By Dianna Rhyan
Inside mossy sunken walls, a bronze nymph pours out splashing streams from cupped palms, arms outstretched to make an offering in a little-known garden I visit.
Water calmed as the goddess raised her face from the pool.
Sprinkling her forehead with crystalline drops,
she drew moist tresses over her shoulder,
and began her story…
(Ovid, Metamorphoses)
The Roman goddess Lympha, robed in limpid undulations, appears and disappears according to rhythms invisible on water’s surface. In cult, she is the personified life of water running free. Elemental Lympha, who could appear as freshwater, a spirit, goddess, or nymph, dwelt only in water that was pure, and finding its own way, emerging from a natural spring called living water. If any of those features were absent, then so was she.
Nymphs dwelt in springs, inseparable from the landscape. When water was caught, a liquid rather than a nymph remained. Yet, basins provided a reflection for worshippers inside temple precincts. Dipped from the wild, vessels of holy water graced the entrance of ancient sanctuaries to cleanse those who entered. Suppliants trailed fingers in the clear water to sprinkle themselves or scattered drops around themselves in a circle.
But here is a delight: gathering water was women’s work. The girl with a vessel on her head appears frequently in Classical art excavated from sacred sites. Lympha attended the woman walking to the spring, then home to house or home to sanctuary.
The daily visit to the native spring was a duty, a pleasure, and a lingering moment for reflection and ritual contact with the ever-flowing feminine divine. Leaning over a living fountain, she could see a rippling unformed face found nowhere else. When a girl’s wedding day dawned, bridal bath water was drawn from a living spring the bride felt relationship with, or from nearby shrine-sheltered waters of a nymph.
To invite evanescent Lympha, or any sister water nymph, nymphaea (shrines) for their presence were created at a cave, spring, or grove in natural form. With some careful chiseling, a rock spring became a rustic basin for offerings, with garlands, figurines, and marble plaques arranged above. Women tied homemade cloth ribbons on overhanging branches, and shepherds hung up goat-milk buckets and whittled flutes. The place had healing powers. Nymphaea survived in remote areas until late antiquity thriving in art, myth, cult, and private prayer.
Devotees affirmed their convictions through material offerings and patient work caring for springs, shrines, and gardens. Lifegiving and benevolent as they were, sometimes nymphs abducted those they loved. A man who encountered them face to face might become a nympholept (someone “taken hold of” by nymphs). This sacred possession, or awakening, was a form of enthousiasmos, meaning “divinity within,” the word behind all our enthusiasms.
The mythical hero Odysseus was a nympholept of sorts: he disappeared for years with the nymph Kalypso in her poplar-shadowed, cedar-scented, spring-watered garden and cave, when he was supposed to be heading home. The ancient novel Daphis and Chloe describes a sensual awakening, centered around a pastoral grotto that innocent lovers tend together, inspired, protected by, and devoted to the nymphs of the place.
Being taken by nymphs brought gifts of inspiration, and the nympholept expressed visions through carving, painting, poetry, and prophecy. Archaic devotees lived out a steadfast commitment often as hermits, their lives focused on intimate rituals.
Ancient evidence survives of a handful of worshippers dedicated to the care of nymph-inhabited caves, sheltering its sacred spring. As nympholept, Archedamos of Thera lived alone to cherish a cave near Vari, on Mount Hymettos in Greece. In this remote place, perhaps around 400 BCE, he left images and messages carved in stone to show that he was “taken” and directed to perform his life’s work there.
He became a mystic figure inhabiting the borderland, away from the secular world. Following his own mystical path, he devoted himself to Vari Cave and cultivated fruit trees, herbs, and flowers near the entrance, in his reverence for living water.
When it was rediscovered by modern explorers, the ancient cave of Vari was screened by a fig tree whose branches shielded the entrance. The fig’s water-seeking roots were visible far beneath the entrance, twining down beside handmade curving steps, finally emerging out on a stone shelf shaped for votive offerings. In the Mediterranean sun, the fig lives where other trees cannot; it seeks and finds water more deeply, and is a sure sign of fertile, hidden streams below the barren rock.
Once, I stood by the mouth of the cave, on Mount Hymettos sacred to the Muses, contemplating its stark black entrance in brilliant sundrenched hillside, daydreaming, musing, on the rustic secrets of this quiet, layered place: a subterranean sanctuary requiring careful descent; an otherworldly atmosphere suited to water spirits, where dripping swathes of roots, and tremulous steps are only gradually revealed.
Devotion here is visible, tangible, and whole.
What lured the enraptured Archedamos to this wild shrine? Was this the allure of Lympha, the beguilement of nymphs?
The Greek and Latin roots of Lympha’s name evoke cleansing baths and ritual transformations: lustrous pourings-out including “nymphic” bridal immersion, washing away pollution, or libating the dead.
Rinsing tender bodies with delicate hands,
it is as if some healing enchantment
flows in these gentle waters.
(Alcaeus)
Amidst such evocative contradiction, we are left wondering; if we seek to define Lympha, we reach for water, and water escapes our grasp.
Like the lotus blossom in her pool,
the flower folds her petals
and draws serene into the shimmering depths,
far beneath the watery caverns,
far beyond the touch of any hand.
I recall that in folklore, some say only those who have lost their way and wandered long from the path can ever find Lympha. If Lympha was ever mistreated, she would be angered, and water turned foul. Or it disappeared. In my mind’s eye, there stoops Tantalus, the archetypal devourer. Once he thirsted to deceive the gods; now trapped in the underworld,
Raving with thirst, he tried to drink but captured nothing;
the soil cracked where he stood, dried by divine revenge.
(Odyssey)
If anyone harmed a sacred spring, sacred vision on the site could cease:
…gone is the voice of the prophetic spring.
Speaking water has been silenced.
(Kedrenos)
The ambition to control whole bodies of water is ancient. In history, kingdoms fell when inimical kings bridged, confined, “punished,” or diverted rivers for their own purposes. As time passed, manipulation of natural flows through tunnels and aqueducts converted water into a public utility, in ever more elaborate buildings over natural springs.
In the time of Lympha’s cherishing, the landscape was considered a sacred primordial being who was alive with the goddesses and gods of nature. All deities influenced nature. Many dwelt not in temples, but in numinous caves and groves, or roamed free in the form of natural forces like winds, storms, or springs. Because Gaia, the creative earth, was a wise organism, any wise human treated the environment with care and approached the earth with respect.
Powerful oaths could sound like this:
Rivers and earth, stand as witnesses.
Keep watch over our oaths of fidelity.
(Iliad)
Or even simpler to swear, as a proverb,
By earth, by springs, by rivers, by brooks.
Such oaths speak to us today if we keep watch over our fidelity—if we are seeking to honor humanity’s sacred bond with the earth and her flowing waters. To aid us, myth slips in where logic could never go. After all, in the world’s oldest myth of underworld descent, for the Sumerian goddess Inanna to live anew, to return to the upperworld again,
Creatures sprinkled fresh water on her corpse…and Inanna rose.
Where are the subterranean springs, the secret sources of rivers Huron, Grand, and Chippewa, the wild waves of Saginaw Bay, and deepest currents of Saint Clair? Immortal freshness, integrity, and beauty are one with these flows. In memory of Lympha, let all those washed by Great Lakes and sister tributaries, marshland, brook, vernal pool, and shore, seek to honor and learn their hidden and forgotten ways, to restore their innate purity and abundant life.
Before you cross the shining currents of ever-flowing rivers,
cleanse your hands in the shimmering surface
and pray, contemplating the bright and lovely stream.
(Hesiod, Works and Days)
In the bodies of all, two rivers wind: dark blood and lustrous lymph. The goddess gave the translucent one its name, long, long ago. Inner lymph washes clean by flowing, and so did she. Indweller and protector of purifying springs, Lympha aided the sick, the lost, or those who were sick with grief, for her fluid had the holy power to heal. For the body or psyche in need of return, for tree sap, for rivers, and for human lymph, the blocked stream finds her way through to new life, and inside our bodies, the liquid waters of lymph stream around our wounds to heal. As Lympha reminds us, all are living watersheds, sacred and mystical, designed in flowing layers.
Dianna Rhyan, PhD is the author of Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash: Sacred Landscapes in Ancient Nature Myth, and Mestra the Shapeshifter: Ancient Heroine of the Sacred Grove, both from Moon Books. This meditation on the goddess Lympha is adapted from Staff of Laurel, Staff of Ash.
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