Abstract (English)
The essay examines symbolic and anthropological value of water, analyzing his role as "ierofania" human society and in particular in that sardinia. Through interdisciplinary reflection, the article explores the ambivalence of water as a source of life and a tool of purifying destruction, highlighting how the rites tied to water, from the cult of Maimone to baptismal practices, they represent structural responses to existential anguish. It is argued that the sacredness of water also survives in modernity, maintaining a deep link between organic matter and the search for transcendent.
Abstract (English)
This shey examines the symbolic and anthropological value of water, analyzing its role as a "hierophany" in human societies, with a specific focus on the Sardinian context. Through an interdisciplinary reflection, the article explores the ambivalence of water as both a source of life and an instrument of purifying destruction, highlighting how water-related rituals—from the cult of Maimone to baptismal practices—represent structural responses to existential angst. The ity argues that the sacredness of water survives into modernity, maintaining a joint bond between organic matter and the human quest for the transcendent.
Water is the element that defines our existence. Composed for almost all of the human body, it represents the very condition of life on Earth. However, reducing it to mere biological resource would be a prospective error: through the millennia, water has been configured as a powerful catalyst of religious, symbolic and social meanings. As underlined by Mircea Eliade, water is not only matter, but an inexhaustible source of "ierophanies", i.e. manifestations of the sacred that transcend the profane dimension of daily life.
In the archaic mentality, water was often divinized. Prehistoric civilizations and successive agricultural societies celebrated their worship in different forms, reconnecting it to concepts of fruitfulness, birth and purification. In Sardinia, this relationship takes on peculiar and deep contours. The Sardinian land, characterized by a often arid climate and a strong agropastoral vocation, has developed over time an ancestral respect for water, raising it to the pin of the entire religious universe. Mithological figures like Maimone, the god of rain, were not simple atmospheric personifications, but guaranteed the survival of the community itself. The propitiatory rite, in this context, was not a vain superstition, but a tool of psychological and social resilience, able to fight the anguish of drought and to weld the collective tissue.
Water ambivalence is another distinctive feature: it is also a source of life and potential destruction. The myth of the flood, diffused transversally in almost all human cultures, embodies this duality. The excess of water cancels, destroys and purifies, preparing the ground for a rebirth. This dialectic between life and death, between creation and dissolution, is found in the rituals of passage: from the Christian baptismal immersion — where water cancels the past and regenerates the individual — to the ancient funeral libations, where contact with water promises the continuation of life beyond the veil of death.
Even in the transition to modernity, despite scientific rationalism tried to incasellate water in purely biochemical parameters, its symbolic resonance came no less. Even today, in the 20th century and beyond, we perceive contact with water not only as a hygienic necessity, but as a gesture that touches deep strings, almost a return to pre-formal origins.
Analyzing water means analyzing humanity itself. From the management of water resources in antiquity to thermal therapeutic practices, the history of water is the story of how man tried to make sense to the world, transforming a natural element into a mirror of his own anxieties, hopes and aspirations towards the transcendent. Recognizing this cultural heritage is fundamental not only to preserve the memory of peoples, but to understand how, even in our technocratic era, the need for sacred remains indissolubly linked to the fluidity of this precious, eternal element.