ENCHANTED RIVERS: How the World Is Becoming Alive Again

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In ancient cultures, rivers were revered as sacred entities. Many of them, such as the Ganges, still hold immense spiritual significance. Has our attitude toward rivers changed since ancient times? Can we today, despite all the technocentrism and rationalism of modern civilization, regard rivers as living beings?

RIVERS HAVE ACQUIRED LEGAL RIGHTS

bout eight years ago, a strange legal trend swept across our world — rivers began to acquire rights. You heard that correctly — legal rights, exactly the same as those of human beings. Remarkable progress in this noble cause was made by the High Court of the Indian state of Uttarakhand. For the first time in the country’s history, it declared the Ganges and the Yamuna «living entities with the status of a legal person, along with all the corresponding rights and duties». Now that rivers have rights, it is no longer so easy for anyone to offend these two most renowned rivers in India’s religious world.

For example, polluting the water or unlawfully seizing riverbanks is punishable as causing physical harm to an Indian citizen. True, the court’s ruling also states that, like any member of society, a river has duties as well. Alas, the court did not clarify what should be done if the Ganges and the Yamuna fail to fulfill them. Fining or imprisoning a river would, after all, be rather difficult. Yet the pioneers in spiritually reimagining rivers and granting them legal rights were not representatives of the Indian religious tradition, as one might have expected, but the Parliament of New Zealand.

RIVERS ARE «PEOPLE TOO»

In this way, New Zealand’s parliamentarians brought to an end a long-standing legal battle that had lasted 170 years. As far back as the nineteenth century, local Māori tribes demanded that the Whanganui River be recognized as a living being. Only in our time, however, has the river’s special spiritual significance for the Indigenous people been confirmed in law. At last, the living being Whanganui need not fear legal arbitrariness — from now on, its interests in all court proceedings with the government will be officially represented by the Māori. Do you find that strange?

Supporters of the new law think otherwise: if legal personhood is granted to virtual entities — thousands of trusts, companies, and corporations — why not grant it to a unique natural resource? Strangely enough, more and more people around the world share this logic. For example, a river in the Brazilian city of Guajará-Mirim has been granted the status of a living being. Local residents claim that it is «like a person» and has its own distinct identity. By granting rivers rights and recognizing them as legal persons, people seek to protect them from pollution and the destruction of ecosystems. However, this movement also has an important non-legal dimension.

RETURN TO AN ENCHANTED WORLD

In essence, this new legal trend revives animism. According to this ancient mytho-religious worldview, nature is inhabited by a wide variety of subjects — living beings endowed with consciousness, will, and the ability to influence human destinies. In other words, a river, a tree, or a stone is the native dwelling of a spirit or deity, an embodiment of natural forces. In ancient Greek mythology, rivers often appeared in the form of nymphs. In Sumerian mythology, the Tigris and the Euphrates flowed from the eye sockets of Tiamat, the goddess of the sea. The Chinese revered the Yellow River as a «life-giving mother river», while at the same time fearing its unpredictable character.

In ancient Egyptian mythology, the Nile was personified as the god of fertility named Hapi — the «lord of fish and marsh birds», responsible for the annual flooding of the river. Native Americans believed that their ancestors originated from lakes and rivers. In various cultures, rivers were regarded not merely as streams of water, but as living beings connected to the otherworldly realm of gods and spirits. For centuries, by making grand scientific discoveries, humanity persistently sought to disenchant this strange and mysterious world. But what has happened now? Why are rivers today reclaiming their long-lost status?

THE END OF «INANIMATE MATTER»?

The revolution of «humanizing» natural objects has affected not only the minds of mystically inclined environmentalists, Indian judges, and New Zealand parliamentarians. It has spilled onto the pages of scientific publications. In particular, the international scientific journal Nature presented a review of three books published in 2025 (a list appears at the end of this article). In one of them, the nature writer Robert Macfarlane admits how difficult it is for a person raised in the spirit of rationalism to imagine that a river could be alive. Rationalism has led to the fate of rivers being reduced to «one-dimensional water»; they have been «systematically stripped of their soul and reduced to what Isaac Newton called inanimate brute matter». To prove that rivers are alive, Macfarlane cites the words of political scientist and anthropologist James Scott: «They are born; they transform; they change their courses; they carve new paths to the sea; they move both serenely and turbulently; they (as a rule) teem with life; they can die an almost natural death; they are often maimed and even killed. Each river, although subject to the same hydraulic laws, has its own personality and unique history».

MONSTROUS THIRST OF CIVILIZATION

Macfarlane offers three entirely different river landscapes that are under threat of disappearance. The first is a unique cloud cedar forest in the Andes, where the headwaters of Los Cedros are located — a river endangered by companies extracting copper and gold. The second is the rivers, streams, lagoons, and estuaries of the city of Chennai on the coast of the Bay of Bengal, poisoned by toxic industrial waste. The third is Nitassinan, the homeland of the Innu people, threatened with flooding due to the construction of dams on the Mutehekau Shipu River, which flows into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. For millennia, humanity has been destroying the planet, driven by a thirst it is unable to quench. And this thirst brings monstrous devastation.

Only 3% of all the water on Earth is fresh water. A Babylonian clay tablet has come down to us, dating from approximately 1900–1600 BCE, on which the «Epic of Gilgamesh» is inscribed in cuneiform. It tells of the first war for water in ancient Mesopotamia, the «land between the rivers» — the Tigris and the Euphrates. Since then, thirst has only grown stronger… It compelled early civilizations to establish territorial boundaries and to seek ways of securing water. In both English and Sanskrit, this word derives from the same Proto-Indo-European root ters, meaning «dry». Yet thirst is also associated with greed, exploitative practices, and conflict — not only with restorative power and abundance.

ANIMISM THAT COULD NOT BE KILLED

It is no coincidence that the investment bank Goldman Sachs calls water «the new oil». For them, it is merely an inanimate material resource. Colonial empires and commercial companies benefit from denying that rivers are alive. For example, after the Spanish conquest of the Andean–Amazonian region in the New World, the Inquisition appeared there. Any local resident who worshipped a river or a stream was sentenced by inquisitors to one hundred lashes. Astonishingly, even after 500 years of oppression, Indigenous communities preserved their understanding of the interconnectedness of living rivers, living forests, living mountains, and human beings.

Now legislation has taken the side of these beliefs, granting nature the status of a legal person. To date, authorities in 40 countries have adopted more than 500 laws on the rights of nature. In some of them — for example, in the New Zealand law mentioned above — a river is described as «an indivisible living whole», «a spiritual and physical being endowed with life force». These descriptions use the Māori word mouri — the equivalent of the Latin anima, «soul». We are witnessing how, after thousands of years, in the twenty-first century, animism is experiencing a second birth. Before our eyes, a new picture of the world is emerging, in which all living things coexist and interact within a single flow. And it seems that in this living world, there is no longer any place for dead matter.

Original research:

Should we treat rivers as living things?

Books featured in the review:

Is a River Alive? Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton (2025)
Thirst: In Search of Freshwater Wellcome Collection, London 26 June 2025—1 February 2026
Thirst: In Search of Freshwater Foreword by Robert Macfarlane. Wellcome Collection (2025)