Water nymphs
with guest contributor Claudia Acklin
Claudia joined the third of our Living Waters inquiries from Switzerland in 2023. In this guest post she tells how she continued her River inquiries after our collaborative work was completed. She is particularly drawn to clairsentience as a way of communicating with River; and how classical European mythology offers an opening to experiencing sentient River.
In one of our plenary sessions in the “Living Walters” inquiry, a discussion came up along the lines of: Do societies with ongoing indigenous traditions, such as Australia, North or South America, have an advantage in understanding River over European ones? In Europe, I suspect that few people practice Celtic or other shamanic ways of living and rituals today or are aware of the knowledge embedded in Greek and Roman mythology, all of which shaped our cultures a long, long time ago. Nevertheless, this discussion captured my interest.
During our participatory inquiry I dealt with two main questions: What is my personal approach to communicating with River? And what are my roots, my foundation so to speak, for doing so? Regarding the first question: Through the rich sharing in our working group, I learned to distinguish the following approaches to River inquiry: the observation and description of River; the translation of these observations into artwork; rituals, which I have come to understand are rooted in animistic practices; and communication with spirit through one’s senses or clairsentience. All these approaches can overlap, of course. Different group members emphasised one approach over the other or used a combination of several of them. For instance, our group leader Jacqueline Kurio taught us how to use labyrinths (also here) and some worked with this ancient ritual later. Another member painted “hydroglyphs” as a result from his interaction with River. My favourite approach, however, is the last one mentioned. While I personally like rituals because they are setting the stage to receive information from our higher selves or from the spirit world around us, I think River does not need us to perform rituals to communicate with us. River is always open and even eager to impart knowledge e.g., on natural laws, the flipside of scientific knowledge, or to pragmatically give personal support. I have strong ties to different spiritual practices, some of them rooted in shamanism. But I also have learned to feel, sense, hear or see “information”, to directly plug into the “cosmic internet” so to speak.
In my very first intentional meeting with Aare, the River that runs through Bern… I met a spirit entity I later would call a Nymph.
Let me illustrate this within the context of answering question two: In my very first intentional meeting with Aare, the River that runs through Bern, the city where I live, I met a spirit entity I later would call a Nymph. There actually had been an observation I made a few days earlier on one of my Aare walks before I sat down to meditate at its riverside: I noticed a rock formation, which glistened with running water. In my meditation later I learned that this Nymph watches over exactly this tiny Spring with its droplets trickling down to the Aare, but is also part of an extended network of nature spirits of that specific stretch. I usually first sense an energy, often together with a colour. I might see familiar images; spirit trying to make it easier for me to put the experience into perspective. I first examine and question my sensations and then start a conversation. In my first encounter the Nymph explained to me that the purpose of River is to transport water and to flow to meet all waters in our seas and oceans.
So, it didn’t come as a surprise to me that a few weeks later, when visiting Rome during the duration of our course, I had a similar encounter on the riverside of the Tiber. It was a male spirit that I sensed and heard several times during my stay and that claimed that he had built the city… While I had learned a lot about the “nature” of rivers in my encounters with River in Bern, the message of the Tiber offered a historical perspective on the founding times of the city and the Roman Empire and the surprising claim that the Tiber did not just passively cross a city on its way to the sea. It had agency.
But how to convey Tiber’s point of view? And I wanted to find “proof” to back up the rivers claim. As a child I was an avid reader of Gustav Schwab’s Die schönsten Sagen des klassischen Altertums (1837). Back in Switzerland I took my copy of Schwab’s myths out of the bookshelf, found additional material supporting Tiber’s claims, and wrote an essay in which I tell of the River god Tiberinus, who made the prophecy that Aeneas’ son would found Rome; and the nymph Egeria, who inspired the 2nd king of Rome, Numa Pompilius to establish a shared Roman identity of the conflicting Etruscans and Sabines.
I believe that mythology can not only connect us to the foundations of our European heritage, but also to the notion that River is alive, if not divine.
You can find my essay, written for a broader public, in the original German here. Please scroll down for English and Italian translations.
Thank you. I live near a mighty River in the Pacific Northwest and I often visit and much appreciate her. Your writing resonates with me.