The Ever-Present Sea: Cosmologies and Religious Beliefs around the “Single Ocean”

In recent years a number of scholars have argued that littoral and ocean-going communities can have more in common with each other than with inland societies in the same country. To date comparative work has tended to focus on the empirical evidence supplied by case studies, pointing to similarities in modes of coastal livelihood, involvement in maritime trade networks, navigational and ship-building skills, and the nature of gender relations. These studies have also shown that the lives of peoples economically reliant on the sea are fraught with unpredictability, and that belief in omens and the efficacy of spirit propitiation are a common means of ensuring good fortune in fishing or trade as well as protection against shipwreck or pirate attack. Not surprisingly, such beliefs can readily be found in maritime societies around the “single ocean” that reaches from Africa to Japan, where legends and cosmological beliefs gave sea deities and the rituals associated with them a central place. In examining a range of literary and historical sources from the premodern period, this paper argues that a preoccupation with the sea was retained even as beliefs and practices associated with world religions like Islam or Buddhism were adopted. In appropriating the metaphor of the ocean, and in transforming land-based divinities into powerful sea spirits, coastal communities retained their ancient connections with the ocean while acknowledging links that bound them to inland centers of spiritual authority.