hould drink would not die, but live forever. I have
already alluded to the Fountain of Youth, supposed long before Columbus
saw the surf of San Salvador to exist in the Bahama Islands or Florida.
It seems to have lingered long on that peninsula. Not many years ago,
Coacooche, a Seminole chieftain, related a vision which had nerved him
to a desperate escape from the Castle of St. Augustine. "In my dream,"
said he, "I visited the happy hunting grounds and saw my twin sister,
long since gone. She offered me a cup of pure water, which she said came
from the spring of the Great Spirit, and if I should drink of it, I
should return and live with her forever."[129-1] Some such mystical
respect for the element, rather than as a mere outfit for his spirit
home, probably induced the earlier tribes of the same territory to place
the conch-shell which the deceased had used for a cup conspicuously on
his grave,[129-2] and the Mexicans and Peruvians to inter a vase filled
with water with the corpse, or to sprinkle it with the liquid, baptizing
it, as it were, into its new associations.[130-1] It was an emblem of
the hope that should cheer the dwellings of the dead, a symbol of the
resurrection which is in store for those who have gone down to the
grave.

The vase or the gourd as a symbol of water, the source and preserver of
life, is a conspicuous figure in the myths of ancient America. As Akbal
or Huecomitl, the great or original vase, in Aztec and Maya legends it
plays important parts in the drama of creation; as Tici (Ticcu) in Peru
it is the symbol of the rains, and as a gourd it is often mentioned by
the Caribs and Tupis as the parent of the atmospheric waters.

As the MOON is associated with the dampness and dews of night, an
ancient and wide-spread myth identified her with the Goddess of Water.
Moreover, in spite of the expostulations of the learned, the common
people the world over persist in attributing to her a marked influence
on the rains. Whether false or true, this familiar opinion is of great
antiquity, and was decidedly approved by the Indians, who were all, in
the words of an old author, "great observers of the weather by the
moon."[130-2] They looked upon her not only as forewarning them by her
appearance of the approach of rains and fogs, but as being their actual
cause.

Isis, her Egyptian title, literally means moisture; Ataensic, whom the
Hurons said was the moon, is derived from the word for water; and
Citatl