The word ‘kumbh’, vase or recipient that holds the nectar of immortality, has survived in other Indo-European languages such as French, where a ‘combe’ is a high valley in which flows a river.
The very name evokes one of the most ancient mythemes of the Indo-European, Arya civilisation, found also among other ethno-cultural families. It is about the salvific, eschatological role of the river flowing from the heavens above, irrigating the land and the subterranean realms before losing itself in the ocean that surrounds the world-island.
The word “kumbh”, vase or recipient that holds the nectar of immortality has survived in other Indo-European languages such as French, where a “combe” is a high valley in which flows a river, while in Spanish “cumbre” has come to mean a summit. “Mela”: gathering or coming together survives in the English medley and in the French “mélange” (mix) and “mélée” in a conflictual context.
The evocation of a gathering around a holy vase, whose miraculous contents heal all diseases and lend its drinkers divine qualities is part of mystical lore in many parts of the world since time immemorial. The Styx, one of the five rivers of the Greek netherworld, made those who took a dip in its water invulnerable, and anyone who swore by its name could never break his word under pain of the most dreadful punishment. Another of those five streams (pentapotamoi, the Greek equivalent of the Pancasindhava, Punjab), the Acheron bordered the Tartarus and had to be crossed by the dead in Nocher (Naukar) Charon’s boat after their funeral. The significance of the river as a frontier between life and death, between temporality and immortality is made clear in the Hellenic spiritual cartography.
The archetype of the Kumbha, the pitcher that holds the Amrit of the gods extracted out of the Shirasagara survives in the Celtic legend of the Grail cup, carved out of a celestial emerald, and adopted in medieval Christian lore. The nectar it contains became Christ’s blood. As such, the Grail is at the heart of the Christian rite of the Eucharist. For the Last Supper, thirteen Elect—the twelve zodiacal signs around the Sun—are shown seated around the cup of the Holy Communion. When they partake in the wine of the cup the enlightenment of the Revelation leads to the Sacrifice (“Making Sacred”).
Alchemy is the secret science of blending sulphur and mercury—the Sun and the Moon—to make the filter or the Philosophical Stone. All those symbols refer to the earliest gatherings around the rivers, especially at a point of confluence (sangam) or at a ford for the lustral bath in the Teertha for the performance of a rite of passage and purification.
Water is, in what perennial philosophers call the primordial tradition, the purifying fluid that washes away sins and defilements. In India, snan is the premise or prelude to any sacramental action as it is in Semitic faiths. The Jewish Prophet Johannes baptised his followers in the Jordan and Jesus his cousin received was anointed by him in the holy water before he could “baptise others by the fire of the Holy Spirit” according to the account of the Gospels. The rebirth in the water of a sacred river is an anagogical return to the amniotic fluid in the maternal womb which makes the body and the soul new and ready to receive the fiery blessing of initiation.
The cyclical celebration of the Kumbh Melas, related to Jupiter’s (Guru, the king of planets) 12-year-long revolution around the Sun, is timed in keeping with the Bharatiya lunisolar calendar and with the original Vedic and Aitihasic 12-year yuga. Contemporary astronomers like to call Jupiter the largest planet, the protector of the inner planetary system because its powerful gravitational field intercepts most meteors and other intruders that venture around its orbit.
The Kumbh rite is of indisputable but chronologically uncertain antiquity. Melas around rivers took place from Vedic times but to Adi Shankaracharya, the great restorer of post-Buddhist Sanatana Dharma is attributed the revival and liturgic regulation of the four or five “canonic” Kumbha Melas celebrated to this day.
Periodic oecumenical spiritual assemblies are vital to the health and unity of the Hindu Dharma, a galaxy of multiple jatis, kulas, paramparas, and sampradayas spread across a vast subcontinent. The Kumbh Mela gives all Hindus the living experience of their common heritage in all its diversity and subsumes the diverse practices and denominations into the primordial and universal Hindu Dharma to which all of them belong. Pilgrimages and festivals are the bonds holding religious communities together and we can see in Europe and America particularly how the decline of faith and practice coincides with the waning of those mass gatherings, mostly replaced by commercial and artistic or entertainment-centric events. Melas are the lifeblood of Sanatan Dharma, just as rivers are the arteries of the land.
The Kumbh Mela may be aptly described as the largest physical representation of the connection between the macrocosm (Vishwa, Jagat, Paramatman) and the human microcosm (vyakti, jivatman, manava) through the medium of water, which is described by some contemporary scientists such as French physicist and musicologist Marc Henry as the embodiment of the field of consciousness and the interface between the material world and the zero point or quantum gravitational field. Water is found everywhere in the cosmos, as was stated in the cosmologies of ancient cultures and yet the greatest mystery is that according to the laws of physics as we understand them so far, it should not exist because the atoms that compose the water molecules are not supposed to form a stable combination. Molecules consist of water to the extent of 89% and in living cells the percentage is above 99%. The human body’s composition is between 96% and 97% liquid. It is now known that water has a memory and can be used to store information in vibrations of specific frequencies. It is significant that “wave”—a graphic term specific originally applied to the motion of water—is the word used to describe atoms as well as electromagnetic pulsations. Water is a physico-chemical wonder that remains a topic of research and fascination.
Marc Henry has pointed out in his work that a mole (basic chemical unit) of water weighs 18 grams. That corresponds in the EM spectrum to a frequency of 429.62 hertz if we apply the Fourier Transform equations from light to sound. The generation of sounds at the 429.62 frequency has healing effects on living systems and especially on the human psyche, hinting at the kinship of our psychophysical nature with water, the matrix of organic life forms.
The immersion in water is therefore an apt allegory of the fusion between the individual and the universal, the Sampurna, reflected in the sangam that water chemically represents and the human sangam or convergence.
This summary description of recent discoveries about the fundamental structure of matter and energy and its relation to consciousness would not be complete without making a reference to the work of Italian physicist Massimo Teodorani that provides an anagogical method to connect our perceptions of the material world with the spiritual intuitions enshrined in ancient scriptures. He has built a theory of a “hyperspace of consciousness” that embraces and pervades the universe, and makes all things alive, including the plasma state of matter. In that “panpsychitic” context, Professor Gerald Pollack from the University of Washington in the USA has discovered a fourth state of water, different from its familiar liquid, solid (frozen) and gaseous conditions, and detectable everywhere, including interstellar space. This new perspective validates the insights provided by many ancient cosmologies that identified the presence of the same fluid in the heavens as well as on Earth. The Biblical Genesis in line with the Mesopotamian creation myth explains that Adonai (later known as Iahweh and Sabaoth) divided the cosmic water between the sky above and the sea beneath. In the Hindu Weltanschauung, the Ganga, as the archetypal river descends from Swarga and streams through Shiva’s locks to cascade in the Himalayan gorges before settling in the plains of Aryavarta. Its water is therefore a heavenly nectar that nourishes all life along its banks and leads to salvation and eternal bliss beyond death.
Back to Pollack, his discovery, based on the many years of research carried out by Dr Gilbert Ling, is that, “when touching most surfaces, water transforms itself into so-called EZ (Exclusion Zone) water, also known as structured water or fourth phase water” (from Wikipedia) whose molecules are aligned within liquid crystals. Even though they are electromagnetic dipoles, the overwhelming polarity of this “structured water” is, surprisingly, negative. Yet it generates energy like a mini-battery that converts infrared light into heat. EZ water, whose formula is H3O2, differs dramatically from H2O. It is omnipresent in living systems which it enables to function.
There is indeed a lot more to water than what we see in water or snow. Clouds are made of EZ water, which is why they float in the sky until a physical change in atmospheric conditions brings about their dissolution into rain. It looks like the contemplative insights of Vedic Rishis and Vidwans led them to grasp the hidden complexity of this “miracle” substance, including the cycle of precipitation, flow, and evaporation that provides an allegory of the biological cycle of insemination, birth (or germination), growth, expansion and return to the source.
The mission of this day and age is to clean the rivers and restore them, as far as possible, to their original purity that enables healthy life to thrive within and around them. They are the nadis (the veins, the arteries, the capillary vessels and also the subtle sympathetic and parasympathetic energy channels known to both the Indian and Chinese medical systems) of the planet’s body and the invisible ones, such as the mystical Saraswati that flows down at Prayagraj to converge with the Ganga and Yamuna, can perhaps now be detected as streams of fourth-phase water circulating in the atmosphere, linked with the magnetic ley lines recognised by many ancient traditions.
The India Foundation will hold a “Kumbh Global Summit on Development and Sustainability”, to be held on 21-23 February 2025 in Prayagraj. The purpose is to reflect on the best ways to integrate tradition with modernity for opening new pathways for a desirable evolution of the Dharmic civilisation and cultures. Leading experts in many disciplines are invited from various parts of the world to contribute their ideas and proposals in the unique environment of the world’s largest and most peaceful assembly.
* Côme Carpentier de Gourdon, Distinguished Fellow with India Foundation, is a writer of several books and articles.