopher, and Professional-Enlightenment-Guy Adam Smith, who lived from 1723–1790.

Adam Smith is the father, grandfather, and third-step-cousin-twice-removed—of economics.

[pause]

The way that Smith got at our question was by comparing the value of water—which seems like it should be valuable—to something that seems like it shouldn’t—like a small sparkly rock.

Smith writes:

“[QE] Nothing is more useful than water but it will purchase scarce any thing. A diamond, on the contrary, has scarce any value in use; but a very great quantity of other goods may frequently be had in exchange for it.”

[Pause]

This observation by Adam Smith—which some folks refer to as the “diamond-water paradox” of economic value—continues to shape and challenge some of the assumptions that many people still make about how the economic world functions.

[pause]

So let’s take a closer look at the diamond by putting it under our metaphorical loupe.

[Aside] A loupe is that cool little magnifying cylinder that jewelers use.

First, it’s worth mentioning that in today’s world, some diamonds do have some practical uses.

Diamonds are pretty much the hardest material that occurs in nature, which makes them really effective at cutting stuff and grinding stuff and scratching or engraving stuff—like glass.

But the diamonds used for cutting and grinding and engraving aren’t really all that expensive. You can run out to your local hardware store and buy a tile cutting blade that’s covered with diamond crumbs and it will run you well under 20 bucks.[3]

Those little industrial diamond bits are known as “bort”—which is my new favorite word.

[pause]

Not surprisingly, larger industrial diamonds cost more than circular sawblade bort. There are for instance some big diamond-covered drill bits designed for mining that allow telephone-pole-sized industrial drills to cut into mountain-sized rocks.

But those diamonds are more expensive because they’re more useful, to do more specialized things.

If the only kinds of diamonds were these useful, industrial ones, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

And that’s why economists and economic historians never talk about the bort-water paradox—because there’s no such thing.

[pause]

After all, even the most useful industrial diamonds just aren’t worth that much when compared to the most valuable, decorative diamonds—and decorative is a nice word for freaking useless.

[pause]

So just how valuable are these useless rocks, and how do we measure that value?

Well in the USA, a one-carat cut diamond—that is, a professionally faceted rock that weighs 200 milligrams that has certain sought-after characteristics—can retail for as high as $21,000 if you pay the list price and don’t bother to negotiate.

Even if you’re a slick-and-savvy, golden-tongued consumer who is patient and likes to haggle and is good at it, you’re still going to pay well over $10 to $15 grand for a 1 carat cut diamond of the highest quality.[4]

How do folks judge that quality?

Once again, the short answer is that it’s got nothing to do with how useful a given diamond is.

The longer answer requires knowledge of a specialized vocabulary which at first seems like it’s made up of normal English words but is actually a whole baffling dictionary full of words specific to describing gem-quality diamonds.

[pause]

First, there’s something called color, which seems like a normal word, but which is measured on a scale that goes from D to Z.

A grade of D means you have a diamond of the very best color.

That color is called “colorless.” And colorless means clear.

But diamond sellers won’t use the word clear because of the second way diamonds are graded—which is based on clarity—which isn’t about whether it’s clear-colored at all but it’s about whether or not there are noticeable inclusions.

And inclusion isn’t about making every diamond feel welcome at your birthday party. It’s a geology term that refers to something inside the diamond that isn’t diamond at all; it’s an impurity.

The best clarity grade for a diamond is an F—which stands for flawless—meaning without inclusions.

[pause]

All of this strange vocab shows just how weird people in the diamond business are. Who else would be so delighted to see a report card full of Ds and Fs?

[pause]

Speaking of school learning, a decorative diamond is also rated by its shape—but not the 3D shapes you learned in elementary school. Jewelry people don’t generally describe their wares as cubes or cylinders or rhombo-triangular dodecahedrons.

No, that would be too easy.

Instead, people in the diamond industry describe shapes using terms like princess, and marquise, and Aascher [ASH-er like ashtray], and most confusing of all, emerald—which I thought was the name of a completely different useless decorative rock.

[pause]

So how and when did these strange baubles become so treasured that they transformed words in the English language just so we could describe them?

That answer definitely has to do with history. And the DeBeers Company which created a monopoly or trust on the diamond industry along with one of the world’s most successful advertising campaigns.

[pause]

I really want to talk more about all of those things. But sadly that’s another story for a future episode.

This episode is mostly about water—the other side of Smith’s paradox.

The main point today about diamonds is just a reinforcement of Adam Smith’s original observation that diamonds are extremely expensive even though they’re mostly useless.

[from trailer:] “…So sure diamonds are sparkly to look at and they’re awesome at cleanly cutting tile, or accidentally scratching up your car windows. But Adam Smith understood that you can’t make coffee with diamonds, they can’t slippery-up your slip-n’-slide, and you certainly can’t baptize a baby with them.”

But our good friend H2O can do all those things—and much more.

[pause]

So why isn’t water worth more relative to diamonds?

To answer that question, we’ll start with just a sprinkling of basic economic theory.

Most economists understand a thing’s value as being synonymous with its price. And a price is determined through a simple question of demand and supply.

First, there’s demand: How much do people want to buy something? Demand, in turn, has to do with the utility of a good or service. Utility literally means usefulness, but economists basically understand it signifying as ‘how much people want something.’

So, again, diamonds aren’t useful but they still have utility in the economics world because people desire them.

And economists don’t care if that desire is based on your real need for something genuinely useful, or if that desire is just invented by advertisers. 

You know, like the ones who try to convince you that only a tiny chunk of sparkly compressed carbon can bring love to your otherwise lonely life.

[pause]

Along with the idea of demand is supply: How abundant or scarce is the thing or service that you want?

Something worth a great deal of money should be rare—at least relative to how much people want it.

So if a meteorite made of diamonds that was the size of Scotland’s Murrayfield Stadium suddenly snacked into the earth [sound effect] and fragmented into a billion 50-carat, ready-to-cut stones, the price of diamonds would plummet—that is assuming any human beings were still around to collect them.

[pause]

So that’s the express version of how economists these days tend to understand value.

Typical econ classes in college don’t even mention that there might be—and historically have been—other ways of understanding the concept.[5]

[pause]

Yet as we’re about to see, the clarity of these mainstream concepts of economic value gets muddied when we consider holy water in world history.

[separator music]

Dipping A Toe into Holy Water

People have treasured some kinds of water for having special spiritual significance since almost as far back as there have been humans.

Humanity’s very earliest written sources mention it, and there’s a good deal of much earlier archaeological evidence suggesting that we people revered water’s sacred properties long before we knew how to write things down at all.[6]

In fact, there are so many historical examples of this phenomenon that this episode’s going to overflow its banks if we’re not careful.

To better contain it, we will look only at a kind of holy water that’s best suited to think about economic value:

that is, Entire natural bodies of water that communities deem to be sacred.

Right off the bat, we have difficulty valuing these kinds of waters.

First of all, this kind of holy water is not really tradable, and for that reason, you can’t really put a price on it—because it’s just not for sale.

[pause]

And even more confusing given present-day understandings of economic value, some of the most valued holy waters in the world have not even been rare. In fact, many—maybe most—natural sources of holy water are enormous—and constantly regenerating.

Some come from underground aquifers whose quantities actually increase over time when they surpass what hydrogeologists call sustainable recharge rates.

[pause]

Even entire massive rivers can become holy in some historical and cultural contexts.

Take, for example, the Moskva River that runs through Russia’s capital city of Moskva—which is to say Moscow.

Like many sources of fresh water in Eastern Orthodox Christian traditions, the Moskva River receives an annual blessing on the celebration of the Epiphany.

[Slowly] That blessing process converts the entire river into holy water.

In other words, it feels for all practical purposes like an unlimited resource; that holy water drains into an area of approximately 6,800 square miles (or 17,600 km2). [7]

And Russians have treasured this immense quantity of water as a precious liquid—for many, many centuries.

[pause]

Precisely because of its enormous quantity, there is a history of foreign observers coming to Moscow and ridiculing the fact that Russians understood the river’s waters to be sacred.

For instance, the English diplomat and poet Giles Fletcher wrote about the river in his 1591 survey entitled, Of The Russe Common-Wealth. 

He begins his description of the river by condescendingly criticizing Russian Orthodox parishioners as being similar to Roman Catholics—whom he also criticizes—in their use and reverence for holy water. Fletcher then adds that the Russians take their holy water to the next level:

[QE] …they doe not onely hallow their holie water stockes and tubbes ful of water, but all the rivers of the countrey once every yeere. At Mosko it is done with great pompe and Hallowing solemnitie, the emperour himselfe being present at it with all his nobility, marching through the streets towards the river of Mosko in manner of procession...[/QE][8]

Following this majestic ceremony, Fletcher adds that common people then rush to the river and fill containers with the now-sacred liquid, at which point

[QE] …many men and women leape into it, some naked, some with their clothes on, when some man woulde thinke his finger woulde freese off, if hee should but dippe it into the water.[/QE]

This practice of bathing in icy water during the Epiphany remains to the present day a practice in Russian and other Orthodox Christian traditions—imitating the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan—which presumably was not nearly as chilly as the Moskva—

—when the Russian Orthodox Church celebrates Epiphany

—on January 19.

Fletcher ends this section with an additional snarky observation:

[QE] When the men have done, they bring their horse to the river to drinke of the sanctified water: and so make them as holie as a horse.[/QE][9]

This sort of mockery of those who cherish enormous quantities of consecrated water helps us reflect further on present-day understanding of value.

On one hand, it demonstrates how intuitive the factor of scarcity can be when trying to understand the value of something like holy water.

To Fletcher and other outsiders who ridicule this tradition, a river is simply too large to be made precious; it feels absurd to these observers to think otherwise.

Yet it is precisely this issue of Fletcher’s outsider status that exposes something about the nature of holy water.

Holy water’s value does not lie solely in its physical utility to individuals; it is a product of a religious community and is part of that community’s shared values—in the cultural anthropological sense.

Some of holy water’s value, then, connects to the roles it plays within a community.

All of which is to say is that the Moskva River becomes a tangible, renewable symbol of that community itself—its piety, its traditions, its language, and its distinctiveness.

And those kinds of symbols can be extremely powerful—and exceptionally valuable—things.

[pause]

And even beyond their symbolic importance, natural sources of sacred waters also have actual, physical, lifegiving properties.

That fact can often amplify their value beyond that of pure symbols like, say, words or abstract icons like, say, flags, crosses or crescents.

[pause]

Let’s illustrate that point by considering a different condescending travel account by a different condescending British observer, this time far away from Russia and a couple hundred years into the future—in 19th century India.

[Separator music]

Sacred Waters of the Golden Temple

In April of 1835, a minister for a multi-denominational British publication called The Calcutta Christian Observer, wrote a short essay about his visit to a place called the Golden Temple.

The Golden Temple, a.k.a. the Harmandir Sahib in the city of Amritsar in the Indian state of Punjab is probably the most important holy site connected to the Sikh religion, and is home to a large, famous reservoir of water.

Many Sikhs attribute special religious properties to the water from this source. 

In fact, many different peoples from many different faith traditions throughout India incorporate fresh water reservoirs into the designs of places of worship.

[pause]

The visiting minister, who signs his essay simply with the letter “C,” first describes his own hesitation and internal conflict at having to visit a non-Christian holy site in the first place.

In fact, he recounts how he almost did not visit the temple at all when he discovered he had to remove his shoes to enter. He writes, though:

“[QE] Being assured by several persons, that compliance with their usage was only politeness, not religious worship, I drew off my boots.”

At which point the Reverend “C” hastens to add,

“[QE] Perhaps this was not right.[/QE]”

[pause]

And the Shoeless Reverend did not let go of his fear of accidentally praying in a non-Christian way. He toured the Golden Temple’s grounds and auxiliary areas, but he ultimately refused to visit the main temple space after learning that visitors there were obliged to make some monetary donation to the temple. He protests:

“[QE] I positively declined to go, being unwilling to afford any kind of countenance to such idolatry.”

So when it comes to his observations about the holiness of the water in the Golden Temple’s reservoir, “C” is predictably dismissive. He explains,

[QE] I made an inquiry about the water. One of the crowd took the occasion to tell me, that, if I would bathe in it, all my sins should be pardoned—a remark made very seriously, but to which it was unnecessary to reply, as it excited a general laugh among the company; thus evidencing greater indifference on their part, than I had been led to believe. [/QE]

[Pause]

Notice that the minister does not consider an alternative explanation for the laughter—that the crowd may have found it funny to imagine the Reverend C’s sins to be so easily purged—not necessarily that they doubted the water’s purifying properties for the Sikh faithful.

[pause]

Regardless, toward the end of this essay, “C” reveals something about the power of holy water that goes beyond its symbolic meanings. He concludes:

[QE] “I would add, that I have not seen any religious place in India… that seems to me so well adapted to impress the minds of the deluded worshippers with deep devotional feelings. Nor do I recollect any so pleasing in its whole appearance, nor in which there is so little to offend good taste. It is a place where a Christian would love to see temples to the living and true God, and where he would be delighted to observe the countenances of the crowds of worshippers reflecting love and Christian peace….The Lord hasten the time, when this shall be the kind of remark which the passing visiter [sic] will make of the reservoir at Amritsir…![/QE][10]

[pause]

So despite the Rev. C’s tremendous condescension and suspicion and maybe even contempt—wait, did I mention condescension?—toward his Sikh hosts— he nevertheless seems to have understood that the Golden Temple’s reservoir was a breathtakingly inspiring place—a holy place, at least potentially. And an ideal site to inspire enlightened throngs of hypothetical future Christians.

[Pause]

C’s conclusion here helps to illustrate a final point—that holy water sources seem to have some universal value.

That is, they contain special religious and/or spiritual and/or inspirational appeal that goes beyond any specific organized religious institutions.

In India alone, rivers can have many hundreds of holy sites along their banks.

For example, the ancient city of Ayodhya located on the Ghaghara river in the state of Uttar Pradesh, has on or near its riverbank hundreds of places of worship. The vast majority are Hindu temples but it also has places of worship for Muslims, Jains, Sikhs, even for Korean Buddhists!

To the delight of British missionaries like “C,” there are even a few Christian sites too.[11]

Yet no single religious institution seems capable of bottling up water’s spiritual power for its own exclusive use.

[pause]

A reverence for sacred water has been shared by many different peoples all over the world.

You’d think that sense of shared experience would be capable of bringing people together.

Perhaps just as often, though, folks have tended to criticize other people’s veneration of holy water as being somehow wrong.

[pause] And as we’re about to see, Europeans like the Rev. C were not the only ones who could express a sense of superiority when it came to the right way to appreciate holy waters.

[Separator music]

Reversing the Flow 

By the first decades of the twentieth century, a new nationalist wave of Indian administrators who worked with the Raj—the British-controlled government in India—worked to reverse the one-way flow of these written descriptions of holy water.

They began to argue that it was Europeans, not Asians, whose views on holy water were superstitious.

In 1918, Sir Rustom Pestonji Masani, the first Indian to assume the post of Municipal Commissioner of Mumbai, wrote a book entitled [QE] Folklore of Wells, Being a Study of Water-Worship in East and West [/QE]. In it, Masani argues that worship of water has a global, universal, human quality to it, and that furthermore that it’s Europeans’ reverence for water that’s more akin to superstition than that of Asian civilizations. He asserts in the introduction to his book:

“[QE]What struck me most during my studies and inquiries was the striking resemblance in the traditions, customs, rites and ceremonies prevailing in India and those in vogue in European countries. It was clear… that until recently the cult of water flourished in the West in a more primitive and much ruder form than in India.[/QE]”[12]

He describes how early Christian officials in Western Europe’s middle ages initially sought to stamp out worship of water sources.

But they ultimately decided that it was easier to re-consecrate these pre-Christian—or pagan—water sources as Christian ones.

Masani argues that this combination of Christian and pre-Christian water worship

“[QE]…gave a new lease of life to the old beliefs.[/QE]”[13]

[pause]

In fact, Rasani’s century-old assertion here continues to hold water.

Present-day historical and anthropological scholars make similar points about the staying power of people’s belief in holy water.

Today’s researchers do not generally buy Rasani’s judgment that water worship is primitive or rude. 

Nor do they ridicule the veneration of holy waters the way that the Reverend C or Giles Fletcher did.

But they do show, that in the historical big-picture—once folks have identified a body of water as being holy, it’s tended to stay holy—no matter who’s officially in charge of spiritual matters.

[pause]

One example of this phenomenon concerns the Irish tradition of “paying the rounds,” at holy wells.

These practices include a specific order of both prayer and other physical actions. Anthropologist Celeste Ray describes these rites as folk liturgies—that is, ways of worshipping that come from regular people and not from Church officials or other authority figures. Ray describes the phenomenon this way:

“[QE] Folk liturgical practices are those accepted as efficacious through generations of repetition rather than through sanction from official religious authorities. …[F]olk liturgies may be challenged, qualified, or supplemented by professional religious practitioners but they remain the community’s.[/QE]”[14]

Many sacred wells in Ireland are on the sites of pre-Christian shrines—like prehistoric burial mounds made of stones called cairns, and other ancient tombs that predate the spread of Christianity to Ireland.

Only later did Irish Christians rededicate these ancient sites to Roman Catholic saints and attribute their spiritual powers to them.[15]

[pause]

And Ireland is definitely not the only place in the world where holy waters have worked this way.

There are many more examples from the historical record—from all over the world—of communities successfully holding on to their holy water through many different religious institutional changes.

In fact, communities seem to value their sacred waters so greatly that they have continued to revere them even when under direct pressure from powerful institutions to abandon those practices.

One recent case that illustrates this point, took place a long, long way from Ireland.

[pause]

…when the Communist Party of the People’s Republic of China attempted to eradicate rural people’s allegedly “superstitious” belief in holy waters.

During the first fifteen years following the Chinese Revolution of 1949, the Communist government attempted to stop people from making pilgrimages to holy wells.

At that point, lower-ranking government officials who were from the villages whose people treasured these waters—had a problem.

They had to negotiate carefully between following the Party’s orders while also keeping harmony in their home villages.[16]

A dozen years later, the Party’s attempts to end people’s holy water practices were unsuccessful—despite a lot of time and effort by the party to condemn and shame those who believed in the water’s powers.

After 1962, the Party diluted its position on holy water, realizing that it made more sense to tolerate those practices than to fight them.

Years later, as historian Steve A. Smith demonstrates in his 2006 article on this topic, holy water remained so popular Chairman Mao Zedong himself, the founder of the People’s Republic of China,

“[QE] …could provide holy water as efficacious as that of any god. Red Guards, for example, would scoop up ‘happiness water’ from the Gold Water Bridge in front of Tiananmen before setting out from Beijing… during the Cultural Revolution.[/QE]”[17]

[pause]

So even the undisputed leader of China’s officially Atheist government[18]—that sought to purge religious, superstitious and other allegedly supernatural thinking from its population—understood that some water—their water—was special—that it possessed properties beyond its physical and chemical attributes. And that it could made to work for the Party—

…if they would just be willing to go with the flow.

[long pause]

So how do we begin to fathom a concept like that? Let’s see what happens when we mix together everything we’ve talked about today into some kind of a conclusion.

[Separator music]

Conclusion

Water means something to people; it has a special place inside us all.

[pause]

Literally.

[pause]

Look: You and I are basically big, meaty sacks full of water; something like 70% of our weight is made up of H2O.

Without access to fresh water, we die—pretty quickly.[19]

It makes sense, then, that people throughout history have found ways to cherish and protect the natural sources of this vital fluid.

[pause]

But historically, our species’ understanding of water goes even deeper than that.

Sources of water take on important symbolic meanings too. Every religion I know of, both past and present, identifies spiritual importance for specific bodies of fresh water.

There’s the River Jordan in Judaism and Christianity and Islam; The Zamzam spring in Islam; there are specific waterfalls in Japan’s Shinto faith tradition; The lakes of Tota and Guatavita revered by Colombia’s Muisca or Chibcha people. 

Name a global faith anywhere in the world and you will almost certainly find connections, practices or beliefs connected to specific water sources deemed sacred.

[pause]

And when outsiders have attempted to ban or restrict or even ridicule people’s reverence of holy waters, they’ve mostly failed.

These traditions seem to have a way of wending a path back to their people, becoming reabsorbed in their hearts, minds and souls.

[pause]

Attempts by powerful institutions to convert holy waters into something ordinary—into just water—seem to have been almost universally rejected in history.

Popular adoration of natural water sources emerges from a powerful, human connection to this life-giving resource.

For many peoples, past and present, water’s value transcends the kind of simple calculations of cost and utility that neoclassical economics takes as a given.

Water’s central place in our lives emerges out of complex social and cultural meanings. Any attempts at valuation must consider those contexts.

[pause]

In that sense, anyone trying to understand the true worth of a specific waterway will need to act like a historian or a cultural anthropologist. That is, they’ll need to understand people’s values about water—to understand its value.

[Pause]

And that final point allows us to draw one more conclusion—this time about history itself.

The process of investigating history—not as an exercise in memorizing trivia but the way real historical researchers do—can give you deeper perspectives into both space and time.

Those who possess genuine passion for genuine history have a critical role to play in ongoing civic discussions about essential natural resources like water.

Historical research offers a wider view of human possibilities than many folks who lack those perspectives tend to grasp.

The history of how people have cherished and defended their holy waters offers one insight into why history matters.

And that’s not all that the practice of history has to offer either.

[pause]

In fact, it’s just one little one-carat-diamond-sized drop in the bucket.

Outro & credits

[pause]

You may find the references to the historical sources, sound files, and other information used for this and other episodes at findyourselfinhistory.com .

I’d really love to hear what you think about this podcast. Chuck an email my way at doug@findyourselfinhistory.com .

Want to support this program and also get cool stuff? Head over to findyourselfinhistory.com/sponsors to find out how.

This episode came out of a paper I wrote and presented at the 2023 annual meeting of the Southeast World History Association. History students, history teachers and history profs in the Southeast U.S. who are interested in world history should check it out at sewha.org [spell out].

It’s pronounced something like “SEWHA” and it’s a regional affiliate of the World History Association

Special thanks to a number of people who assisted with this episode:

There’s Reeves Johnson, Assistant Professor of Commerce at the University of Virginia who helped me think through some questions of economic value.

And there’s Rob Zoland of Zoland Jewelers in New York City’s famous diamond district on 47thStreet who schooled me on the glittery vocabulary connected to the diamond trade. 

You can find their precious, decorative merchandise at www.zolands.com .

And thanks too to economist Sharon May and historian Dan Klingensmith for letting me bounce some ideas off of them pertaining to this episode.

Both of those folks work at—and treasure—the same place I do: Maryville College in East Tennessee.

That’s Maryville College—right between the city of Knoxville, TN and the more than one hundred spectacular and awe-inspiring, mountain waterfalls in the Great Smoky Mountains.[20]

Maryville College: Everyday Unexpected. Learn more at maryvillecollege.edu 

[Fast, lawyerly] Opinions expressed in this podcast are mine alone and do not necessarily represent those of Maryville College, its administrators, faculty, staff, students, board of directors, or any on-campus delivery drivers representing the Doctor Mountain’s Soda-Flavored Energy Cola Bottling Company of America.

This podcast episode was researched, written, edited, narrated, recorded and mixed by Doug Sofer; all materials are copyright 2023 Doug Sofer. The theme song was written and performed by Doug Sofer with Matt Trimboli on rhythm guitar. You can find out more about Matt at trimboli.com .

Thanks for listening.

[1] Here in the USA, utility companies like my local one are funded by residential customers, and usually also with additional funds from various levels of government at the municipal, county, state and/or Federal levels. The standards of clean drinking water they’re required by law to follow come from both the US Environmental Protection Agency and state agencies that further define what are the safe levels of water-borne contaminants. Each of those agencies, in turn, have water scientists and water engineers on their payrolls—folks who are up-to-date on what can go wrong with drinking water. On the legal side, it’s equally complicated. At the Federal level alone, standards of treatment are regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974 which was later amended in 1977, 1979, 1980 and 1986, then by the Lead Contamination Control Act of 1988, and by still another set of amendments in 1996.
[2] United States Environmental Protection Agency, “Statistics and Facts,” https://www.epa.gov/watersense/statistics-and-facts, accessed 6 Oct., 2023.
[3] See, e.g., United States, U.S. Geological Survey, “Diamond (Industrial), 2023,” at https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2023/mcs2023-diamond.pdf , accessed 21, Dec., 2023.
[4] Chat with Rob Zoland of Zoland Jewelers in New York City’s famous Diamond District.
[5] Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making & Taking in the Global Economy (New York: Public Affairs, 2018), 71–72. See also Mazzucato’s 2019 TED Talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXrCeiQxWyc
[6] For a classic summary of this literature, see, e.g., the chapter by Mircea Eliade, “The Waters and Water Symbolism” in Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion: Study of the Element of the Sacred in the History of Religious Phenomena by a Distinguished Catholic Scholar (Cleveland: World Publishing Company, 1966), Ch. V. Some of the earliest evidence of the sanctification of water is, almost by nature, speculative. Still, Eliade offers so many examples of holy water in this chapter so as to make a strong case that multiple ancient and classical civilizations revered water in this way.
[7] “Moskva River,” Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/place/Moskva-River, accessed 15 Oct., 2023.
[8] Giles Fletcher, Of The Russe Common Wealth, originally published 1591, in Edward R. Bond, editor, Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, Comprising the Treatise “Of The Russe Common Wealth” by Dr. Giles Fletcher and the Travels of Sir Jerome Horsey, Knt., Now For the First Time Printed Entire from His Own Manuscript, reprint for the Hakluyt Society (New York: Burt Franklin, 1856), 135–136.
[9] Ibid., 136. Nearly three centuries later in 1872, another British observer quipped of this same ceremony: “The populace regard this ceremony with excessive superstition. Upon the retirement of the imperial cortege, they rush with eager haste to the opening, anxious to touch the consecrated stream, and fill pitchers from it to carry home. Even infants have been sent with their nurses to be plunged, under the idea that if the immersion is endured they will be fortified to bear all the perils of life.” See Thomas Milner, The Gallery of Geography: A Pictorial and Descriptive Tour of the World, Volume II (Glasgow: W.R. M’Phun & Son, 1872), 748.

[10] C., “A Visit to the Sacred Reservoir of the Sikhs,” in The Calcutta Christian Observer, Edited “by Christian Ministers of Various Denominations” Vol. IV (Jan.–Dec., 1835): 169–173.
[11] See Rana P.B. Singh, “Sacrality and Waterfront Sacred Places in India: Myths and the Making of Place” in Celeste Ray, editor, Sacred Waters, Kindle Edition (London: Routledge, 2020), 90–91. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.
[12] R.P. Masani, Folklore of Wells, Being a Study of Water-Worship in East and West (Bombay: D.B. Taraporevala Sons & Co., 1918), xviii.
[13] Ibid., 42.
[14] Celeste Ray, “Paying the Rounds at Ireland’s Holy Wells” in Anthropos, Vol. 110 (2015): 417.
[15] Ibid., 419.
[16] Steve A. Smith, “Local Cadres Confront the Supernatural: The Politics of Holy Water (Shenshui) in the PRC, 1949-1966,” in The China Quarterly, no. 188 (2006): 1010. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20192702.1010
[17] Ibid., 1021.
[18] Pew Research, “Government policy toward religion in the People’s Republic of China – a brief history” at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/08/30/government-policy-toward-religion-in-the-peoples-republic-of-china-a-brief-history/, accessed 24 Dec., 2023.
[19] Randall K. Packer, “How Long Can the Average Person Survive Without Water?” Scientific American (9 Dec., 2002), https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-the-average/, accessed 24 Dec., 2024.
[20] See, e.g., the short 2012 video by the Great Smoky Mountains Association, “Waterfalls in the Great Smoky Mountains,” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMQ_pVh2zmY, accessed 29 Dec., 2023.