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Religious historians are growing more interested in the study of the relationship between the sacred and the natural worlds.1 They are paying considerable attention to the great influence that indigenous culture exerts on the religions that have been introduced into African soil, such as the Judeo-Christian and Islam faiths. This relationship not only encourages indigenization of Christianity, but also helps in huge production of Africa's own brand of Christianity, which is not necessarily syncretistic. These AfroChristian churches, commonly called the Aladura Movement2 in Nigeria, have benefited immensely from their special use of some African cultural elements and values, which have produced what we now call African Christianity.
This indigenization process resulting from the integration of certain symbolic elements from the African sacred cosmos with central tenets of the Bible has also given birth to African Theology or African Christian Theology.3 Water, being the most common natural phenomenon, finds expression in the healing ministries of the Aladura Movement not only in Yorubaland, where each of the four main branches took off, but also in the whole of Nigeria and some other parts of the world. This element is greatly responsible for the various branches' growing popularity. To Africans generally, water transcends its scientific properties or chemical composition (H20) as testable in the chemistry laboratory. The sacred quality of water has diverse symbolic meanings and applications in Yoruba religious traditions, and these characteristics have been adapted by the Afro-Christian Movement. Therefore, the concern of this article is to examine the symbolic and religious significance of water in Yoruba religious traditions and water's interactions with, and adaptation by, Aladura churches in their therapeutic ritual processes.
Symbolism and Water in Universal Religious Context
Mircea Eliade, a historian of religion, has devoted much attention to the study of symbols and symbolism.4 He notes that all the religious beliefs of man, being a homo symbolicus, have a symbolic character.5 Symbolism translates a human situation into cosmological terms and vice versa; more precisely, "it reveals the continuity between the structures of human existence and cosmic structures."6 Religious symbolism has two qualities through which it reveals the modality of the cosmos: presentational and representational. This revelation explains why a religious symbol may have a depth of interpretations.7 Thus Charles Long writes:
[R]eligious...