The natural landscape and the different elements of nature as water form a mediation or a link, between the down here and the beyond, between the believer and the divine. The issue here is not so much the way in which religions or spiritualities grasp the environment, but rather to look at how believers use environmental forms to access the divine. The sources and experiences of the sacred are determined by, or even subjected to, specific ecologies and typologies in ways that are simultaneously social, psychological, cultural, geographic and historical. We observe the spiritual potentiality of many environmental forms. For example, swamps – organic miasmas, ecosystems of chaos – combine the pair dread-fear with the dichotomy death-life: these marshlands call forth the disquieting supernatural, Charon, the mythological ferryman of Hades, as well as the witches and warlocks of lore that are associated with the vast European wetlands. Conversely, the running water of the rivers is associated with purity and facilitates access to the divine. In all religions, it motivates pilgrimages and determines specific types of urbanities._x000D_
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We will define how the sacred is a space mediation. We will insist on the diversity of the sacral functions of water and how these functions contribute to the urban and rural fabric. Particular attention will be paid to the mutations that occurred in the spiritual perceptions of wetlands during the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries, and this in the three religions of the Book but also in the context of Indian Hinduism. The spatial hypothesis is that the spiritual, guiding the perceptions and representations of space, is a factor acting on the modes of valuation of water places, and in fine on their ecological and geographical destiny. The geohistorical hypothesis tends to link the systems, notably hydraulic, of valorisation of wetlands with spiritual representation._x000D_

Bertrand Sajaloli*, Etienne Grésillon** et Laura Verdelli***
* Université d’Orléans (France), CEDETE, Groupe d’Histoire des Zones Humides : ** Université de Paris (France), LADYSS ; *** Université de Tours (France), CITERES, Groupe d’Histoire des Zones humides

 
ID Abstract: 482