FT275


I was walking along the path towards St Madron’s Well in Cornwall when a family group came in the opposite direction. Despite my passing greeting, none of the family said a word. They went by in silence, averting their gaze. I noticed the young woman in the group holding a tiny, sickly baby close to her body.

On arriving at the ruins of the little chapel at the well site, I found a candle and some votive offerings – flowers and coins. The candle appeared to have been recently snuffed out. It seemed that the family had been taking part in a ritual at this ancient holy place – possibly praying for the health of the fragile-looking infant.

They were clearly not the only people who had visited the spot. Nearby, a tree was festooned with ribbons, rags, paper and plastic hangings, messages and prayers. One I read was from a woman hoping to conceive. Others talked of sickness or emotional turmoil.

Belief in the power of holy wells and the efficacy of their waters is clearly not just the stuff of ancient history. Although many of the local wells in Britain have been lost to nature or agricultural drainage schemes, hundreds are still maintained and hold fast to their reputations.

Of the dozens in Cornwall, with such singular and exotic names as Menacuddle, Sancreed, Alsia, St Clederus, St Cuby and St Guron, many are regularly visited and appear to be the places of contemporary ritual. Like St Madron’s Well, those at Sancreed and Alsia are also associated with the tying of strips of material to the branches of nearby bushes and trees. It is a practice found across the British Isles from Cornwall to Scotland. One of the best examples is to be found in the far north near Munlochy, Easter Ross. There they are known as clootie (or cloutie) wells, because of the cloths (or clouts) left hanging. Munlochy is now established on the region’s tourist trail.

A standard explanation of the cloutie tradition can be seen on the Scottish Nat­ural Heritage visitors’ web pages.

“Holy wells were often regarded as places of healing, with certain wells assoc­iated with particular afflictions. The ‘cloutie wells’ are a survival of this belief. Sufferers hung strips of cloth from trees beside the well, and as the cloth decayed so did the affliction disappear. A number of wells and springs became the site of religious pilgrimages and were regularly visited over many years. Rituals associated with wells and springs persisted into the 20th century. For example, there is a well-known cloutie well on Culloden Muir. In 1937, a crowd of over 12,000 people assembled here to drop coins in the water, drink from the well, wish for something and tie a rag to one of the nearby trees. Still today, you pass areas such as these with rags tied to trees near wells!”[1]

Holy wells are thus officially posit­ioned as a species of heritage curiosity, as places where odd or amusing customs survive from some vaguely defined lost age.

Judging by their demeanour, I would have thought it unlikely that the main interest of the family I encountered at St Madron’s Well was in keeping alive an old tradit­ion. Their visit to the well appeared to have a serious purpose. Evoking the magic of the well might even have been their last hope of finding a cure for a sick child, perhaps after weeks of conventional med­ical treatment.

Far from taking part in a pictur­esque curiosity, the family was but one example of thousands of individuals and families worldwide who continue to seek out sources of holy – and often, by implication – healing waters.

But how ancient are these beliefs? Have they survived in an unbroken line from before the mists of time, or at least before the days of Christianity? Or, are they a relatively recent fabrication?


HOLY SPRINGS AND ZAM ZAM WATER
Holy springs and wells are found all over Europe and a few have acquired international reputations. Nowhere else in Christendom matches the fame of Lourdes in France. Thousands of pilgrims visit the Pyrenean town every year seeking cures. They drink from the holy spring in the Grotto of Massabielle and wash in the waters discovered, with a little help from the Virgin Mary, by St Bernadette only 150 years ago (FT222:32–38).

“[The Lady] told me that I should go and drink at the fountain and wash myself,” to quote from St Bernadette’s own account. “Seeing no fountain… she pointed with her finger that I was to go in under the rock. I went, and I found a puddle of water which was more like mud, and the quantity was so small that I could hardly gather a little in the hollow of my hand. Nevertheless I obeyed, and started scratching the ground; after doing that I was able to take some. The water was so dirty that three times I threw it away. The fourth time I was able to drink it.”[2]

In due course, a small spring began to flow from the spot. The first miracle occurred when a friend of Bernadette healed a dislocated arm by placing it in the water. News of Bernadette’s appar­ition of the Virgin Mary and the curat­ive powers of the spring rapidly spread.

Today Lourdes is the major economic centre of the district. The healing water is in such demand that it has to be piped and collected for distribution. Those who require its healing properties, but cannot themselves travel to Lourdes, can buy bottles of it online from The Lourdes Water Shop.[3] A small transparent Virgin Mary bottle filled with water can be bought for 33.20 dollars and a litre can be ordered for 138.80 dollars. It is even more expensive than water from the River Jordan, a small bottle of which will be dispatched in a presentation pack by Holylandmall.com for only 12.95 dollars.

Water rivalling that of Lourdes and the Jordan in efficacy and value can be found in the context of other faiths. When performing Hajj or Umrah in Mecca, devout Muslims visit the well of Zam Zam close by the Kaaba. The legend goes that the well was discovered by Ishmael, the infant son of Abraham. He and his mother were in the desert. They were thirsty and Ishmael was crying for water. He began kicking at the ground and water miraculously sprang forth. Water still flows from the same spot. Today the flow has to cope with the demand of millions of pilgrims every year. They not only drink it from the taps on site – it is even collected and bottled industrially for wider distribution.

Rarely over its supposed 4,000-year hist­ory has the well dried up, but never has demand for its water been so great as it is now. Thanks to air travel,the numbers of pilgrims performing Hajj has risen fast – more than ten-fold in a generation. Once, the devout Muslims going on pilgrimage would have numbered just a few thousand; today millions are involved and they travel from all around the world.

In the early days of Islam, the value of Zam Zam water was as much practical as devotional. It was a rare, pure water source in a notoriously dry area. Mecca has on average four inches (10cm) of rain a year. Today visitors to, and residents of, Mecca emphasise Zam Zam water’s spiritual properties. They are unique, say Muslims, and many cures have been attributed to them. Such is its value that there has been a reported trade in counter­feit Zam Zam water.

Three years ago, Westminster City Council warned Londoners to be wary of supplies being sold during Ramadan. Environmental health officers seized a consignment of supposed holy water from a shop in the Notting Hill area at the start of the holy month. Laboratory tests found the water contained three times the permitted level of arsenic.

In a statement, Westminster Council said that the export of genuine Zam Zam water was expressly forbidden by the Saudi authorities: “Any being offered for sale in the UK will be from unauthorised sources and pot­entially harmful. Genuine Zam Zam, which is sourced from the Well of Zam Zam, located within the Masjid al Haram in Mecca, can only be taken out of Saudi Arabia in small quantities by returning Pilgrims for personal consumption.”


WATERS OF LIFE
Britain’s holy wells are far more modest in scope and ambition than those of inter­national renown. Even Britain’s ‘most-visited’ – St Winefride’s Well at Holywell in North Wales, which has a religious order and a hospice attached, is a modest place of pilgrimage compared to Lourdes. But it has a recorded history that goes back further than its better-known French counterpart, indeed longer than that of most other holy wells. Written references to it are found in mediæval manuscripts and the chapel and well buildings date back to the 16th century. However, only legend can date it as a sacred site before the 12th century and only supposition can give it pre-Christian antecedents.

There is no commercial trade in water, real or fake, from the holy springs of Cornwall or Wales – yet there are close parallels between the legends associated with them and those told about some of the more famous holy water sources of the world. There might even be an explanation in common as to why certain springs and wells attract legendary properties.

Water is essential to human life. Without a reliable water source, no community can survive. Yet, water is not simply a practical necessity. It can come to symbolise life itself and thus also plays an important role in many religious rituals. Whether in ritual washing, baptism, sprinkling of holy water, the mixing of water and wine, mystical powers are attributed to plain, ordinary water.

In parts of the world where water is a scarce resource, a single well or spring serving a community is at the heart of that commun­ity’s religious, cultural, as well as economic life.

The Bible tells of Jerusalem’s Pool of Siloam. In the first century AD, it was the city’s only permanent supply, being fed by ancient tunnels from the Gihon Spring. In Christian tradition, it became associated with a miraculous healing after Jesus sent a blind man to the pool with instructions to wash. As a result, the man received his sight.[4]

The story, like that of the baptism of Jesus, has its parallels in the traditional Jewish custom of the Mikveh. The ritual washing, by immersion in water, is undertaken to achieve spiritual purity. Today it often precedes conversion to Judaism, and in some Orthodox circles it is a ritual undertaken before holy days or to ‘cleanse’ a woman after pregnancy.

The sacredness of water appears to be pan-cultural. Worldwide, the water source that attracts the most devotees is the River Ganges, holy in many strands of Hinduism. The river, despite its modern pollution, can wash away the sins of the faithful. It is parti­cularly efficacious at the time of death and many practising Hindus seek to breathe their last on the river’s banks. The city of Varanasi on the banks of the Ganges hosts 50,000 funerals a year. Death is the city’s main industry as thousands of Hindus travel there in order to die within sight of the sacred river and then be cremated on her banks.

What often identifies a source of water as holy, be it river or spring, is that it has attracted a genesis legend – a poetical and apocryphal story which is told to explain its origin. In the case of the River Ganges, there are several. She is associated with the Godd­ess Ganga, the mother goddess said to have descended to Earth through a lock of the God Shiva’s hair. Or, in another Hindu myth, the river is said to have emerged from the feet of Lord Rama.

Whether the legend is Cornish, Indian or Arabic, the common feature is that the water was created or discovered in some magical way, or is associated with a great mystic of the past.

St Non’s Well in Pembrokeshire is named after the mother of the great Welsh religious leader, St David. According to folklore, writes Janet Bord, the well began to flow at the time of his birth, “which was said to have taken place on the cliff-top where the ruined chapel now stands”.[5]

St Neot’s Well in Cornwall is associated with a story about a saint who survived on eating fish that miraculously appeared in the waters of the well. The legend told about St Teilo’s Well at Llandaff, Cardiff, is equally odd. The saint is said to have found women washing butter by the well. He first of all turned their butter-pats into a cup in order to have a drink and then miraculously turned the cup into a bell.


PAGAN OR CHRISTIAN?
British holy wells are found mostly to the west of the country in Wales, the Welsh bord­ers and Cornwall in particular. It has been estimated that 100 years ago the average number of wells per British county was 40. There were at least 90 in Cornwall and 600 in the counties of South Wales – Pembrokeshire alone having over 200.

The reason for the preponderance of wells in the west of the country might be that they survived better in areas of the country which were largely Celtic, or it could be for the more mundane reason that the rainfall out west is higher and therefore there are more springs and rivers. If the latter is the cause, left unexplained is why some of the wells attracted legends of healing and others did not.

One possibility, some would say a fanciful one, concerns ‘ley lines’ and earth energies. Leys drawn on maps frequently go through holy well sites as they join other places of spiritual importance. Dowsers say they can trace the energy of leys in much the same way as they can dowse for water. Holy wells, it is said, are natural water sources which occur on earth energy lines, and as a result their water can be used for healing and for divination.

A more scientific explanation as to why some wells are considered to have healing properties – and others are not – is that the waters themselves might have special physical properties. Possibly they are high in beneficial trace elements. Analysis of Zam Zam water, it is claimed, shows a higher than normal content of calcium and magnesium salts and natural fluorides.

But how ‘authentic’ are Europe’s holy wells? Have the rituals performed at them really survived from the mists of time, or are they relatively recent inventions? Writers like Ronald Hutton have suggested there is very little hard evidence for supposing that the rituals of modern Paganism are rooted in genuine pre-Christian practices. Certainly there is evidence of pre-Christian cultures – those responsible for the building of the mega­liths – positioning their stones near to water sources. Whether this was for religious purposes, or because the builders needed to have a supply of water, is open to question. What is also open to question is whether the ancient water sources continued in use through the Christian­isation process, the mediæval period and through to modern times.

Evidence from Denmark suggests there was a break in continuity, which may be typical of the rest of Europe. “Two kinds of silence, archæological and theological, sugg­est that holy springs were of little or no import­ance during the Middle Ages,” wrote Jens Johansen in 1997. “While many coins and pieces of pottery have been found at places identified as holy springs, few of the artefacts are of mediæval origin.”[6]

Johansen continues: “Moreover, early Danish reformers such as Hans Tavsen and Peder Palladius never referred to the existence of holy springs in their copious writings on superstition published during the 1550s.

“In the late 1580s, the Regisse Spring on the island of Funen is mentioned for the first time. Archæologists have uncovered rags, crutches, hair and caps there. Such items have also been found at the Helene Spring, first mentioned in 1617… Evidently, people’s faith in miracles had not suddenly disapp­eared with the coming of the Reformation. Instead, ordinary people shifted their focus to the holy springs, which in Catholic times had played a rather unobtrusive and insignificant part among the wealth of possible express­ions of faith in saints and miracles. Undoubtedly, the growing belief in holy springs can be considered a way of compensating for the loss of other ways of worship.”

The suggestion is that if there had been some form of pre-Christian folk-faith based on holy wells – which, given the significance of water in human history, is not unlikely – the observances faded through the mediæval period, their revival only coinciding with the rise of Protestantism.

James Rattue’s book The Living Stream: Holy wells in Hist­orical Context also challenges the notion of the widespread survival of pre-Christian rites and belief systems evidenced through a survival of holy well rituals. Rattue examines the effects of the Reformation on hydrolatory (the worship of water) and the influence of the romantic post-Reformation period – the period in which, to quote from Rich Pederick, the editor of Living Spring Journal, “…antiquarians first began to wax lyrically about lost treasures and the upper classes attempted to envelop themselves in the romance of times past by surrounding themselves with temples, follies and grott­oes, and devouring all things antiquarian. This arousal of interest in wells resulted in a lot of literature.”

Rattue brings the story of the holy well into the modern period and tells of country vicars who ‘reinstated’, or rather invented, rituals around wells in their parishes. According to Pederick, the late 19th cent­ury saw the creation of many well-dressing ceremonies. A Roman Catholic pilgrimage to St Plegmund’s Well in Plemstall, Cheshire, began as late as 1938. Visitors to many of the holy well sites in Britain find them restored, with a Victorian or 20th-cent­ury well house covering them.

“By the early 20th century,” wrote Pederick, “romantic assumptions had ‘graduated into a theory which became all-dominating’. Rattue asserts that ‘at the root of that theory was romantic urban angst’. In conclusion, Rattue attempts to succinctly disentangle the romantic from the historical, asserting that it is ‘the aching alienation of the modern mind from the land itself’ that has led to such an entanglement.”[7]


REINVENTING TRADITION
Worldwide, holy wells continue to be discovered or created. Healing waters have of late been found in Mexico, Germany, China and India – at least, so claims Share International, the movement which claims a new messiah, the Maitreya, is currently active in the world.

One of their reports estimates that 10,000 people a day have been queuing for water at a miracle well at Tlacote, Mexico, said to cure everything from AIDS and cancer to obesity and high cholesterol. The healing properties of the waters were first noticed when it was lapped up by a sick farm dog. The waters had supposedly been empowered by the Maitreya himself. As had those at a spring in a disused slate mine at Nordenau in Germany, where an ex-miner said his back was healed and he has thrown away his crutch. Another woman said: “I always had problems with high blood pressure and was afraid of collapsing. I went to the grotto with my pressure at 160 to 100. I came out with 130 to 100. Now the blood pressure is constant, a fact which my doctor cannot explain.”[8]

Individual holy wells become associated with specific practices. At some rags are hung, others have coins left or pins. Some are said to heal blindness, while others special­ise in rheumatism. Some are places of divination. At a new holy well site, or at one that has been revived in modern times, how do these rituals or associations come about? Why do the visitors opt to perform certain rites? When much of the traditional Christian practice of Britain and Europe is being lost, and church leaders talk of a ‘Generation Y’ – the new young adults who know nothing of Christianity, not even the Lord’s Prayer – who determines what behaviour and pract­ices are appropriate for a holy well?

A clue may be found in a new work by socio­logist Sylvia Collins-Mayo. From her study of the views and attitudes of 300 people born after 1982, she found what she described as a “benign indifference to relig­ion”. However, young people do turn, she said, to “a faded, inherited cultural memory of Christianity” during difficult times, such as illness or bereavement, when they are “looking for some sort of guidance” and a way of “making sense of death”.[9]

Substitute the word ‘religion’ for ‘Christianity’ and an explan­ation for the rites at holy wells might be found. Might members of Generation Y, not having trad­itional faith roots of their own, have had to reinvent their own forms of spiritual practice from surviving cultural remnants?

Thus the rituals observed at holy wells are not survivals of an ancient tradition, but invent­ions, based on some popular idea of what ritual ought to include. Like the creation of shrines at the sites of motorcycle accidents and the placing of flowers and cards on the gates of Kensington Palace to remember Princess Diana, are contem­porary holy well rituals being created to fill a cultural or spirit­ual void?

Some of the practices would superficially appear to follow the supposed ‘old ways’, but actually seem to have missed the point – an indication perhaps that they are reconstructed from fading memory. Rags were, it is said, left at wells so that they could rot away. It was as they decomposed, so the illness of the supplicant faded.

Many of the items left at wells today however are made from plastic – polythene and artificial fibres. According to the old lore, the diseases represented by these non-biodegradable offerings will take a long time, if not a lifetime, to heal.





Notes
1 Scottish Natural Heritage.
2 Catholic Pilgrims of Mary and Jesus.
3 Lourdes Store.
4 John 9 vv6–7.
5 Janet Bord: Holy Wells in Britain – A Guide, Heart of Albion, p161.
6 Jens Chr V Johansen: “Holy Springs and Protestantism in Early Modem Denmark: A Medical Rationale for a Religious Practice”, Medical History, 1997, 41:59–69.
7 Living Spring Journal, Issue 2, Nov 2002.
8 www.share-international.org.
9 Church Times, 8 Oct 2010.