"...97% of the total supply of fresh water on our planet is contained inside the earth from which it emerges in springs and geysers or though wells and boreholes, sometimes boiling hot and sometimes icy cold, sometimes sluggishly and sometimes with enormous force, sometimes containing a rich variety of minerals and salts and sometimes containing almost nothing at all.
It is this fresh water, bubbling up from the ground, tumbling down hillsides in fast flowing streams, flowing more sedately through great rivers and forming pools and lakes that has been accorded particular spiritual significance and venerated through human history.
The much greater quantity of salt water that makes up the seas and oceans has, on the whole, inspired rather different emotions - awe and wonder, certainly, but also fear and dread. The sea, conceived as "the deep", has been seen as something other, a remnant of the chaos that existed before creation, untamed, savage and associated with danger and death.
Fresh water has, for the most part, been conceived of in much more positive and benign terms, although it too has not been wholly without negative and demonic associations..."
From "Water - A Spiritual History" by Ian Bradley
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