How to Detain a Tsunami: Impassable Boundaries against Ocean Chaos in Ancient and Modern Imaginaries.

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the symbolic keys of a very long-standing model of perception of the sea among the cultures of the Mediterranean, which includes a combination of events played out on a cosmogonic stage: the deity’s domination over the sea as the incarnation of original chaos, the differentiation between the places belonging to the land and to the sea, and the imposition of unpassable limits on the latter with the perpetual command that it should never transgress them. In the framework of this model, a phenomenon like that of a tsunami is understood as the sea’s unlawful transgression of the limits imposed on it and as a return to original chaos. This conceptual model was employed by Christian authors to represent the tsunami occurring in the Eastern Mediterranean in AD 365 and to construct accounts, such as the miracle of St Hilarion in Epidaurus (Croatia), of the miraculous detention of the waters through the establishing of an impassable boundary. The same narrative scheme is revealed in traditions emerging after the Lisbon earthquake and tsunami in 1755, for instance, the miracle of Our Lady of the Palm in the southern Spanish city of Cadiz. These examples allow for a reflection on the role of religious rituals in preserving the memory of catastrophes such as tsunamis from a long durée perspectiv