Creating the Webbd Wheel: The Bathhouse
In which we remember the old ways ...
Bathrooms are much on my mind these days.
We just moved (which is why I’ve been absent for a couple of weeks) into an old colonial house in a small city in central Maine. For more on that, see my latest blog post.
The plumbing in this house needs some work. Both bathrooms, one directly above the other, are the size of a closet. The one I use has fire-engine red stacked washer and dryer in it. The washer, I discovered after I put the first load in it, doesn’t work. I had to wring out the load by hand because the washer wouldn’t complete the drain/spin cycle. Hello, laundromat!
Aside from the machines, I have a sink and toilet. The bathroom above has a tub/shower, but only just. The bathroom sink upstairs has no running water at all, and the pipes under the sink leak.
For the first few days I lived here alone as my partner finished up at our old house. The first night he was here, we happened to be using the toilets at the same time. He flushed first.
I got a cold bidet. Whoops!
I thought the cats were splashing water all over the sink and floor!
Yeah. So. The whole situation makes me giggle. I apologized to the cats. We are awaiting the attentions of a plumber. And I’m having fantasies of bathrooms in which the pipes don’t gurgle, the toilet doesn’t erupt, everything drains properly, and I have my own clean little tub and shower and a separate laundry room with machines that work.
When I sat down this morning to prepare this week’s post, I realized we’re reading about the bathhouse for the first time.
The first thing to know about bathhouses is they’re hard to research on line. A Google search produces lots and lots of porn.
Not that kind of a bathhouse!
Bathhouses are an old, old tradition from many cultures around the world. The earliest humans stumbled across hot springs and used them for cleansing, relaxing, and healing. The Romans, Turks, Russians, Japanese, Koreans, Native Americans, and Fins are a few of the cultures who developed important social rituals and routines associated with bathing together, often using saunas, steam, and cold plunge pools as adjuncts.
Bathing was a nature ritual intertwined with spiritual practices, and several traditions include magical spirits and creatures associated with bathhouses. Women gave birth in them, the sick and injured were carried to them, lovers met in them, and often the dying were taken to the bathhouse. Bathhouse ritual was an integral part of the social fabric, a place where elder passed on wisdom and teaching to youth, where women congregated with women or men congregated with men in a safe space, and where families bathed and relaxed naked together.
As a lifelong swimmer and water worshiper, I have always enjoyed saunas, steam rooms, hot springs, and pools. Modern locker rooms just aren’t the same as the rustic, hand built, wood heated, non-modernized traditional bathhouse, perhaps watched over by a Bannik, a Slavic spirit which hid under benches and threw boiling water or hot rocks at disruptive or disrespectful bathers.
We could use a Bannik at the pool facility where I work.
Anyway, I had great fun researching traditional bathhouses, and then I made up my own for Webbd. I hope you enjoy reading about it as much as I enjoyed writing about it.
(This essay was published with post #22 of The Hanged Man.)