Fluidity and Solidness in Culture

The same psychological bias that causes the selection of fluid~solid mixtures in poetry and creation stories causes them in culture more widely, in myths, stories, religions, rituals, paintings, sculptures, architecture, decoration, language and elsewhere.

Coming from the throne are flashes of lightning, and rumblings and peals of thunder, and in front of the throne burn seven flaming torches, which are the seven spirits of God; and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal.

— The Bible, Revelation 4:6 (Coogan et al. 2018)

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.

— The Bible, Psalm 23:5 (Coogan et al. 2018)

Anointment

Rituals involving the application of water, blood, oil and other fluids to solid objects like temples, altars, bones and statues have evolved many times in diverse cultures around the world, persisting to the present day and apparently going back before recorded history, the purpose typically being to raise the status of the object anointed to that of something more exciting, such as a sacred place, a living being, a saint, a king or a god.

Anointment of the statue of the god Marduk at Esagila, the “temple with a lofty top,” is an instance from Babylonia over 3,600 years ago. In addition to receiving food and water, baths, perfumes and fine clothing, being treated to music, dance and a recitation of the Enuma Elish creation story, the gold, silver and wooden statue of Marduk was anointed with oil, most likely olive oil infused with spices, and so was his wife, Sarpanitum, also a statue.

The Egyptians used black liquids to anoint bones, coffins, mummy cases and solid funerary items like figurines of Osiris, shabtis (assistants for the dead) and shabti boxes (Cartwright 2021). The liquids were complicated mixtures variously incorporating oil, fat, tree resin, beeswax and bitumen (Fulcher et al. 2021). Their use might have been linked to worship of the death and resurrection god Osiris, who was known epithetically as “the black one” and often shown with black or green skin.

Shortly after his birth, Siddhartha Gautama, destined to be the Buddha, was bathed in fragrant water that poured down from a pair of warm and cold streams in the sky, produced either by gods or a group of nine cosmic dragons. The event is commemorated today by rituals in which water is poured over the right shoulder of statues of the Buddha as a baby from copper ladles with long handles, accompanied by the recitation of vows to do good instead of evil and liberate all living things.

Hindus pour water prepared with energizing mantras on deities and temple towers in a ritual called Kumbhabhishekam, with the water adding energy to the structure and transforming the gods inside from a nonliving stone to a devine being. In the Jain ritual Mahamastakabhisheka, hundreds of liters of milk, saffron water, turmeric water, coconut water, sugarcane juice and other liquids, and flowers, are poured on the head and down the body of a giant statue, carved in the tenth century, of the legendary hero and ascetic monk Bahubali (Gommateshvara).

The Aztecs evidently believed human blood was desired by the gods, who would retaliate in anger if it wasn’t being provided in sufficient quantities through sacrifice and bloodletting, which were also responsible for maintaining the motion of the sun, the order of the cosmos and ultimately life on Earth. It was offered in special stone bowls called cuauhxicalli, which were decorated with “undulating bands” denoting a liquid, likely the sacrificial blood they contained (Taube 2009). It was poured onto statues of the gods to provide them with nourishment (Cartwright 2018), and applied to the sun, the stars, mouths of stone idols and the cornices of chapels (Anonymous Conqueror 2025):

He plunges the knife into the breast, opens it, and tears out the heart hot and palpitating. And this as quickly as one might cross himself. At this point the chief priest of the temple takes it, and anoints the mouth of the principal idol with the blood; then filling his hand with it he flings it towards the sun, or towards some star, if it be night. Then he anoints the mouths of all the other idols of wood and stone, and sprinkles blood on the cornice of the chapel of the principal idol.

The earliest instance of anointment in the Bible might be when Jacob, after dreaming of a ladder to Heaven with ascending and descending angels (up~down), stood up the stone he’d been using as a pillow to make a pillar (up~solid) and anointed it with olive oil. A few hundred years later (~1200 BCE), in Leviticus, Moses supposedly consecrated the tabernacle and the solid objects inside with scented oil: the table, lampstand, basin, utensils, altars and the Ark of the Covenant (Coogan et al. 2018):

Then Moses took the anointing oil and anointed the tabernacle and all that was in it, and consecrated them. He sprinkled some of it on the altar seven times, and anointed the altar and all its utensils, and the basin and its base, to consecrate them. He poured some of the anointing oil on Aaron’s head and anointed him, to consecrate him.

When people are anointed, for instance in Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism, the liquid is commonly applied to a relatively solid part of the body, particularly the head. The purpose is usually to elevate a person’s status, connect them to a deity, heal the sick or prepare the dead for the afterlife, suggesting psychological associations between fluids and empowerment, divinity, spirituality and life.

In later temples that replaced the Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, the most holy innermost temple chamber and place where Heaven and God were thought to exist on Earth, was sprinkled with the blood of a goat and bull every year on the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, a ritual similar to Aztec blood anointment of statues and chapels.

Various Christian sources claim that Adam, the first man and son of God, was entombed below the base of the Cross when Jesus was crucified at Golgotha, the “Place of the Skull.” The blood and water that ran down from Jesus’ side when he was stabbed by the Roman soldier Longinus flowed through the cracks created in the Rock of Calvary by an earthquake at the moment he died, anointing Adam’s skull and bones in a kind of reconciliation for original sin.

By being crucified above them [the remains of Adam], our Lord Jesus Christ mystically showed our salvation through the water and blood that flowed from Him, through His pierced side, . . . to sprinkle our forefathers’ remains.

— Epiphanius, Panarion (2009)

According to legend Christ’s blood also fell on rocks of green jasper, leaving red spots and creating heliotrope “bloodstones,” or “Christ stones,” which were believed to have healing powers such as the ability to stop bleeding. Bloodstones were worn around the neck as amulets, and dipped in cold water to increase their powers.

The theme of adding fluids to solids reappears in other Christian contexts, such as sprinkling with holy water, reliquaries with holes and pathways through which water or oil are poured to flow over the bones of dead saints, or, with breath as the fluid, when God breathes on the “very dry” bones filling a valley to resurrect them in the Book of Ezekiel (Bible 2025):

The hand of the LORD was upon me, and he brought me out by the Spirit of the LORD and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?’ I said, ‘O Sovereign LORD, you alone know.’ Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the LORD! This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life.’

This event is notable for its similarity to the way life and/or humans are made in Egyptian, African, Greek, Norse, Native American, Islamic and other creation stories, by the injection of breath into clay, wood or other solids. It also happens to be how God made the first person in the Bible (Coogan 2018):

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being.

We see the same mixture in magical Greek breathing stones, the gambling superstition of blowing on dice for good luck, the Egyptian practice of transferring the dying breath of sacrificed animals such as birds and lizards to a statue or amulet to make it come alive, and in poetry, as discussed in Fluidity and Solidness in Poetry using an example from Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (2022):

I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary

There are also magical events from famous stories that involve adding fluids to solids. For instance, in Chrétien De Troyes Yvain, the Knight of the Lion (2018) a magical stone triggers a storm and the appearance of the guardian knight when water is spilled on it from a nearby spring:

If thou wilt take of the water in the basin and spill it upon the stone, thou shalt see such a storm come up that not a beast will remain within this wood; every doe, star, deer, boar, and bird will issue forth. For thou shalt see such lightning-bolts descend, such blowing of gales and crashing of trees, such torrents fail, such thunder and lightning, that, if thou canst escape from them without trouble and mischance, thou wilt be more fortunate than ever any knight was yet.

Other occasions in which liquids are applied to solids include the widely practiced wetting the hulls of newly constructed ships or new buildings and roofs with water, blood, beer, rum or wine, or the anointment of the weapons and armor of medieval knights. Libation rituals in which fluids are poured onto the earth, temples or other solids have the same structure as the given practices of anointment, and the same tendency to arise and persist ubiquitously. Libation is among the most ancient and mysterious of religious activities (“Libation” 2025), with a “remarkable degree of similarity between religions that otherwise have little connection.”

For we must needs die, and are as water spilt on the ground, which cannot be gathered up again.

— The Bible, 2 Samuel 14:14 (2008)

The probability is low of so many cultures persistently converging on the practice of mixing fluidity with solidness in the form of anointment without a process of selection, rather than a series of coincidental events, pushing them toward this outcome. There’s a clue to the mechanism or selection agent at work in the fact that the fluid is always understood to elevate the status of the subject of anointment, from a statue to a god, a dead pharaoh to a pharaoh living in the underworld, a stone temple to a conduit of blood for the cosmos, the Tabernacle to a house of God on Earth, a stone to a sacred marker for a spiritual vision or a magical device, or from “very dry” dead bones to a “very great multitude” of resurrected Israelites. The subject is more arousing after it’s anointed than it was before. This supports predictions 1 and 2 in Thesis and Predictions: fluidity is more exciting to the human mind than solidness.

Fluids From Solids

Thou shalt see the mountains that thou supposest fixed, passing by like clouds.

—The Koran 27:88 (Bartlett 2022)

He turns rivers into a desert, springs of water into thirsty ground, a fruitful land into a salty waste, because of the wickedness of its inhabitants. He turns a desert into pools of water, a parched land into springs of water.

— The Bible, Psalm 107:35 (Coogan et al. 2018)

In another popular mythological and religious motif fluidity is produced by solidness, rather than being added to it. Although it seems to be less common than anointment, likely because it’s relatively fantastic, and impossible in practice, it shows up at least four times in the Bible, once when Moses hits a rock with a staff in Exodus 17 (Coogan et al. 2018):

The Lord said to Moses, ‘Go on ahead of the people, and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile, and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.’

Moses does the same thing many years later, in Numbers 20:

Moses and Aaron gathered the assembly together before the rock, and he said to them, “Listen, you rebels, shall we bring water for you out of this rock?” Then Moses lifted up his hand and struck the rock twice with his staff; water came out abundantly, and the congregation and their livestock drank.

God makes sure to get credit for the production of water in Psalm 78:

He divided the sea and let them pass through it, and made the waters stand like a heap.

In the daytime he led them with a cloud, and all night long with a fiery light.

He split rocks open in the wilderness, and gave them drink abundantly as from the deep.

He made streams come out of the rock, and caused waters to flow down like rivers.

In 1 Corinthians, we find out the water-spilling rock was mobile, and that it was Jesus:

I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.

Turning rock into water or making a solid object otherwise produce it is not the only option for providing it to thirsty people, especially for God. He could have redirected a river, dropped bottled water from the sky, made the Israelites impervious to desiccation, or made it rain, which He’d done before, most famously in the Genesis Flood, but also in Kings, Deuteronomy and Zechariah.

Previous to Moses striking a rock the second time in Numbers, Rabbinic writings say the Israelites got their water from Miriam’s Well, which differed from the usual well in that it was a beehive-sized, sieve-like sphere of solid rock that rolled through the desert under it’s own power spraying drinkable water into the air like a geyser, as needed to keep millions of people hydrated for forty years. The Well disappeared when Miriam died, or quit providing water, creating the need for Moses and/or God to turn more rock into water for the remainder of their final year wandering in the desert, on the way to the “land flowing with milk and honey.”

Similarly, the Zoroastrianism god Mithras saved the lives of his followers during a drought by creating a flood of water from a rock by shooting it with an arrow, the same rock from which he was born. In depictions of the event he can be seen emerging equipped with a dagger, a torch and a Phrygian cap, along with shooting flames and a fountain of water, often accompanied by the water god Oceanus, the winds, and exciting animals such as a scorpion, raven, snake, lion, crocodile or dog.

The Mayan god of wind, rain and breath Kukulkan, the Feathered Serpent, was in possesion of a magical stone called the “wind gem,” believed to be the divine source of air, wind and hurricanes in Mesoamerican mythology. The Aztec counterpart of the gem is a section of a conch shell that Quetzalcoatl wore around his neck, its spiraling shape representing the fluidity of breath and wind. The Mayans and Aztecs were influenced by the Olmecs, who used jade for wind gems going back to around 1000 BCE or more, carving it into the flowing shape of an oyster shell.

In The Poetic Edda & The Prose Edda, Saemund Sigfusson and Snorri Sturluson (2019) explain how the dead warriors Odin collects, the Einheriar, subsist in Valhall, the hall of the slain, while they wait to be released and fight in the battle of Ragnarök. They eat the flesh of a repeatedly resurrected, cornucopia-like porky beast named Sæhrímnir every day, and drink mead provided by the goat Heidrûn, who produces enough for at least 432,000 soldiers from the nourishment he gets by munching on the branches of the tree Lærâd, which grows on the top of the hall:

Five hundred doors, and forty eke [many~entrance], I think, are in Valhalla. Eight hundred Einheriar will at once from each door go when they issue with the wolf to fight.

Five hundred floors, and forty eke, I think, has Bilskirnir with its windings. Of all the roofed houses that I know, is my son’s the greatest.

Heidrûn the goat is called, that stands o’er Odin’s hall, and bites from Lærâd’s branches. He a bowl shall fill with the bright mead; that drink shall never fail.

This is nothing, however, compared to the amount of water that drips from the solid horns of the magical stag Eikthyrnir, who feeds on Lærâd along with Heidrûn, into the “bubbling boiling spring” Hvergelmir, from which all waters rise and 20 rivers flow around the “dwelling wind” of gods:

Eikthyrnir the hart is called, that stands o’er Odin’s hall, and bites from Lærâd’s branches; from his horns fall drops into Hvergelmir, whence all waters rise:

Sid and Vid, Soekin and Eikin, Svöl and Gunnthrô, Fiörm and Fimbulthul, Rin and Rennandi, Gipul and Göpul, Gömul and Geirvimul: they round the gods’ dwelling wind. Thyn and Vin, Thöll and Höll, Grâd and Gunnthorin.

Odin’s magical golden ring Draupnir is like Eikthyrnir horns in that it drips fluid, in this case what must be liquid gold, which turns into eight new rings once every nine nights. The Bleeding Lance from Arthurian legend is like Eikthyrnir and Draupnir, described by Chrétien de Troyes (2019) as being the “purest white,” except for the tip, which is “pure vermillion,” because, despite that “it has neither flesh nor veins,” the tip is continuously dripping blood.

At the Temple of Apollo at Delphi the oracular priestess reputedly received and passed on prophecies in a trance induced by vapor flowing into the sanctuary through a crack in the ground below her seat. The vapor was thought of as coming from Apollo, the corpse of the serpent Python who he killed to take over the oracle, and/or from the earth herself, Gaea. The priestess could have relayed the prophesies sober, in a normal, vaporless temple, and there’s an ongoing debate about what was really happening historically. Either way, the story is more interesting in the case with vapor. If it was real then the Greeks built the Temple at Pytho (Delphi) over a geothermal vent because they liked the idea. If it wasn’t real then it was added to the story later on for the same reason.

Solids from Fluids

There are also numerous legendary instances of the opposite transformation, where fluids magically turn into solids. The Jiaoren mermaids of China cry tears than turn into pearls. In Japanese folklore the ugly, “inky black,” shark-like, demon-faced, dragon-bearded but friendly yokai called the samebito cries blood that changes into rubies upon hitting the ground. In Apache legend, the relatives of a group of warriors who rode off a cliff to avoid being captured cry tears that turn into black obsidian. The “fairy crosses” of the Blue Ridge Mountains, small natural rocks with shapes like crosses, are said to have formed through the crystallization of tears of fairies crying about the death of Christ. The tears of the Finish hero Väinämöinen become blue pears at the bottom of the sea (Lönnrot 1989):

Finally Väinämöinen himself weeps. His huge tears fall into the sea. When a duck dives down and recovers them, they have been transformed into blue pearls.

The Norse goddess Freyja cries tears that become gold when they fall on the earth and amber when they fall in the sea, leading to the popular kenning for gold “Freyja’s tears.” The myth and the kenning are structured the same, specifically as tear~gold, generally as fluid~solid, and they have the same explanation, that we’re amused by the concept of mixing physical opposites. This kind of correspondence between an expression and a famous fictional event is very common. “Wet your beak,” “blood and iron,” and “soaked to the bone” have the same structure as anointment rituals. “Like getting blood from a stone” generally matches the structure of the water from rock motif, and so on.

Art and Decoration

If cities were built by the sound of music, then some edifices would appear to be constructed by grave, solemn tones, — others to have danced forth to light fantastic airs.

—Nathaniel Hawthorne (from Ballou 1899)

Visual mixtures of fluidity and solidness have been admired for centuries in the form of water fountains, wishing wells, reflecting pools, gargoyles, artificial waterfalls, streams and ponds, Zen gardens with sand raked in flowing patterns, as well as floral, swirling, twisting, spiraling, undulating and/or wavy forms moulded into, carved into or painted on rocks, pottery, temples, churches, sculptures, gravestones, coffins, staircases, roofs, gates, street lamps, railings, stained-glass windows, doors, door handles, door knockers, keys, tables, chairs, bed frames, desks, drawers, drawer handles, faucets, lamps, vases, light fixtures, chandeliers, cups, plates, silverware, swords, suits of armor, shields, helmets, guns, crowns, thrones, coins, belt buckles, buttons, medals, rings, pendants, coins and other objects.

Decorative water cascades go back at least 3,000 years, being constructed in the ancient Mesopotamian city of Girsu (Stancius 2022). The first known fountain, around 4,000 years old, is a Mesopotamian statue of a goddess, possibly Ishtar, holding a vase with a hydraulic device that created the effect of spouting water. Rain chains, recently gaining popularity worldwide, were used in Japanese temples and tea houses going back at least to the 1500’s. Some ornamental fountains, such as those in Japanese gardens, consist of little more than water dripping onto and flowing over a rock, so that the effect is almost identical to that created by the anointment of a solid object in a ritual.

The main styles, or “orders,” of classical Greek architecture—the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian—incorporated increasing amounts of fluid-like ornamentation over time, a transition Ralph Waldo Emerson called “the flowering of geometry” (Ballou 1899). The simple, plain and rounded tops of the Greek Doric order gave way to the volutes, or spirals, of Ionic columns, and these to the most ornate Corinthian columns with spirals, leaves and scrolls. At each step the architecture became more fluid. Buildings increasingly looked as though parts of them were melting. Architectural fluidity is not confined to the buildings of the Greeks and Romans. Emerson also used the flower analogy in describing Gothic cathedrals, as “a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower, with the lightness and delicate finish as well as the serial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty” (Ballou 1899).

The opening picture, Bruegel’s 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel, exemplifies the mixture fluid~solid in that the Tower is a solid surrounded by water and clouds, with the clouds nearly penetrating some of its many entrances in the upper floors, like breath entering a stone. In Edvard Munch’s famous painting “The Scream” the solid wooden walkway in the lower portion of the painting contrasts with the dark fluidity into which the person on the bridge looks to be melting away. The background of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” is one of blue fluidity intermingling with red solidness, and a very improbable scene for a subject to be sitting in front of.

In the paintings that resulted from a survey conducted by the artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid, which were selected to reflect average public opinion about artistic preferences in several countries, almost every country tested appears to have chosen a painting with a solid, rocky cliff, outcrop or stretch of land taking up about half the space, on the left, and water and sky taking up the rest, on the right.

Dennis Dutton, in his book The Art Instinct: Beauty, Pleasure, & Human Evolution (2010), interpreted these paintings as evidence for his hypothesis that humans evolved our appreciation for such paintings in the context of differential survival while living in the African savannah. He suggests humans without a sufficient attraction to such landscapes were less likely to survive, despite that the paintings show very little resemblance to the flat, mountain-less, waterless savannah habitat of our distant ancestors.

Dutton’s scenario would seem to imply people were dying in large numbers and populations were being driven to extinction repeatedly when they wandered beyond the savannah into new territory, that those with a tolerance of or attraction to other types of environmental scenery were consistently eliminated for doing so, although our ancestors subsequently lived in and traveled through every other type of habitat.

Hypotheses

The rise of Marduk in the Egyptian pantheon doesn’t make it inevitable for worshipers to carve a statue of him and anoint it with liquids. The idea that baby Buddha was sprayed by a celestial river does not necessitate the existence of massive ritualistic effort to pour water on Buddha statues in commemoration of the event. Such things don’t necessarily need to be commemorated at all, and certainly not in the particular, idiosyncratic ways they are. Although rituals incorporating such abstract concepts can serve important purposes, those purposes could just as well be accomplished by any number of other activities. We shouldn’t expect cultures to so often converge on themes like anointment or liquid to solid or solid to liquid phase changes by chance, without the action of some selective process.

Aesthetic mixtures of fluidity with solidness are so common, cross-cultural and persistent that it’s not sufficient to trace the practice back to a point of origin predating all the examples and treat that event in itself as an explanation. There were multiple independent origins, and none of them constitute an actual reason for the ritual to come about, or for it to continue to be of interest for so long, persisting from prehistory into the present day.

This could be called the origin hypothesis of anointment rituals. It offers no obvious mechanism, relying on randomness and coincidence rather than selection, and it doesn’t predict the existence of a desire to initiate, adopt or continue the practice. The argument is like claiming music (including song) exists in every human culture today only because, long ago, someone made a musical sequence of sounds for the first time. What’s missing is the reason the first person did so, why they wanted to do it again, and why others copied the idea and kept making more music until the phenomenon expanded to its current extent. A much more probable alternative is that people have always been biased to favor musical sounds, and this created the effect of cultural music being adopted at every stage from its inception, through its dispersion and ultimate, ubiquitous distribution across the globe.

Music isn’t unusual in being both ubiquitous and inexplicable in terms of natural selection. The same kind of bias and effect process can be used to explain aesthetic phenomena in general, including dance, poetry, ornamentation, contrasting coloration patterns in bodies and artifacts, popular motifs in myth and religion and other aesthetic phenomena that have no obvious adaptive value.

An incidental bias for fluid~solid mixtures would hardly be unusual considering the scope of such unnecessary and non-adaptive biases and aesthetic effects, many of which (music, dance, ornament, color patterns) predate human evolution by hundreds of millions of years, commonly enough that it’s worth asking whether nonhuman animals are also in the habit of adding fluidity to solidness.

Fluid~Solid Mixtures in Animals

Waterfowl, being somewhat uniquely in a position to display an appreciation for fluid~solid mixtures due to their constant access to water and possession of a prominent solid feature to anoint with it, can be predicted to have a habit of dipping their beaks in the water to impress and amuse each other. Assuming a universal bias, this should be common in the courtship and other friendly interactions of widely unrelated waterfowl species, used by both males and females in displays. Clark (1971) observed beak dipping in pair formation and copulation of the white-backed duck Thalassomis leuconotus:

The smaller bird dipped its beak as if to feed from the surface. The other did the same and again both immersed their beaks…. On another occasion the birds swam round in a circle about 5 feet diameter, dipping their beaks frequently.

The same kind of display is used by male and female common loons Gavia iramet (Tate 1970), the yellow-billed loon Gavia adamsii (Sjölander and Ågren 1976), black-winged stilts Himantopus himantop (Goriup 1982), eiders (genus Somateria, Johnsgard 1964), diving ducks in the tribe Aythyini (Johnsgard 1965), adult and yearling Mandarin ducks Aix galericulata (Bruggers and Jackson 1981), male and female flying steamer ducks Tachyeres patachonicus (Moynihan 1958), wood ducks Aix sponsa (Armbruster 1982), dabbling ducks (Hepp and Hair 1983), stiff-tailed ducks (genus Oxyura, Johnsgard 1967) harlequin ducks (genus Histrionicus, Bengtson 1966) and male and female black brant geese Branta bernicla nigricuns (Welsh and Sedinger 1990), among others.

Ravens appear to enjoy dipping their bills in a shallow pan of water (Heinrich and Smolker 1998), and many types of birds including ravens, crows, various parrots, cockatoos, starlings and grackles dip solid food in water for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

The popularity of this behavior, the lack of an obvious adaptive purpose for it, and the fact that it’s used in courtship all suggest the presence of a nonadaptive bias for fluid~solid mixtures in birds, calling into question any adaptation-based or psychoanalytic explanation for the same bias in humans.

Fluid~solid bias is likely to be at least partially responsible for the evolution of fluid-like and spiral forms in horns such as those of spiral-horned antelopes, kudus, elands, markhors, moose, Girgentana goats and many others. Fluid-like horns, which hardly seem like the ideal weapon, can evolve to be useful in a fight with a conspecific intrasexual rival and be attractive to the opposite sex at the same time, somewhat like the structure of a building is entirely practical while the addition of fluid-like decoration is done purely for pleasure.

Adaptive Hypotheses

An adaptive hypotheses would propose there’s a function for a psychological bias favoring fluid~solid mixtures, and that the bias evolved through differential survival. This would be a process that selects for individuals who appreciate visual experiences mixing a fluid such as water with a solid such as earth over those who don’t. It requires a reason for those in the former group to survive and pass on the genes for the bias more effectively than those in the latter group.

A scenario of this kind would be that, due to the bias in question, our ancestors chose to live near an interface between a body of water and land, where they had better access to water and related resources than individuals or groups choosing to live at too great a distance from water, who were disadvantaged by the lack of those resources. The bias would originally have happened to come about by chance in one or a small number of our ancestors, and then be selected for due to the advantage until it was expressed by everyone in the human population. This is a complicated process, and it’s not likely to have played out in reality. An animal, especially a person, would seem to know better than to wander off and perish in the desert or the ocean without the additional need for an abstract, unconscious attraction to an intermediate landscape keeping them alive.

Adaptive models are problematic because of how easy it is to imagine scenarios like the one above and decide they must be true without testing them, and most of them can’t be tested. The fact that we can also easily think of other reasons for the bias, such as that animals require both fluid water and solid food, and those who avoid one or the other will die before reproducing, might seem at first to reinforce the adaptive perspective. However, it could also be thought to reduce the chances of any one competing possibility being correct, and cast doubt on the approach as a whole. It’s just as easy to come up with reasons to avoid the edge of a water body, which would make the bias detrimental, perhaps especially in Africa, and the water in lakes, streams and the ocean is usually unsafe for humans to drink. Another problem with adaptive models is that it’s not only mixtures of water with land that we admire, it’s also blood and breath with bones, stones and statues, wind with stones, oil, milk, and black liquids with statues and coffins, and so on.

Fluid~solid bias is not in the same category as other features of the mind regarding the degree of certainty that can be attached to its functionality. The usefulness of desires for food, water, and the opposite sex are beyond dispute. They make so much sense it’s safe to assume they evolved in the contexts of survival and reproduction.

Desires for things like music, dance and ornamentation are different. We know based on the prevalence of these phenomena throughout the animal world that animals generally find them amusing, that we’re biased to favor them, but our amusement probably can’t be understood in terms of natural selection, and we don’t need an adaptive reason for every bias in the mind, even if it happens to be universal. It’s entirely possible that they arise for no purposeful reason, incidentally, from features of the brain that do serve a purpose, and don’t get eliminated because they’re not sufficiently detrimental to be selected against. Fluid~solid bias seems to belong in this category, along with other biases for compositions of primitive perceptual opposites, including those describing matter in fluid versus solid states.

Psychoanalysis

Freud might argue for the existence of the same bias as in adaptive hypotheses, but say that it results from experiences during development. He might point out fluid~solid mixtures in sexuality, and be intrigued by the extremely frequent appearance of fluid~solid juxtaposition in dreams. What the experiences inducing the bias would be is far from obvious, however, more so than with adaptive explanations, despite that the experiences would need to be nearly universal, and there’s nothing about familial relationships or frustration of the libido that immediately stands out as a good reason for the bias in question to arise.

Sensory Bias

Preexisting sensory bias, a fourth hypothesis, also assumes fluid~solid mixtures in culture can be explained by human amusement with the idea of adding fluidity to solidness. In this case, however, the bias is an incidental side effect of sensory system and/or brain structure, with no need for a direct adaptive function or differential survival process, and the bias is free to favor fluidity of any kind with any kind of solidness, rather than only water and land as in the idea of adaptively preferring fluid~solid scenery. It can also efficiently explain the prevalence of fluid~solid mixtures in poetry, creation stories, religion, mythology, idiomatic language, art and architecture, and it covers instances of the mixture such as the magical transformation of solids into fluids and vice versa, which seem unlikely to follow from a preference for semi-watery landscapes.

The presence of the mixture fluid~solid in poetry, art, decoration and nonhuman, courtship-related characteristics supports the sensory bias view because these are inherently aesthetic phenomena. The same can be said for religion, mythology and architecture to the extent such things evolve through aesthetic selection. Considering only the titles used by some of the most famous poets, “A Drop Fell on the Apple Tree,” “Before the ice is in the pools,” “The Mountains stood in Haze” and “How the old Mountains drip with Sunset” by Emily Dickinson, “To the Thawing Wind” by Robert Frost and “Lines Composed in a Wood on a Windy Day” by Anne Brontë all qualify as fluid~solid mixtures.

The strongest evidence of an aesthetic rather than adaptive explanation for fluid~solid mixture bias is probably how well the bias fits the general pattern of contradiction and differential excitement in aesthetic material, and that by replacing fluidity with other more exciting qualities, or solidness with other less exciting qualities, one can generate the structure of additional, extremely common aesthetic structures. This is shown in Monoaesthetic Mixtures in Language, Culture and Biology. Fluid~solid and similar biases for mixtures of opposites can be explained as side effects of brain and sensory system structure, coming into existence with the evolution the of perceptual dimensions that allow us to distinguish the opposites interacting in the corresponding effects.

The same arguments made above for an excitement differential between fluids and solids and a universal bias for mixtures of the two can be made for any of the qualities that define the physical difference between a fluid and solid, such as dynamism versus stasis and disorder versus order, aesthetic examples of which appear to be more common than those of fluid~solid mixtures. The implication is a causal link between preferences and states of matter, the most obvious underlying reason for the link being that the animal brain is inevitably in a state of balance between a liquid and crystal, and therefore also the properties of matter in these phases.

Perplexity

Perplexity’s response to “Earliest recorded instance of the practice of anointing a solid object with water, oil, blood or some other fluid.”

The earliest recorded instances of anointing solid objects with water, oil, blood, or other fluids can be traced back to approximately 3000-2500 BCE in Mesopotamia and Egypt, with possible prehistoric antecedents extending back to the Neolithic period around 7000-8000 BCE. The practice appears to have emerged independently in multiple cultures across the ancient Near East and Mediterranean, suggesting a fundamental human impulse to sanctify objects through the application of sacred substances. These early practices laid the foundation for the elaborate anointing ceremonies that would become central to religious traditions worldwide.

Perplexity’s answer to “How common is anointment of statues in ritual?”

Statue anointment is a remarkably common practice across virtually all religious traditions worldwide, occurring with such frequency and universality that it can be considered one of the most widespread ritual behaviors in human history. From daily temple ceremonies to major religious festivals, the anointing of religious statues represents a fundamental way humans interact with the divine through material objects.

The universal nature of statue anointment reflects fundamental human psychological and spiritual needs. Anthropological studies reveal that the practice serves multiple functions: it maintains the perceived “aliveness” of religious objects, creates tangible connection points between human and divine realms, and provides regular opportunities for community religious participation.

Perplexity answers “What is the most common body part to be anointed with oil?”

The most common body part to be anointed with oil is the forehead. This is often done in religious ceremonies and rituals. Sometimes other parts of the body like the hands or feet may also be anointed, depending on the tradition or purpose.

Perplexity responds to “Spirals in cave art”:

Spirals are one of the most ubiquitous motifs in cave and rock art across ancient cultures, often interpreted as symbolic representations of spiritual journeys, natural cycles, or cosmic forces.

Perplexity responds to “tears that turn into solids mythology.”

Throughout human history, cultures around the world have created compelling mythologies about tears that transform into solid substances, particularly precious stones, crystals, and other enduring materials. These legends serve as powerful metaphors for grief, transformation, and the permanence of emotional experiences.

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