The use of such “holy water” astonished the Romanist missionaries, and they at once detected Satan parodying the Scriptures. But their astonishment rose to horror when they discovered among various nations a rite of baptism of appalling similarity to their own, connected with the imposing of a name, done avowedly for the purpose of freeing from inherent sin, believed to produce a regeneration of the spiritual nature, nay, in more than one instance called by an indigenous word signifying “to be born again.”[126-1] Such a rite was of immemorial antiquity among the Cherokees, Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians. Had the missionaries remembered that it was practised in Asia with all these meanings long before it was chosen as the sign of the new covenant, they need have invoked neither Satan nor Saint Thomas to explain its presence in America.
As corporeal is near akin to spiritual pollution, and cleanliness to godliness, ablution preparatory to engaging in religious acts came early to have an emblematic as well as a real significance. The water freed the soul from sin as it did the skin from stain. We should come to God with clean hands and a clean heart. As Pilate washed his hands before the multitude to indicate that he would not accept the moral responsibility of their acts, so from a similar motive a Natchez chief, who had been persuaded against his sense of duty not to sacrifice himself on the pyre of his ruler, took clean water, washed his hands, and threw it upon live coals.[126-2] When an ancient Peruvian had laid bare his guilt by confession, he bathed himself in a neighboring river and repeated this formula:—
“O thou River, receive the sins I have this day confessed unto the Sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear.”[127-1]
The Navajo who has been deputed to carry a dead body to burial, holds himself unclean until he has thoroughly washed himself in water prepared for the purpose by certain ceremonies.[127-2] A bath was an indispensable step in the mysteries of Mithras, the initiation at Eleusis, the meda worship of the Algonkins, the Busk of the Creeks, the ceremonials of religion everywhere. Baptism was at first always immersion. It was a bath meant to solemnize the reception of the child into the guild of mankind, drawn from the prior custom of ablution at any solemn occasion. In both the object is greater purity, bodily and spiritual. As certainly as there is a law of conscience, as certainly as our actions fall short of our volitions, so certainly is man painfully aware of various imperfections and shortcomings. What he feels he attributes to the infant. Avowedly to free themselves from this sense of guilt the Delawares used an emetic (Loskiel), the Cherokees a potion cooked up by an order of female warriors (Timberlake), the Takahlies of Washington Territory, the Aztecs, Mayas, and Peruvians, auricular confession. Formulize these feelings and we have the dogmas of “original sin,” and of “spiritual regeneration.” The order of baptism among the Aztecs commenced, “O child, receive the water of the Lord of the world, which is our life; it is to wash and to purify; may these drops remove the sin which was given to thee before the creation of the world, since all of us are under its power;” and concluded, “Now he liveth anew and is born anew, now is he purified and cleansed, now our mother the Water again bringeth him into the world.”[128-1]
A name was then assigned to the child, usually that of some ancestor, who it was supposed would thus be induced to exercise a kindly supervision over the little one’s future. In after life should the person desire admittance to a superior class of the population and had the wealth to purchase it—for here as in more enlightened lands nobility was a matter of money—he underwent a second baptism and received another name, but still ostensibly from the goddess of water.[128-2]
In Peru the child was immersed in the fluid, the priest exorcised the evil and bade it enter the water, which was then buried in the ground.[128-3] In either country sprinkling could take the place of immersion. The Cherokees believe that unless the rite is punctually performed when the child is three days old, it will inevitably die.[128-4]
As thus curative and preservative, it was imagined that there was water of which whoever should 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 Citatli and Atl, moon and water, are constantly confounded in Aztec theology. Their attributes were strikingly alike. They were both the mythical mothers of the race, and both protect women in child-birth, the babe in the cradle, the husbandman in the field, and the youth and maiden in their tender affections. As the transfer of legends was nearly always from the water to its lunar goddess, by bringing them in at this point their true meaning will not fail to be apparent.