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Abstract

In his article the author explores such issues as: how metaphysical, religious and phylosophical attitudes influenced a symbolic undersyanding of the water in the city of both ancient civilization and the Christian West, when and why water lost its sacral privileges and how it became humilated to the point as to become a facility for a city's sewerage. Using a number of considerations of the other investigators the author notes that the signs of the exhaustion of the metaphysical symbolics of water could be discernable as early as in the period of the Ancienr Rome. Although its sacral content to water was given back by the Christianity and the Middle Ages, any kind of its sacral symbolics was forced to the margins of the culture that suffered the dominance of the attitudes being distated by natural sciences. The specialists on urban matters in the new epoch started interpretating a city as a social body from which water, "urban blood" takes out all the scum.