Shell-Trumpets and their Distribution. 55 
It is altogether inconceivable that people so far apart 
as India and Mexico could have independently associated 
the conch-shell with the moon and adopted it as the 
symbol of their Moon God, in addition to using it as a 
trumpet, and one may justly conclude that we have here 
definite proof of the transmission of an element of culture 
from the Old to the New World. 
If any further evidence is needed regarding the simi- 
larity in the moon-cult of these two people, it is provided 
by the fact that the ancient Mexicans, like the Hindus, 
regarded what we call the “ Manin the Moon” as a rabbit, 
and explained the present fainter brightness of the moon 
by the myth that the gods flung a rabbit in the face of 
the moon, which originally shone as brilliantly as the sun. 
Strangely enough Dr. Seler points out this fact in his 
description of the Codex Vaticanus, but makes no further 
comment. 
In Aztec picture-writings the moon is figured—usually 
as a nasal crescent of bone with a rabbit seated in a watery 
field—beside the so-called “Goddess of Filth’”—the old 
Huaxtec Earth Goddess. 
The “God in the Shell” idea, z.e., the curious belief in the 
presence of gods, spirits, or human beings, indwelling in 
shells is remarkable for its wide-spread occurrence. Forste- 
mann, in his discussion of the ‘Tortoise and Snail in 
95 
Maya Literature” ” ventures to connect the snail with the 
winter solstice ; the tortoise with the summer solstice. In 
the Dresden Maya manuscript, he informs us “the sea 
snail appears very curiously in page 370. Here it lies in 
the water and appears to be in the act of giving birth to a 
tiny person (female ?).” This seems to bear some relation 
to the ancient myth that Venus was born of the froth of 
the sea, within a shell, which transported her to Cyprus. 
25 Bureau of American Ethnology, Bull. 28, 1904, pp. 423-430. 
