Bernadette Soubirous, 1844–1879
These are all ancient stories. But the allure of holy wells and their sacred waters remains strong today, exercising a powerful attraction on believers. And nowhere is this clearer than in Lourdes, France.
Lying in the foothills of the Pyrenees in southwestern France, Lourdes was, for centuries, merely a small market town. Dominated by the fortified castle rising in its midst, the town’s population counted a modest four thousand people through the middle of the nineteenth century. On February 11, 1858, though, this all changed. A poor fourteen-year-old girl, Bernadette Soubirous, was walking through the town’s untended outskirts, looking for firewood and bones within an area commonly used as a garbage dump. Pausing to cross a stream beside a small cave known as the grotto of Massabielle, she had a vision of a dazzling light and a beautiful woman. Her companions saw nothing.
Returning to the grotto a few days later, she had another vision. In all, Soubirous experienced eighteen visions of the white-veiled lady, who later described herself as the Immaculate Conception. This figure was interpreted by the villagers as the Virgin Mary.
The mystic lady’s messages were different each time, calling for penance, for a chapel to be built on the site, and, later, for Bernadette “to drink of the water of the Spring, to wash in it, and to eat of the herb that grew there.” This seemed impossible, since the only water to be found in the grotto was in the moist mud. Following instructions only she could hear, Bernadette clawed in the mud and tried to drink the dirt-filled water. She seemed crazy. The next day, however, it was reported that clear water flowed from the grotto. This spring later became the source of the famed water of Lourdes, drastically changing the town’s future.
Needless to say, there were many skeptics at the time of Bernadette’s claims and since then. She was first denounced as deranged or a fraud, but after multiple interviews church officials became convinced, finding her story credible both because of her unwavering conviction and because they concluded the poor, uneducated girl could never have known about the theology of the Immaculate Conception.
Soubirous died in 1879 and following her death the fame of her story only continued to grow. A group of admirers soon began to push for her canonization as a saint. Her body was exhumed three times to seek evidence for sainthood, and each time it showed remark ably little decomposition, seen as proof of her incorruptibility. Having satisfied the Church’s requirement for three miracles, she was officially declared Saint Bernadette by Pope Pius XI in 1933. Her body has been on constant display in a glass coffin in the Sisters of Charity Convent in Nevers, France, since 1925.
Visitors started coming to Lourdes for its waters shortly after Bernadette’s claims. Some come in the hope that the waters will cure an ailment, others just for the chance to bathe in or drink such holy waters. The town now hosts roughly five million visitors a year with seven churches and upward of 270 hotels—incredibly, the greatest concentration of hotel rooms in France outside of Paris. Streets are filled with shops catering to the trade, with all manner of Lourdes-emblazoned statuettes, jewelry, and bottles of water. It’s estimated that pilgrims contribute up to $300 million to the local economy. The holy and mercantile exist alongside one another in an uneasy pairing. The English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge derided the commerce as “tawdry relics, the bric-a-brac of piety.”
Holy water bottles on sale in Lourdes, France
Nor is the commerce limited to purchases on site. The website directfromlourdes.com, for example, offers a range of Lourdes bottled water to those who cannot make the journey. The marketing pitch takes in both holy and practical concerns: “We are one of the only stores to sell bottles containing fresh water from the spring. Be aware that when you buy from other Stores that have imported the water, you may be buying stale water, that has been sat in storage for days, weeks or even months this water may not be fit to drink.” My personal favorite is the Lourdes bottled water key ring with a screw top, so you can have easy access to the holy waters while stuck in traffic.
The “pilgrimage season” runs from Easter through October. Upon arriving, pilgrims are met by volunteers who guide them to the grotto and nearby baths, one for men and one for women. Volunteers assist bathers by helping those who come for healing submerge up to their chins in the water. If a person is unable to walk, a volunteer will carry him or her. In addition to the baths, pilgrims may also visit the actual spring, in order to fill containers to take the water home. The spring is covered in glass with spigots leading out of it. In 1990, due to heavy consumption, authorities had to ration Lourdes water.
Unlike the holy wells described earlier, where news of legendary cures was passed on by word of mouth, the Catholic Church has meticulously documented miracles at sites around the globe. Indeed, in 1883, the Church created a formal system to confirm miracles at Lourdes. Known as the Bureau des Constatations Médicales (Medical Verification Agency), the Bureau has reviewed a staggering 6,700 claimed cures and deemed 66 officially “miraculous.”
To obtain miracle status, the illness and cure must meet certain criteria set out in a rigorous, multistep review process. Pope Benedict XIV established these standards in the eighteenth century. An article in The Economist explains the core requirements:
The original disease must be incapacitating, with a sure and precise diagnosis. Any organic or physical ailment qualifies, but psychiatric conditions are, for the moment, excluded since diagnoses are too uncertain and recoveries too hard to assess. The cure, which should be sudden, instantaneous and without convalescence, must not result from medical treatment; and recovery must permanently restore the normal function to the beneficiary.
When a pilgrim initially claims a miracle, a doctor will consult with the patient and the patient’s doctors and write up a case history. Assuming the cure has lasted, the patient then returns a year later with the relevant medical records. For a further three years, up to 250 doctors making pilgrimage to the site review the record. If the case makes it past this comprehensive review, it is submitted to an international medical committee, comprised of twenty experts (not all of the Catholic faith), that votes on recommending miracle status to the bishop of the patient’s diocese. A two-thirds majority vote is necessary to confirm that the case cannot be accounted for by medical understanding. With increased understanding of disease, it may not be surprising that there has been a significant decline in the number of documented Lourdes miracles, with only eight declared cures since 1956.
While impressive in its rigor, such a detailed administrative process seems strangely at odds with the very idea of holy waters. Religious belief, after all, is often described as the ultimate leap of faith. This does not sit well with a rigorous examination to ensure objective verification of inexplicable events. Indeed, in 2008, the international medical panel of doctors, appointed by the Roman Catholic Church, stated that it no longer will approve miracles, leaving that decision to the Church officials.
The intense interest of Catholics in Lourdes and its waters makes clear that the allure of holy waters is alive and well. This remains true in other cultures today. Consider this assessment in a multivolume history of water:
People come from all over the world to drink and collect the water [at Lourdes], just like the Hindus, who over thousands of years have carried water from the Ganges across the Indian subcontinent. Or like the Muslims, who for hundreds of years have carried water from Mecca on their pilgrimages across the African savannah to Mali and Mauritania. Millions believe that this water can work wonders, that its miraculous properties can heal the sick, cleanse the soul, and ensure longer life.
And, while perhaps not as obvious, we see the veneration of drinking water in our own lives. Think of the New Age appeal of the town of McCloud’s water, attracting people from around the globe to meditate at the waters’ spiritual vortex. Or consider the mass marketing of bottled water. The “natural origins” of bottled water feature prominently in the marketing for some of the mo
st important bottled water brands. Part of this is surely meant to demonstrate the purity of the water and the implication that it is safer to drink than tap water. But it may be getting at something deeper, as well—that drinking this water brings you closer to Mother Nature, to a purer place. As the historian William Cronon observed, nature “has become a secular deity in this post-romantic age.” Our relationships with drinking water have long been told through spiritual, sanctified stories, and they continue today.
SHOULD WE DRINK EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER A DAY?
We have all heard this at some point: To stay healthy, you should drink eight eight-ounce glasses of water every day. Not juice, not beer, and definitely not coffee. Water. While omnipresent advice, this turns out to be an urban myth. As a comprehensive 2008 review in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology concluded, “There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.”
No one seems to know for sure where this maxim originated. A 1945 report from the U.S. government’s Food and Nutrition Board recommended that people consume a milliliter of water for every calorie of food. This would work out roughly to sixty-four ounces for a day’s eating. The problem, though, is that this neglects to make clear an important point: much of the water we consume is not drunk. It’s in the foods we eat such as fruits, ice cream, and vegetables. The amount of water we should drink depends on how much water we also have eaten, not to mention how hot it is, activity levels, etc. And even if a standard rule did make sense, eight glasses a day is likely too many. Jurgen Schnermann, a kidney specialist at the National Institutes of Health, recommends half that amount, about a liter of water, to satisfy the body’s daily needs.
What about beauty? Over one-quarter of bottled water drinkers believe it improves the appearance of their hair or skin. Despite lots of websites claiming that drinking lots of water will make your skin smoother and more youthful, there is no evidence that drinking water offers dermatological benefits or prevents wrinkling.
And weight loss? We often hear that drinking throughout the day will make us feel less hungry. If you drink regularly, the pounds will melt away. If only …
In fact, as Pennsylvania State University nutritionist Barbara Rolls explains, “hunger and thirst are controlled by separate systems in the body. People are unlikely to mistake thirst for hunger.” Filling your belly with water, in other words, doesn’t make you less hungry. Nor, she found, does drinking water before or during a meal affect appetite. Eating water-rich foods, however, does make a difference. Subjects who ate soups were less hungry and consumed fewer calories. Better to eat chicken soup than chicken casserole and a glass of water.
But does it have to be water? Doesn’t drinking some liquids, like soda or coffee, cause us to lose more in urine than we take in? Some beverages are diuretics, but only alcohol comes close to being a net loss in hydration and that’s if you consume several servings. Researchers have found that the body retains about two-thirds of a cup of coffee if you’re not a regular java junkie. If your body is accustomed to caffeine, though, then your body retains almost all of what you drink.
Nutritionists counsel that thirst is one of the body’s strongest signals. If you are from Maine and hiking in the Arizona desert, of course, you may not recognize the symptoms of dehydration. For everyday living, though, if you are thirsty, your body will let you know it.
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Who Gets to Drink?
THE EPIC 1962 MOVIE Lawrence of Arabia DOMINATED THAT year’s Academy Awards, winning Best Picture and six other Oscars. One classic scene features Lawrence (played by Peter O’Toole) first meeting his future Arab brother-in-arms, Ali ibn el Kharish (played by Omar Sharif). Lawrence, parched after his travels through the desert, has reached an oasis and is greedily drinking from the well with his guide, who is from the Hazimi tribe. His guide tells Lawrence they are drinking from a well belonging to the Harif tribe, a “dirty” people. From the distance, slowly becoming visible in the shimmering waves of the desert sun, approaches the armed and dangerous-looking Ali ibn el Kharish. Panicking, Lawrence’s guide pulls a gun but is shot down by Ali ibn el Karish. A wonderfully terse dialogue follows.
ALI IBN EL KHARISH:
What is your name?
LAWRENCE:
My name is for my friends. None of my friends is a murderer.
ALI IBN EL KHARISH:
You are angry, English. He was nothing. The well is everything. The Hazimi may not drink at our wells. He knew that. Salaam.
As a scarce resource, safe drinking water has been governed by rules from the earliest times. Indeed, rules establishing access to water in arid regions may very well have predated property rules for land. As the shooting from Lawrence of Arabia amply demonstrates, in the desert, control of an oasis is far more important than control of the dry desert around it.
Water is one of the few essential requirements for life. Without water, plants wilt, shrivel, and die. Even viruses, which may not even be alive, go dormant and “turn off” without water. Throughout history, societies have been predicated on ready access to sources of drinking water, whether in the cisterns of Masada high above the Dead Sea, the graceful aqueducts carrying water into Rome, or the sacred Aboriginal water holes in Australia’s outback. While not an obvious issue to us in twenty-first-century America, management of drinking water as a resource—who gets it, when they get it, and how much they get—has been a life-and-death matter for much of human history.
While we tend not to think much about who gets to drink, drinking water is a dauntingly complex resource to manage. For millennia, human societies have faced the challenge of supplying adequate quality and quantities of drinking water. Whether limited by arid environments or urbanization, provision of clean drinking water is a prerequisite of any enduring society, but it is a multifaceted task, in large part because water is a multifaceted resource.
Drinking water is most obviously a physical resource, one of the few truly essential requirements for life. Regardless of the god you worship or the color of your skin, if you go without water for three days in an arid environment your life is in danger. And water’s physical characteristics confound easy management. Water is heavy—it is difficult to move uphill. Water is unwieldy—it cannot be packed or contained easily. And drinking water is fragile—it easily becomes contaminated and unfit for consumption. That much seems obvious.
Less apparent, though, is that drinking water can also be regarded as a cultural resource, of religious significance in many societies. It can also be a social resource, for in some societies access to water reveals much about relative status, and a political resource, as the provision of water to citizens can help justify a regime. And finally, when scarce, water can become an economic resource. Taking these facets together, one can ask how different societies, from ancient times to the present, have thought about drinking water, and how they have determined access. These questions are, of course, interrelated. How we think of water, whether as a sacred gift or a good for sale, both influences and is influenced by how we manage access to drinking water.
On July 28, 2010, for example, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed a resolution proclaiming a human right to “safe and clean drinking water.” Maude Barlow, a famed international campaigner on this issue, declared that “when the 1948 Universal Declaration on Human Rights was written, no one could foresee a day when water would be a contested area. But in 2010, it is not an exaggeration to say that the lack of access to clean water is the greatest human rights violation in the world.” And making this struggle harder, she argued, has been the commodification of water: “Instead of allowing this vital resource to become a commodity sold to the highest bidder, we believe that access to clean water for basic needs is a fundamental human right.” The public interest group Food & Water Watch describes the conflict more starkly: “Around the world, multinational corporations are seizing control of public water resources and prioritizing profits for their stockholders and executiv
es over the needs of the communities they serve.” Should water be a basic right or a marketable good?
As we shall see later in this book, this conflict is right now playing out in stark and often violent encounters in water privatization debates around the world. While much ink and, unfortunately, blood, has been shed over this debate, it has been remarkably lacking in any sense of history or what we have learned over time. After all, it’s not as if access to water is somehow a new issue or concern.
An age-old concern, the story of how societies have managed the complex resource of drinking water goes back well over five thousand years. Through a voyage across ancient cultures in the Middle East, Europe, Australia, and Asia, we will find that a society’s management of something as seemingly simple as drinking water is actually no simple matter.
GIVEN THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE OF DRINKING WATER TO SURVIVAL, it should come as no surprise that human settlements have always depended on ready access to sources of drinking water. As societies developed from hunter-gatherer economies to more advanced grazing and agriculture, the need for secure, abundant supplies of water became even more important. Archaeological excavations have found that settlements since the Neolithic time go hand in hand with water engineering. As settled populations grew, access to and control over water sources needed to grow at the same time. Cisterns and wells carved from rock have been found in excavations at Ebla, in Syria, dating from 2350 BC. Even earlier water storage sites have been found in northeastern Jordan, dating from the fourth millennium BC. Though half a world away, water storage basins with storage capacities of 10,000 to 25,000 gallons of water have been excavated in the Mesa Verde region of the American Southwest, and large collection and storage structures have been uncovered throughout the Maya lowlands.
Drinking Water Page 4