Wells, springs and the beliefs attached to water

Water occupies more space in this folk system than any other element, and the practices around it group into three quite different functions.

Water as boundary

A river separates worlds. Wreaths are floated to carry a question away and bring back an answer; the drowned are a distinct category of the dead, unsettled and dangerous; and there are periods in the year when swimming is avoided for reasons framed as spiritual and expressed as a rule.

Those periods correspond fairly closely to when open water is cold enough to be genuinely hazardous, which is worth noticing.

Water as remedy

Water blessed at Epiphany is taken home and kept, sometimes for a year, and used for a range of purposes. Springs with reputations for healing attracted visitors, and some still do.

The Epiphany bathing custom — cutting a cross in the ice and immersing — is the most visible of these and is now practised by a much wider range of people than religious observance alone would explain.

Water and the well

A well was communal, essential and vulnerable. The rules around it were strict: not to spit in it, not to wash near it, not to take from it after dark in some regions, and to keep it covered.

Every one of those rules is sound sanitation stated as custom. A community with no theory of bacteria still had to keep its water clean, and a rule expressed as a taboo is obeyed more reliably than one expressed as advice.

The general observation

Where a folk practice concerns something that could kill a village, it usually turns out to be correct in effect if not in explanation.

A public health logic turning up underneath the practices is a pattern I have met several times in this archive: a rule whose reason has been forgotten usually stayed because it worked. Most of the prohibitions around a well are, in today's language, contamination control. Whether they knew that I cannot say — but the result is the same.