04/11/2025
In a city that is defined by rivers, ARAS Archive invites us to dive into the archetypal symbolism of the river!
It's Archetypal Friday and our symbol for this week is river.
Human civilizations were first borne on the banks of the rivers of the world including the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Yellow River, Yangtze, the Mississippi, and the Tiber. Rivers flow like life-giving veins through land, delivering water, fertilizing soil, and easy transportation. Only with the advent of industrialization did the river stop being the main highway of human development. The river, while serving as a life-giving force, has a shadow which reflects how its great power can be unleashed in flood, endangering the communities and prosperity that the river brought about in the first place. With increasing technology, people attempt to control this force with damns, levees, and other methods, but sometimes these restraints are fragile or are destructive in their own way. The river also serves as a physical boundary, with its currents and width providing an obstacle that can either protect one from danger but also can strand someone far from home and safety. As an obstacle, albeit a surmountable one with the right materials, the river can take the form of a threshold, like the River Styx, the boundary of Hades. Thinking of a river as a natural border and demarcation of physical space in the world runs contrary to societies where the river forms the physical and spiritual center of a culture, where not unlike a watershed that feeds a river, all the strands and variations of a culture flow into or emit from one single life-giving source.
Image:
ARAS Record 5Cn.009
Constellation Eridanus, river god, n**e, horned, looking toward left, holding fish in left hand, vessel from which river flows in right hand. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.
