Another well in Parsi Bazar Street is also believed to harbour a beneficent pir. Only four years ago, a friend was informed that when doctors despaired of curing a patient, a Parsi carpenter suggested that the well spirit should be implored to save the patient. He brought certain people versed in the art of propitiating spirits and asked them to try their skill. They gratified the well-spirit by placing grain and other offerings on the surface of the water and by remaining in the water for days together, muttering incantations. The patient was thoroughly cured and, no wonder, he attributes the cure to the grace of the water saint.
These folk beliefs in the efficacy of well-water and the influence of the spirits dwelling in it are, as already observed, in no way peculiar to the City of Bombay or to other parts of the country of India and present no new phase of human thought. They are common to the whole world. In the concept of primeval man everything had its spirit. Particularly did it associate life with motion. The spring was ever flowing, ever bountiful, ever refreshing and fertilizing and came to be regarded as a living organism, a benevolent spirit supplying man with the prime necessity of life and endowed with purifying and healing qualities. Everywhere, therefore, the source of this quickening element that had such charms came to be adored so that the water-worship in the East has its striking counterpart in the history of Western thought.
Professor Robertson Smith identifies well-worship with the agricultural life of aborigines who had not yet developed the idea of a heavenly God. This is his description of the worship prevailing in Arabia: “The fountain is treated as a living thing, those properties of its waters which we call natural are regarded as manifestations of a divine life, and the source itself is honoured as a divine being, I had almost said a divine animal.”[10] “This pregnant summary of well-worship in Arabia,” says Sir Laurence Gomme in his Ethnology of Folklore, “may, without the alteration of a single word, be adopted as the summary of well-worship in Britain and its isles.” One might even say that well-worship is probably more widespread in the West than in the East and that some of the rituals there observed are more primitive than those which distinguish it in the East.