The ceremonial use of water followed the Mexican through all his life; though for the present we shall only notice one more custom connected with it, the last of all. When a body was buried, a vase of clean, sweet water was let down into the tomb; bright, clear, life-giving and preserving water--hope and love, dumb and inarticulate, stretching vague hand toward a resurrection.
The Mexican rain and water god was Tlaloc, sender of thunder and lightning, lord of the earthly paradise, and fertilizer of earth; his wife was the Chalchiuhtlicue, already mentioned.[III-28] Like Tlaloc was Quiateot, the Nicaraguan rain-god, master of thunderbolts and general director of meteorological phenomena.[III-29]
The Navajos puffed tobacco smoke straight up toward heaven to bring rain, and those of them that carried a corpse to burial were unclean till washed in water.[III-30] In a deep and lonely cañon near Fort Defiance there is a spring that this tribe hold sacred, approaching it only with much reverence and the performance of certain mystic ceremonies. They say it was once a boiling spring, and that even yet if approached heedlessly or by a bad Indian, its waters will seethe up and leap forth to overwhelm the intruder.[III-31]
The Zuñis had also a sacred spring; sacred to the rain-god, who, as we see by implication, is Montezuma the great Pueblo deity himself. No animal might taste of its sacred waters, and it was cleansed annually with vessels also sacred--most ancient vases that had been transmitted from generation to generation since times to which even tradition went not back. These vessels were kept ranged on the wall of the well. The frog, the rattlesnake, and the tortoise were depicted upon them, and were sacred to the great patron of the place, whose terrible lightning should consume the sacrilegious hand that touched these hallowed relics.[III-32]
We have seen how the Californian tribes believe themselves descended from the very earth, how the bodiless ancestor of the Tezcucans came up from the soil, how the Guatemaltecs, Papagos, and Pimas were molded from the clay they tread, and how the Navajos came to light from the bowels of a great mountain near the river San Juan. It seems long ago and often to have come into men's mind that the over-arching heaven or something there and the all-producing earth are, as it were, a father and mother to all living creatures. The Comanches call on the earth as their mother, and on the Great Spirit as their father. The Mexicans used to pray: Be pleased, O our Lord, that the nobles who may die in the war be peacefully and pleasingly received by the sun and the earth, who are the father and mother of all.[III-33] It was probably, again, with some reference to the motherly function of the earth that the same people, when an earthquake came, took their children by the head or hand, and lifted them up saying: The earthquake will make them grow.[III-34] Sometimes they specified a particular part of the earth as closer to them in this relation than other parts. It is said that on the tenth day of the month Quecholli, the citizens of Mexico and those of Tlatelolco were wont to visit a hill called Cacatepec, for they said it was their mother.[III-35]