Artistic Flow   Because reality is only an illusion

It is a sticker.

You can get it HERE.

Ever throw a coin into a wishing well? I have.

Did your wish come true?

Ah, but why?
Wishing wells are things that have been around forever. As long as we’ve had history at least. Why though?

The mythologies and theories involved vary by culture, but in most cases, it had to do with deities or spirits living in or having something to do with water. The wishing well existed before there existed wells. Basically, it was about wishing and water.

So getting into the history of wishing wells is pretty much not a thing we can do in a simple post. There is so much involved that it would be an entire book.

I will touch on a couple of things.
First is that in Nordic mythologies there is a well that gives knowledge. Mímir’s well. Mímir himself partakes of this well. He even drinks from it with a drinking horn that may or may not be the same horn used to signal Ragnorak.
Pretty special if you ask me. Anyways, the well is located beneath one of the three roots of Yggdrasil. Potent. All things in old Norse culture required sacrifice. Not a group of entitled little brats at all. Odin was asked to sacrifice his right eye for what he wished. He wished for wisdom and received it. It was into that well that he was told to throw his eye.
The basic premise is to get one’s wish from the well one must sacrifice something.
The coins we toss nowadays are more of a holdover from a time when people did it in a sacrificial manner than anything else.
If I toss a penny, nickel, quarter, or even a dollar into a well it is no great sacrifice I have made. My wish will be granted in the same way my sacrifice was given.
I only have mentioned the nordic mythological reasons here because I recently posted a couple of paintings based on Huginn and Muninn. HERE and HERE.

So how did this mysterious and odd practice continue on through time when so many other things people did way back faded into oblivian?

It was through the selection of the fittest. That is my own opinion btw.
Those who spend time worrying on the big matters of spirituality, gods, creation, etc…
and believe in more than their limited personal view shows them are in my opinion the better folk.
They are often rewarded in roundabout ways. Imagine if you will living way back when a copper penny could feed you, When a bag of silver was a fortune, and coins had value.
To toss the coin was a sacrifice.
So in areas where beliefs ran shallow people didn’t do such things often. In areas where people believed in the miraculous they did.
One well gets many coins (and other valuable items) tossed into it while another goes without.
Diseases and such which we consider many of to be nothing now could wipe out a village in those days. The water supply was often the saving grace or the curse for people.
Guess what???? All that tossing of metals into the well kept people safe.
There is a biocidal effect of metals in water, especially heavy metals, but most common metals used to make coinage, jewelry, trinkets, and weapons have the magic. With every wish the people who believed kept themselves and their loved ones safe from the diseases that often ravaged others through bad water.
Thus the believers lived on and the unbelievers died more frequently.

Strange to imagine that a lovesick pup tossing his copper into the well whenever he got it and wishing for a marriage to a seemingly out of his reach girl could be directly responsible for keeping people alive. I’m sure if he truly loved her he would be very pleased with the notion because it meant he helped keep her alive as well. Who says romance is dead.