The purifying and regenerating virtue of the bath is well known, and attested, to the profane as well as to the sacred, by related uses among all peoples, in all places and all times. We can say that the bath is universally the first of the rites sanctioning the major stages of life, in particular birth, puberty, death. The symbolism of the bath combines the meanings of the act of immersion and the water element.
Immersion is, for the analyst, an image of uterine regression. It satisfies a need for relaxation, security, tenderness, healing, the return to the original matrix being a return to the source of life. Immersion, voluntarily granted, and which is a kind of burial, is the acceptance of a moment of forgetfulness, of renouncing one's own responsibility, of "setting aside", of emptiness. Hence its countless therapeutic uses. This immersion takes place in the time lived as a hiatus, a solution of continuity, which necessarily gives it an initiatory value. The best example is perhaps this closed rite of entry of the magicians of Central Africa (Gameroun-Gabon) according to which the imprétante, drugged, is buried twenty-four hours in a sealed cavity arranged under the bed of a stream, in the heart of the equatorial forest: the forest-belly symbols of mother-water, and of time flowing like the river, associated with that of the uterine cache, here form a symbolic complex of such power that the initiates of this brotherhoods practically forget the course of the previous life. Initiatory regeneration here fully takes on its meaning of death and rebirth; moreover such customs, still observable, throw a complementary light on such or such myth or custom of classical antiquity, or other moments of our history. Thus, among the Greeks, statues of gods and goddesses were ritually immersed (Athena, Hera, etc.); a bath preceded the initiation of the Nazarenes, as, in the Middle Ages, the coronation of the knights.
Purifying, regenerating, water is also fertilizing; hence the ritual bathing of brides, and the immersions of sterile women in a particular lake or basin of a sacred spring, a practice attested from the Mediterranean to the Far East over more than three thousand years of history.
Christianity takes over the use of the lustral bath. Jean Batiste in the Jordan. With Christian baptism, matter and spirit merge into the same symbol; when John the Evangelist declares: He who has taken a bath does not need to wash himself, he is entirely pure (JOHN, 13, 10), the same Greek word has the meaning of clean and pure. This purity, in its Christian acceptance, is not negative: it prepares a new and fruitful life.
The state obtained is purely life, unmixed with the principle of death which is sins: positive purity is not the absence of stain, but life in its pure state.
Despite so much tradition agreeing to positively value the bath, a hundred Christian prudishness has overturned the symbol, condemning the use of the bath as contrary to chastity. Here we must distinguish between hot baths and cold baths. The former are considered as a search for sensuality which should be avoided. This is precisely the opinion advanced by Saint Jerome (Epist. 45, 3) who sees in the hot bath an attack on chastity. The Christians of the first centuries willingly went to shared baths. The councils and the Fathers of the Church revolted with violence against a use which they considered immoral. In the Middle Ages, stoves had the reputation of being places of debauchery; they were therefore forbidden to Christians.
Some Western and Eastern monks - these being even more severe - not only exclude bathing the body in its entirety, but even refuse the use of cold water was recommended mortification, and this all the more that the water was freezing cold. This is how biographers of holy lives, belonging to the first Christian centuries and the Middle Ages, copying each other, will speak of immersions in ice water in order to tame the flesh.
Note also that, in a certain alchemical acceptance of the term, the bath can be understood as a purification by fire, not by water, as there is a bateme of fire, that of the martyrs. Finally, the bath, in a text like the treatise on the Golden Flower, is associated with fasting of the heart (sin tchai); its washing is the elimination of all mental activity, the decisive acquisition of emptiness, which closes the loop of the symbol and brings us back to its departure.
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