The spring or fountain of youth is a mythical place that gives health and youth to everyone who tries its water or bathes in it. The legend about him spread after the mention in the "History of Alexander the Great" - a medieval adventure novel, which is credited with the origins of as early as 2-1 century. BC. (of course, the original text was not preserved, and then it was corrected many times). There was an episode in which Alexander, somewhere in the "Indian" lands, where eternal darkness, finds a rejuvenating spring.
And already in the 16th century, Juan Ponce de Leon allegedly found such a source in the New World, but this is also fiction.
The image of this spring was famous in Europe in the form of a natural grotto or an elaborate bathhouse. The most famous depiction of the Source is in a painting from the mid-16th century by Lucas Cranach:
Lucas Cranach the Elder. Fountain of youth. 1546.
On which we see how old and frail people enter the pool, and leave it already young, and someone immediately runs into the nearest bushes to "shake the old days".
They say that this story is thousands of years old, but, firstly, it is too Catholic, and secondly, it all very much reminds of something.
Let's open the collection of A. Tereshchenko “To be the Russian people. Part 7 (1848):
This is the same "Holy Water" that is known to us today, and Epiphany bathing, which, apparently, for Europeans was something wild, like Russian baths, which became the prototype of "hellish suffering" among some Catholics.
As we can see from Tereshchenko, in the 19th century in the capital this custom was already erased, but there is also a lot of other information. For instance:
That is, oblivion of the ancient winter custom was only in St. Petersburg, where the power and "enlightenment" of society came from the European royal family. Considering that Vodokreshchi was the end of the sacred Christmastide rites, it is clear that the people simply could not forget them, even if the meanings of this action were erased from their memory.
Bulgarian tradition of male choro dance in icy water on Epiphany.
It is curious that the tradition of blessing water remained only in Orthodox countries, as well as in Finland, Romania and Lebanon. It is not observed in western Europe.
In some Slavic countries, Vodokreshchi is called Jordan's Day or simply Voditsy.
Of course, the Jordan is, according to the Bible, the river in which Jesus was baptized. However, the etymology of the word reveals very interesting parallels:
Don is a reservoir, a source of water (the same root as the words "Milk" and "Give")
Ior is the Russian "Yar", which in this case refers us to Spring. So, Dahl's explanatory dictionary defines the word "Ardent" as follows:
Slovak jarý - "fresh"; Latin ver - "spring". And Snegirev in "Russian Common Holidays" (1838) gave the following data:
If we compare all these data, we can see that Spring is understood here not so much as a season (but this too), but as an epithet of youth, strength, health.
And then “Jordan” is literally the “Source of Youth”!
Again, Jordan was very widespread in Slavic conspiracies and folk songs, which was not found either in the biblical or in Western culture. And of course, it is not tied to the geographically defined Jordan River, which scientists decided to place closer to the lands of Israel … into cold water).
Author: peremyshlin