Naiad

• 1. Introduction

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  In ancient Greece, a child who reached the age of coming-of-age ceremonies had a particular debt to pay. Boys and girls offered their childish locks of hair to the naiad of the local spring. The naiads of Greek mythology were female spirits, or nymphs, who presided over fountains, wells, springs, streams and brooks. Why would a young person hand a piece of childhood to a spirit of running water? What did communities expect in return? What happened when these spirits turned jealous? And how did a Greek idea of the spring spirit end up in places the Greeks never touched?

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• 2. A Name That Flows

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  The Greek word ναϊάς, written naïás, gives the naiads their name, and its plural is ναϊάδες. Scholars trace it to the verb νάειν, meaning "to flow", or to the noun νᾶμα, meaning "body of flowing water". Either way, the name describes motion before it describes a person.

  Some writers used a second word, hydriads, for the same kind of spirit. Naiads also had a clear boundary on the other side. River gods were a separate class of being, because a river god embodied the river itself. A naiad, by contrast, presided over a fountain, a brook or a well. Where those waters ran, local worship followed, and at Lerna it took a strange and vivid form.

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• 3. Worship at the Spring

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  Lerna was a place where the waters of the naiads were used for ritual cleansings. People there credited those cleansings with magical medical properties. Animals were ritually drowned in the same waters, an offering that shows how seriously the spring was taken.

  Archaic local cults often treated the naiads as essential to human life, which is easy to understand when a village depends on a single source of fresh water. Some ancient springs also hosted oracles, so the same water that cleansed and healed might also be asked about the future. A spirit with that much power over a community was not always gentle with those who caught her attention.

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• 4. Jealous Spirits

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  Hylas, a member of the crew of the Argo, never finished the voyage. Naiads fascinated by his beauty took him, and he was lost. The story marks the darker side of the spring spirits, which ancient listeners also believed could be jealous.

  Theocritus told of a shepherd named Daphnis, who was the lover of Nomia, also called Echenais. Daphnis was unfaithful to her on several occasions. As revenge, she permanently blinded him.

  The nymph Salmacis assaulted Hermaphroditus. When he tried to escape, she fused with him. In each tale, the beauty or loyalty of a mortal drew a naiad's attention, and the mortal paid for it. Yet one hero in Greek myth sought the naiads out on purpose, and he came back with help.

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• 5. Aristaeus Below the Water

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  Hypseus, a king of the Lapiths, married a naiad named Chlidanope. She bore him a daughter, Cyrene. That family link is the back-story to a myth about Aristaeus, a man who knew the naiads far better than most mortals did.

  When his bees died in Thessaly, Aristaeus went to consult them. His aunt Arethusa invited him below the surface of the water. There he was washed with water from a perpetual spring and given advice. In this tale the naiads are hosts and counselors, with a home beneath the water that a visitor could enter, if invited. The question left open is how far such spirits could travel from their springs.

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• 6. Bound to a Place

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  In the Iliad, Zeus summons the gods to an assembly on Mount Olympus, and the poet makes an extravagant claim about who attends. The scholar Walter Burkert describes it this way: "it is not only the well-known Olympians who come along, but also all the nymphs and all the rivers; Okeanos alone remains at his station". Greek listeners recognized this as hyperbole. It proclaimed the universal power of Zeus over the ancient natural world.

  Burkert adds that the worship of such deities is limited only by the fact that "they are inseparably identified with a specific locality". A spring spirit belonged to her spring. Even so, the idea of the water nymph attached to a particular spring was known all through Europe, in places with no direct connection to Greece. It survived in the Celtic wells of northwest Europe that were rededicated to Saints, and in the medieval Melusine.

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• 7. Names Left Behind

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  In New Orleans, St. Charles Avenue was formerly known as Nyades Street. It runs parallel to Dryades Street, so the nymphs of water and the nymphs of trees still sit side by side in the city's naming.

  The name reaches much farther. Naiad Lake in Antarctica is named after the nymphs. So is Naiad, the innermost moon of Neptune, which carries the spring spirits of Greek belief into the outer solar system.

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