Let us begin with a fish. There it is — swimming around, blissfully unbothered, breathing water, experiencing hydraulic pressure on all sides, completely surrounded by its medium and utterly oblivious to the fact that it is surrounded. It does not know it is wet. It has never thought the word "wet." It simply… exists. In water. As if that is perfectly normal. Which, for a fish, it is.

Now consider you. You are also surrounded on all sides by your medium. It presses on you at 14.7 pounds per square inch. It carries you sounds, smells, weather, the distant howl of your neighbour who mispronounced "charcuterie" at a dinner party. You breathe it in and out approximately 22,000 times a day without once stopping to think: wait. Was I purpose-built for exactly this layer of the cosmic water system?

The answer, dear reader, according to a converging consensus of ancient cosmologists, Hermetic philosophers, Vedic scholars, and one extremely passionate Austrian naturalist named Viktor, is: extraordinarily, deliberately, yes. You were fashioned for the aerial ocean with the same exquisite precision that the fish was fashioned for the liquid one. Different phase. Same original design brief.

The air you are breathing is not air in the sense of "nothing special." The air is the middle stage of water — the vaporous, gaseous, breathable phase of the one universal substance that the ancients called by many names: Apas, Nun, Nammu, the Primal Waters, That Thing That Is Definitely Not Nothing. We live at the interface of two fluid systems — the dense liquid ocean below, and the lighter aerial ocean above — and we have the audacity to call this "land."

    "Air is water that has forgotten it was water."     — Viktor Schauberger, The Water Wizard (1998) · Also what your dehydrated cousin sounds like at 2pm   

Let us lay it out simply, because cosmic hydrology deserves a good diagram and we deserve a moment of clarity before the article gets delightfully strange:

The science is real. Water (H₂O) transitions between phases — solid, liquid, gas — based on temperature and pressure, while remaining the same molecule throughout. The atmosphere contains, at any given moment, an estimated 37.5 million billion gallons of water in vapour form (USGS). That is not a typo. That is a number so large it deserves its own room.

Atmospheric pressure behaves identically to hydraulic pressure — pushing on every surface equally, supporting buoyancy, driving currents (we call them wind, but the ocean calls them currents, and the ocean was here first). The only real difference between you and a fish is that you were each fitted precisely to your appointed phase — one to the liquid, one to the aerial — and you both have opinions about brunch, though only one of you can express them.

Here is something modern science is sometimes reluctant to admit: the ancients were not guessing. They were observing, over centuries, with alarming precision and a great deal of ceremonial regalia.

The ancient Hebrews described a firmament (raqia — a beaten-out solid dome) separating "waters above" from "waters below" in Genesis 1:6–8. Above the dome: water. Below it: the air we breathe. Below the air: the seas. Three phases. One substance. This was written down approximately 2,500 years ago by people who did not have spreadsheets and still managed to nail the general architecture of the cosmos.

The ancient Egyptians were even more explicit: their primordial substance was Nun — the infinite, undifferentiated cosmic waters from which all creation emerged. The sky goddess Nut arched her water-body over the earth. The air god Shu held them apart. There you go: three water phases, encoded in theology, depicted on ceilings, and considerably more accurate than "it's all just rocks in space."

    "In the beginning was the Flood — the Waters called Nun. From Nun arose the Primeval Mound, and upon it all differentiation."     — Egyptian Pyramid Texts, c. 2400 BCE · Predating your current understanding of physics by quite some margin   

The Vedic tradition called the universal waters Āpas (आपः) and dedicated entire hymns to them in the Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE or considerably earlier, depending on who you ask and how heated the scholarly argument becomes). The hymn Apah Sukta (Rigveda 10.9) describes the Waters as the original medicine, the original purifier, the original substrate of being — which is to say, a civilisation that had been watching the sky for at least a thousand years before anyone wrote it down concluded that water was the fundamental thing. Respect.

Before someone in the 16th century decided the Earth was a ball hurtling through nothing (which, if true, raises questions that remain unanswered with a satisfying click), the dominant cartographic tradition worldwide depicted the world as a flat disc surrounded by an encircling ocean. Not because they were ignorant. Because they were describing the cosmographical reality as they understood it — a land-plane floating within and beneath a fluid cosmos.

The Babylonian Imago Mundi (BM 92687) is the oldest surviving world map, held in the British Museum. It shows a flat disc. An encircling ocean. Islands at the far edge. Above it: cosmic water. This is not a geography map. It is a cosmographical cross-section of the water-phase model, drawn in clay, by people who were simultaneously tracking astronomical cycles with extraordinary accuracy. They knew what they were doing. They just drew it differently.

Now we ascend. Past the air-ocean. Past the boundary layer (the raqia, the tropopause, the firmament — same real thing, different nomenclature). Into what modern science calls "space" and what sensible ancient people called the upper waters, the æther, the crystalline void that is not actually void.

Modern physics, after spending decades insisting space was empty, has quietly begun walking that back with the nervous energy of someone who has just discovered they left the oven on in 1926. The Casimir Effect, experimentally confirmed in 1997 by physicist Steve Lamoreaux, demonstrated that the vacuum between two metal plates exerts a measurable force — because the vacuum is not empty. It is churning with virtual particles, zero-point energy, and the faint despair of classical physics professors everywhere.

The Cosmic Microwave Background radiation means space glows — uniformly, at 2.7 Kelvin, in every direction. A void does not glow. Water, as it happens, is an excellent carrier of electromagnetic information. The ancient æther theorists of the 19th century — who were defunded and academically cancelled by the Michelson-Morley experiment — were not wrong about a medium existing. They were wrong about its mechanical model. The medium is still there. It just ignored their attempts to measure it like a breeze.

    "The firmament divides the waters above from the waters below."     — Genesis 1:7, c. 5th century BCE text encoding oral tradition of considerably greater age · Still peer-reviewed by exactly zero papers but remains largely unrefuted   

Ancient astrology was not the "Mercury is in Retrograde, do not send emails" industry it has since become. It was a precision observational science built across thousands of years of sky-watching by extremely dedicated people who took it very seriously and also thought the planets were gods, which honestly tracks.

The Babylonian astronomical system divided the sky into three celestial paths: the Way of Enlil (northern sky, air/ether realm), the Way of Anu (equatorial sky, middle realm), and the Way of Ea (southern sky, water realm). Ea — the god of the southern celestial path — was explicitly the god of water, wisdom, and the deep. His sky region was the water-phase of the cosmos. This is not metaphor. This is cosmographical hydrology expressed through theology because they did not have a peer-reviewed journal and they were working with what they had.

The Egyptian astronomical ceiling of the Tomb of Senenmut (c. 1473 BCE, Theban Tomb 71, and yes you can go look at it) depicts the sky as an ocean populated by star-boats. The Sun-god Ra sails through the sky-ocean by day, descends into the underwater Duat realm by night, and re-emerges at dawn. This is a complete three-phase water narrative: sky-ocean, aerial passage, underwater night. They were not confused. They were describing the system as they understood it, which was: everything is water, some of it just has stars in it.

If any figure from recent history embodies the spirit of "ignored by mainstream science, correct about most things," it is Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958), Austrian forester, water researcher, and professional observer of fish. Schauberger spent decades watching how trout moved in mountain streams and became convinced — correctly — that water in motion develops implosive vortex energy that is qualitatively different from inert water at rest.

He described what he called living water: water in a natural vortical, spiraling state that behaves as a biological medium rather than an inert liquid. He connected this to the spiral growth patterns of living organisms, the structure of atmospheric cyclones, and the formation of river systems that choose their own paths based on temperature gradients. His work, published in Austrian forestry circles and in his treatises Unsere Sinnlose Arbeit (1934) and collected later in The Water Wizard (Gateway Books, 1998, trans. Callum Coats), described air explicitly as the "volatile continuation of water" — the medium of transition between the liquid and ethereal phases.

He was, in his lifetime, variously celebrated, dismissed, and forcibly consulted by the Third Reich, which is the kind of biography that does not fit neatly onto a conference lanyard. His influence on independent water research has been substantial and largely unacknowledged by institutions that find spiraling fish inconvenient.

    "Nature is not a collection of objects but a continuous flow. Air is water that has forgotten it was water."     — Viktor Schauberger, The Water Wizard, 1998 · Also applicable to your ex   

We exist in the middle phase of a cosmic fluid. The ocean is below us, dense and ancient. The air is around us, the vaporous sea in which we swim without noticing. The æther is above us — not empty, not nothing, but the crystalline upper water charged with energy that ancient cosmographers correctly identified as the third phase of the one universal substance.

The Hebrew firmament, the Babylonian three celestial roads, the Egyptian sky-ocean, the Vedic waters, the Norse mist-worlds above and below — these are not myths. They are hydro-cosmological observations encoded in the only language available to people who were watching the sky with their bare eyes for centuries and writing down what they saw with considerable care and excellent stone tablets.

Modern physics is catching up. The quantum vacuum is not empty. Space is not nothing. The atmosphere is a fluid that presses on us, carries us, and sustains us in precisely the same way the ocean sustains the fish that has never wondered what "wet" means.

You are a being purposefully placed in the middle layer of a cosmic water system, reading a magazine featuring cats with ears, raising money for real animals in actual need. The ancient Babylonians would have found this deeply appropriate. The fish would have no comment. The cat is watching you with the expression of someone who has always known.