THROWING stuff in the water has always had a strange appeal. In the US, companies offer Amish-style wishing wells as lawn ornaments or kits for charities as a sure-fire money-spinner. And in Britain, an exhibition last month at Newcastle Library featuring mundane objects recovered from the bottom the city鈥檚 Leazes Park lake was a huge success.
But why do so many of us do it? Commenting on the Newcastle offerings, archaeologist Lindsay Allason-Jones said that she would recommend a water feature as a fund-raiser for any museum, but said that votive psychology itself was a puzzle.
Maybe Frank Sinatra had a clue for us when he sang 鈥淭hree coins in a fountain鈥�, linking love, luck, coins, water and wishing. It certainly seems to be common behaviour across time and cultures. And there is a deep association between water and treasure, casting away the valuable into the liquid. Walk past the Tower of London and if a puddle has accumulated in the normally dry moat, there will be coins. A few kilometres upriver, the Iron Age Battersea shield, gloriously decorated (and unfit for battle), was found in the Thames.
Advertisement
At Llyn Cerrig Bach in north Wales, engineers building an airfield during the Second World War found iron slave rings, weapons and rich chariot fittings in the ancient lake bed. And in China鈥檚 distant past, dragons were water deities. People fought in dragon boats, and it was thought unlucky unless someone drowned, an offering to the dragon.
Archaeologists reckon it鈥檚 down to boundaries: water is liminal, a border between land and sky, other-worldly. This was a place to commune with the gods and with the dead. The weapons, slave rings, iron and gold, and the bog bodies pinned under hurdles all linked people to gods.
But how did throwing anything in water become associated only with good fortune? It turns out that only folklore connects throwing something into water with luck, love or wish-granting. In Roman Britain, for example, you could curse someone who had stolen your cloak by writing a complaint to the gods on a piece of lead and throwing it into a spring.
So why do people still do this? Votive, after all, means vowed, something promised to be given. In the absence of Zeus, Nanabojou et al there is no one left to receive offerings or grant wishes.
Could the attraction be hard-wired? Like jackdaws, are we irresistibly drawn to shiny things such as sparkling springs? Neuroscientist Semir Zeki of University College London has suggested that our attraction to brilliance and shine is inbuilt. But does that explain why we invested water with the power for good or ill?
Maybe we should make an offering to the gods of psychology鈥�