4 JACKSON, The Aztec Moon-cult, 



was also associated with conception and birth by the 

 Mexicans. 



The offerings made to the chank of the fruits of the 

 earth ; the harvest rites accompanied by conch-shell 

 music ; and the use of shell-trumpets in Hindu temple 

 worship, have their counterparts in Mexican manuscripts 

 in the figure of the God of Flowers and Food Supplies 

 being carried in procession preceded by a priest blowing 

 a conch-shell trumpet, 3 and in references to the blowing 

 of conchs in the temples at midnight as a signal for the 

 priests to arise and mortify themselves, to sing, and then 

 to go in procession to the bath. 4 



In India both the ordinary and the rare and highly 

 prized sinistral forms of the chank are employed in 

 temple-worship, and it is not a little curious to find that 

 in the Mexican pictures both forms are also shown. It is 

 quite possible that here, as in India, the sinistral form 

 may have had a special significance. 



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 " Man in 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 



3 See Edward Seler, " Codex Vaticanus, No. 3,773," 1902, Fig. 363, 

 p. 162. The shell figured, by the way, is a reversed Cassis cornuta. 



* Ibid. 



