Living Water and Dead Water

The barrel came ashore tarred black and bound with iron hoops, heavy enough that the eagle had to drag it out of the surf. Inland, on three windowsills in three palaces, a silver spoon and a silver fork and a silver snuffbox had all gone dark at the same hour, which is how the brothers-in-law knew to come. They broke the hoops. Inside was Ivan-tsarevich in small pieces, exactly as Koschei the Deathless had left him.

Then the falcon flew for the living water and the raven flew for the dead, and this is the part worth slowing down for. The three birds washed the pieces and laid them out the way a man ought to be. The raven sprinkled the dead water first, and the body knitted, joint to joint, seam gone. Only then did the falcon sprinkle the living water, and Ivan shuddered, stood up, and said that he had slept a long time.

The order is not an accident and it is not reversible. Russian tales keep two waters where most traditions keep one, and they are not opposites so much as two halves of a single procedure. Dead water is badly named for what it actually does; the tales sometimes call it healing water instead, *tselyashchaya*, which is the plainer label, because its work is to make a corpse whole, *tsely*, without making it alive. It closes wounds. It draws severed limbs back to the trunk. It leaves the man on the ground, mended and breathless, a thing rather than a person. Living water is what arrives afterwards to put him back on his feet, and the tales also call it strong water or heroic water, because a single mouthful is what lets a champion lift a sword he could not lift the day before.

Say the pair aloud and the living water comes first. Use them and the dead water comes first. Every canonical telling holds that inversion.

Neither water is ever described. The tales that are lavish about tarred barrels and iron hoops and the exact number of chains on a prisoner go completely silent on what these waters look like, and the silence is consistent enough to be a decision rather than an oversight. What gets described instead is packaging and distance. The water travels in a *puzyryok*, a little stoppered vial small enough to hide in a coat, or in a bird’s mouth. It sits, in one telling, on a table in the third chamber of a sleeping woman’s house, next to her portrait, with the door beyond it opening on a garden of rejuvenating apples; the thief takes the vials, the portrait and five apples, and the whole theft is over in a paragraph. In another the road to it is signposted, and the signpost is honest. An oak stands at a fork with words cut into it: ride right and be a dead man, ride left and reach a soft bed and a bowl of kisel. The hero who wants the water rides right.

Where it comes from originally, nobody in the tales says. Alexander Afanasyev, who assembled the largest Russian tale collection between 1855 and 1863 and then spent the 1860s explaining it, thought he knew. In his *Poetic Views of the Slavs on Nature* he read the pair as weather: rain clouds are the sky’s wells, winter locks them the way it locks a spring, Perun breaks the fetters with his hammer, and the first rains of the year drag the ice off the fields and pull the severed limbs of mother earth back together, while the rains that follow put green on her. Dead water is the first rain and living water is the second. He also noticed the thing that makes this entry necessary at all, and stated it flatly: the split into two waters occurs in Slavic tales and not in the traditions of the neighbouring peoples. It is worth being clear that this reading is his own, a piece of nineteenth-century comparative mythology rather than something a storyteller ever said, and that his generation read almost everything in folklore as a thunderstorm.

Vladimir Propp came at it from the other direction in 1946, in *Historical Roots of the Wonder Tale*, and asked the better question: why two waters at all, when a single sprinkle would do. His answer was that dead water is not medicine but burial. It finishes the killing. A man cut to pieces and scattered is neither properly alive nor properly dead, and something in that state can come back wrong, as an upyr rather than a hero. The dead water settles the matter, the way a handful of earth over a coffin does, and only a man who is entirely and correctly dead can be brought back from it. Propp read this against a Greek gold lamella buried with the dead that sets two waters in the house of Hades, one to be avoided and one carefully guarded, and against the gatekeeper who sprinkles Ishtar with the water of life on her way out of the underworld. He also said, in his own words, that all of it must remain a hypothesis until better material turns up, which is more than most of his readers say for him.

Living water heals blindness as well as death, restoring sight the way rain clears a sky. It is carried by the personified violence of a summer storm, by whirlwind and thunder and hail, or by the prophetic birds that stand in for them: the raven, the falcon, the eagle and the dove. Propp adds a further variant guarded at the border of the other world, strong water and weak water, standing to the right and left of the serpent’s bridge, which the hero swaps before the fight so that he drinks the strong and the serpent drinks the weak. He argued the two pairs are the same thing wearing different names.

The limits are as tidy as the powers. Neither water restores a body that has not first been assembled, which is why the birds wash the pieces and lay them out properly before a drop is used. The vial is portable, which makes it stealable, and in the tale of the rejuvenating apples the elder brothers do exactly that: they cut the youngest to pieces, take the vial of living water off him and ride home to their father with it, and it is a Firebird that comes down, gathers the scattered pieces, arranges them as a man should be, and brings first dead water in its mouth and then living. And the water never travels to you. It is always past thrice-nine lands, on somebody else’s table, behind somebody else’s sleeping guards, which is the tales’ quiet way of saying that the cure for death is real and is simply not local.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between living water and dead water?

Dead water repairs a body without reviving it, closing wounds and knitting severed limbs back into one piece, while living water returns life to a body that has already been made whole. Russian tales sometimes call dead water healing water for this reason, and call living water strong or heroic water. The two are complementary stages of one procedure rather than opposites.

Which water is used first, living or dead?

Dead water is always used first. The canonical sequence in Russian folktales is that the corpse is sprinkled with dead water so the pieces grow back together, and only then sprinkled with living water so that it stands up. The name of the pair reverses this order, but the tales never do.

Who brings the living and dead water in Russian folktales?

Birds, usually. In the tale of Marya Morevna the falcon fetches the living water and the raven fetches the dead while the eagle drags the body ashore, and in one version of the rejuvenating-apples tale a Firebird brings both in its mouth. Alexander Afanasyev also lists the whirlwind, thunder and hail among the carriers, alongside the raven, falcon, eagle and dove.

Where is the living and dead water found?

Never anywhere near home. The tales place it past thrice-nine lands, in one case standing on a table in the third chamber of Elena the Beautiful’s house beside a garden of rejuvenating apples, reached only by a road whose signpost at the crossroads oak warns that riding that way means being a dead man.

Is living and dead water found outside Slavic folklore?

The single water of life is widespread, but the split into two distinct waters is not. Afanasyev, writing in the 1860s, stated that the distinction between dead and living water appears in Slavic tales and not in the traditions of the kindred peoples around them, and the tale type that carries it elsewhere in Europe generally has only one water in it.

Related Entries

Koschei, Baba Yaga, Fire Bird, Vasilisa the Beautiful, Zmey Gorynych, Alatyr Stone, Vyrai, Nav, Perun, Rusalka, Vodyanoy, Marzanna, Ambrosia, Soma, Xiwangmu