Apah

Apah, in Sanskrit, are the waters, both earthly and celestial, the first element of the Cosmos with purifying, medicinal and reviving power. Of feminine gender and character, they are called Gods, that is Devih.
The particularity of water, as Raimon Pannikar points out in his comment on the Veda, is their intermediate character, in the sense of being neither of air nor earth.
It is on the earth but it comes from the sky; it brings life but can also bring destruction. It flows on the surface but also in depth and it can evaporate. It therefore assumes the most diverse shapes, it possesses an unlimited freedom. It combines in synthesis the movement of the air and the gravity of the earth: full vitality. We find the same thing in the human body with its fluids and its pulsations. The symbolism of this element in almost all traditions is that of the return to origins and of purification.

“Whatever sin can be found in me
whatever evil I may I have committed,
if I have lied or sworn falsely,
o Waters, remove it from me.
Now I have come to look for the waters.
Now we blend into them
Come to me, Agni, rich in milk!
Come and enrich me with your splendour!” RV X,9

In these verses is the deep meaning of this trio, marked by the rhythm of Salpuri a traditional Korean sciamanic dance meaning “washing away the malignant spirits”. A trio that echoes ancestral images and symbols belonging to a distant collective past, recreating in a danced contemporary ritual a type of trance through which one can process and exorcise the heaviness of our historicity and even the simplest human fragility which each of us carries.