>From:    "J. F. Kaiser" <[log in to unmask]>

>Excuse my sloppy language. When I said the sea is "still", I meant it
>as a body of water and not flowing as a river "moves". When looking
>out to sea, it appears like a pond. The waves are just a bit of
>movement on the surface and at the edges. It is therefore very similar
>to a well, pool or lake, i.e. an enclosed body of water. Just bigger.

Thank you for explaining. My image was quite different--I was visualizing
how ocean looks from the beach, with waves crashing and doing anything but
keeping still (there are very few quiet beaches in my part of the world). So
perhaps now you can understand why I was puzzled.

<snip>I did not mention rocks. Stones and pebbles are generally what people
throw into the sea.

In my part of the world, a rock can include stones and pebbles. I didn't
realize my turn of phrase would be an obstacle.

>"For fun"? Well, that is a presumption. What does
>one understand by the concept "fun"? Throwing coins into wells and
>fountains is also "for fun", but it was my proposition that it is also
>an instinct or congenital behaviour pattern.
>
>Good grief! Do you seriously believe that is what tourists in
>kiss-me-quick hats do when they throw a coin into a well or fountain?
>People expect chucking a coin into a water feature at their local
>garden centre will conjure up a holy fish?

Did I say that? Not at all. My point was that your picture might work for
why people would throw a coin in a fountain at the mall or skip rocks on a
lake, but it wouldn't explain why people would bother to do all the ritual
involved with active "holy" wells. If you want to have a child very badly
and believe that doing a ritual pattern around a well may make that happen,
then that might be motivation but it wouldn't be instinctive. Or I recently
saw a film in which a woman explains why she's making the pattern at
Glencolumcille--for the sake of a sick friend. In my eafrlier post, I
mentioned the vague but compelling conviction that things must be done or
the [good] luck will be taken away. There are some motivations that cannot
be explained purely by evolutionary instinct, unless you accept that there
are instincts to look beyond ourselves whether it's into some inner self or
out into the sky or down a well.

Francine Nicholson

_________________________________________________________________
Join the world’s largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail.
http://www.hotmail.com