Most people don’t need to be convinced about the benefits of warm water and bubbling jets, soothing your aching muscles and melting the stress of the day away. It’s really rather universal, and even primal, to be drawn to water. Bathing is as old as life itself, with the idea that we come out of the waters of the womb and go back to the water for cleansing and purification. Ritual bathing is also something very old, with a long and fascinating history. With our hot tubs, you’re entering into that old tradition, but also enjoying all the fabulous features of modern technology. Control of the water’s temperature and speed are just the beginning, and we offer such delightful amenities as stereo systems and television to enhance the experience.
The modern ritual of hot tubs has its origins, most likely, from the Romans, who got the idea from the Greeks – just like everything else. But it wasn’t until Carcalla built his famous Thermae that the history really begins to roll along. Carcalla, who lived between the years 188-217, designed one of the largest bath houses in the world. Funded by taxes, it could allow for 1,600 bathers at a time, and the citizens were allowed to use it whenever they wished. One might think Carcalla would have been a magnanimous ruler with enlightened ideas of the good life, but unfortunately he was just another bloodthirsty emporer who helped bring the end of the Roman Empire.
Nonetheless, the ideas of the public bathhouse were not his ideas, but had already been well-established and formalized by the time he built his monument. At least a century before his rule, Roman baths were extremely popular. Again, drawing on the wisdom of the Greeks, the Romans had a complicated ritual for bathing already in place. It involves annointing the bather in oils, and this is followed by a regimen of heavy exercise, and then various dips in waters of different temperatures. They needed the baths, then, for their complex system of modulating the body’s temperature to give the bather a feeling of terrific well-being. The end of the bath was followed with more annointing with more oil, and at this point the history of the ritual gets slippery. While our experience of the bath is much simpler, the technology has certainly grown more sophisticated, but its place at the center of culture is a very old idea indeed.
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