The letter created a furor. On September 27, 1177, the pontiff Alexander III addressed a papal response to Prester John and sent his physician into the unknown to deliver it. Dr. Philip was never heard from again. King John II dispatched men fluent in Oriental languages through Abyssinia and Egypt to find the Magnificence. Vasco da Gama set out carrying letters of introduction addressed to Prester John. In an attempt to establish contact, Bartolomeu Dias ended up discovering the Cape of Good Hope. A big reason the Fifth Crusade flopped is that Cardinal Pelagius and other field marshals gambled that Prester John or one of his descendants would bail them out.
Even Marco Polo was convinced of his existence. The Travels, undertaken more than a century after the letter made its rounds, described the regions conquered by Prester John and told of his descendants still reigning in Tartary, somewhere between Siberia and Manchuria. While visiting the court of Kublai Khan, Polo learned of battles ostensibly waged between Prester John and Genghis Khan (Kublai’s grandfather). But the Venetian explorer never actually saw Prester John’s wonders. Awed by the sight of Kublai hunting game with a pet leopard, he was less into fact-checking than relaxing in Xanadu, its golden palace overlooking grounds dripping with opulent fountains.
Another thirteenth-century visitor to the Mongols, however, cast doubt on Prester John’s veracity. William of Rubruck suggested that the whole yarn may have been spun by Nestorians, a sect of Christians exiled from Europe since the Council of Ephesus in 431 CE. Condemned as heretics for purportedly believing that Jesus Christ was actually two men—one fully human and the other fully divine1—the Nestorians spread their teachings outside the Roman Empire, throughout the Middle East, into India, China, and Mongolia. Rubruck’s encounter with them in the Far East left him convinced the Nestorians had fabricated Prester John and the fountain of youth: “For this is the way of the Nestorians who come from these parts: out of nothing they will make a great story.”
* * *
My letter to David Copperfield didn’t mention Prester John’s letter. Instead, it recapped the conversation Martha and I had had about knowledge and belief, emphasizing her point about the limitations of science. I described a journey that would explore the fountain’s symbolic value, and the nature of belief itself. “Stories, now more than ever, grant access to deeper truths, as Mr. Copperfield has shown us time and time again,” I wrote, suitably sycophantically. To tell the story of the master’s Caribbean discovery, I proposed spending a few days on Musha Cay with him. He could teach me about the fountain, and I would document what it meant to him. The story of its discovery was begging to be told. “If possible,” I added, “I would like to speak with some of the biologists and geologists investigating the islands’ waters.”
* * *
While trying to understand the links between Prester John’s fountain of youth and the waters of eternal youth alluded to in the Qu’ran, I read about the origins of Islamic mysticism in an ancient text called Drops from the Fount of Life. I also perused the writings of Farīd al-Dīn Attar, an esteemed Sufi poet, chemist, and perfumer. “If you can drown in a drop of water,” Attar wrote, about our inability to understand certain things, “how will you go from the depths of the sea to the heavenly heights? This is not a simple perfume.”
Attar’s most famous work, The Conference of the Birds, tells of a mysterious prophet called Al-Khidr. “When you enter into the way of understanding, Khidr will bring you the water of life,” he wrote. Sufis consider Al-Khidr, also known as the Green Man, to be an immortal being. He drank from the fountain of youth five thousand years ago, and he still walks on earth. He’s the teacher of all prophets and messengers through the centuries. He has the power of multiplicity: he may appear in different shape, with a different face, in many different places at the same time.
In hagiography, Al-Khidr, the Hidden Guide, is deemed the patron saint of the Sufis. An emissary from the unknown, he appears, transmits a divine message, and then vanishes from cognition. Those praying fervently without receiving any outward response might encounter Khidr in dreams. He emerges from a thick tangle of foliage and explains that one’s longing is the reply from God.
When he alights upon barren lands, they turn verdant, hence his moniker: the Green Man. He is a kind of spiritual fertilizer. “He is at once the guardian and genius of vegetation and of the Water of Life,” explains the Indologist Ananda Coomaraswamy. Khidr moves with greenness, bringing rain and growth to arid regions. In Carl Jung’s essay “Concerning Rebirth,” he considers Khidr emblematic of the individuation process’s goal of psychic transformation and self-realization.
In the Qur’an, a Khidr figure teaches Moses difficult lessons. But Khidr is best known from mythology as the old man who accompanies Alexander the Great into the Land of Darkness in search of the Water of Life. Khidr drinks from the spring, but Alexander doesn’t. Instead, the king learns that no matter how insatiable his ambitions may be, he is destined to die. “You will find satisfaction only through the earth, when it covers you,” Khidr tells him.
Nizami’s Iskandar N ma decodes this story as being an allegory about grace. Alexander has misinterpreted the meaning of the fountain, thinking it is an actual thing when it is but a symbol. Its metaphorical waters arrive unsought, bringing with them a sense of rebirth and renewal. It’s what Father Gervais called the life force.
In the Sufic system, there’s a name for grace: baraka. It is a blessedness that descends, deservedly or not. It arrives from on high, a something given, a messenger of sympathies. Lent only for uncertain moments, it’s not perpetually available, yet it is imperishable. It is an example of what Sufis call tajalli, a manifestation or “shining through” of the sacred into this dimension. It is an infusion that whips through our world, uniting the divine and the profane. And within each of us, distinct from the self, is a symbolic splash of bubbling water that connects to its source through the medium of baraka, dispensed by Khidr.
Grace, like the fountain of youth, is what scholars call a mythical signifier, something immaterial and full of meaning whose form can be envisioned as a way of approaching the even more meaningful Truth it refers to. Stories show this rather than telling it. In The Conference of the Birds, the parrot, dressed in his brilliant coat of green feathers, speaks of himself as a Khidr among birds. But even he cannot get to the fountainhead. “I should like to go to the source of this water,” admits the parrot, “but the spring of Khidr is enough for me.” Perhaps acknowledging grace when it alights in our lives is also enough.
As Father Gervais hinted at, the water of life spoken about in the New Testament, and alluded to on Auntie Tiny’s funeral invitation, is itself a metaphor for grace, something vague yet tangible: “Whoever drinks of the water that I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”
* * *
Alongside being a prophet in Islam, Khidr has been linked to the Green Knight of Arthurian literature, to the Wandering Jew in medieval lore, and to dragon-slaying Saint George. He is also venerated in Hinduism, where he is known as Khizr, or Jind Pir, the Living Saint. Khizr’s main shrine is located on the Indus River, and he has long been the divinity of the Bengal boatmen. Some worshippers consider him an incarnation of the river, a protean water-god who assumes human form, among other guises. Leaving his watery abode, he can also appear as a ball of colored light, mist, a presentiment, leaves shimmering on branches. For Hindus, as for Muslims, Khizr’s role is to lead seekers deeper, to demonstrate the Marvelous to those of little faith, to thrust upon the needy silken bolts of grace. He initiates solitaries. He brings a new mode of knowing. He embodies the flowing reality of something metaphysical. He is the waves.
Beyond Khizr and the Indus waterway, several other South Asian rivers have Hindu deities attached to them, as well as various apotropaic attributes. The sacred Ganges plays a part in helping release souls from the cycles of rebirth, and the nearby Yamuna River can even, it is th
ought, exempt some believers from the necessity of dying. In Brahmanic tradition, the semilegendary Sarasvati River2 is the site of a particular fountain, called saisava, or the Place of Youth, which restores bathers to whatever age they desire.
Perhaps the earliest example of a fountain of youth in history, the saisava’s origins predate the historical record. Sacred waters figure in the earliest Vedic hymns, and Brahamanic tales about the Place of Youth were already in circulation twenty-nine hundred years ago. Scholars who’ve traced the fleeing fountain back through time agree that the written Place of Youth stories were certainly preceded by an oral tradition in India.3 Even the word fountain seems to come from there: its winding etymology seeps from a delta of possibilities, but one of its primeval tributaries is indisputably dhanvati, the Sanskrit word for “flow.” If that weren’t complicated enough, bathing in the saisava’s flow merely has a rejuvenating effect; living forever requires drinking another beverage, called soma, celebrated in the Rigveda circa 1500 BCE.4
These are, of course, mythologies. If we believe in them and practice their attendant rites, they accrue meaning. Hindu scholars have a name for such stories: terum. These are “stories about something that could not or should not be true.” All immortality stories fit into this category. We know that we have to die; terum tell us that there may be ways to get around the inevitable. “When what happens in the myth is not physically possible in this world,” writes the Indologist Wendy Doniger, it alleviates our fear of the unknown. “It enlarges our sense of what might be possible. Only a story can do this.”
* * *
History, too, is always a kind of story. In the history of Western history, miraculous Eastern waters have been there from the start. Herodotus, in the first ever book of occidental history, told of his journey to the distant orient, where he found a violet-scented spring that kept those who bathed in it alive to an average of 120 years.
In the fourth century BCE, another Greek historian, Ctesias of Cnidus, wrote Indica, a compendium about the wonders of India. A physician for the Persian court, Ctesias claimed to have reliable information on India, even though he’d never been there. He distinguished between his own meticulous, honest reporting and that of his predecessor Herodotus, whom he characterized as a peddler of deceptions. Indica states that the average Indian lived to be 120. A longer life, he said, was somewhere between 130 and 150, with the really elderly making it to 200.
Ctesias’s writing overflows with miraculous fluids. His India had rivers of honey, lakes covered in cooking oil, and a stream whose water, when drawn off, fermented into wine. Another fountain’s water curdled into an aquatic cheese that could be used as a truth serum; one wonders what would’ve happened if Ctesias’s successor Theopompus had consumed it and was then interrogated about his fabulations concerning Meropis, a land he claimed lay beyond India. It was crisscrossed by two rivers, he wrote: one of pain, which made you die in anguish and misery; the other of pleasure, which killed you in ecstasy. People entering its waters would forget everything and grow younger and younger until they became a baby and were then “quite used up.” Then they’d die.
In a linguistic coincidence that suggests a familiarity with ancient Indian texts, Ctesias mentioned a river that could cure leprosy, called the Hyparchus, which meant “bearing all good things.” India’s Sarasvati River, mythical site of the fountain of youth, was said to “provide all good things.” In Vedic lore, it, too, could cure leprosy and other ailments.
Living alongside the banks of this Hyparchus, continued Ctesias, was a race of men with dog’s heads who spoke in barks. There were also pygmy shepherds who tended miniature flocks, people with ears dangling down to their feet that they used as blankets, and griffins that lived for a thousand years. Past them, in the very north, dwelt an ageless people called Hyperboreans (hyper means “beyond,” boreas “the north wind”).
These foreigners captured the early Western imagination. Hesiod, Homer, and other poets seemed to understand that such places weren’t actually real. As Pindar wrote, “neither by ship nor on foot would you find / the marvelous road to the assembly of the Hyperboreans.” But others considered them a genuine people. Greek ethnographers disputed the precise whereabouts of a mythic continent called Uttara Kuru (“beyond the north”) whose sap-drinking populace lived for ten thousand and ten hundred years. The Puranas said they existed and they didn’t exist. Euhemeros wrote of a healing spring called “the water of the sun.” It was located near India, on an island where gods like Zeus, Hermes, and Apollo had at one point lived as actual human beings. From him comes the term euhemerism, which means interpreting myths as accounts of historical persons and events.
History started out messy, and as time went on and more historians joined the fray, the line between the factual and the mythical got increasingly blurred.
Once Alexander the Great actually made it to India in 326 BC, that land’s wonders ought to have been relegated to the Sci-Fi/Fantasy shelves. Instead, stories about the waters of immortality became even more widespread. The king of Macedonia traveled with chroniclers ostensibly charged with documenting his advances. Their accounts of India were as outlandish as ever. “All those who wrote about Alexander preferred the marvelous to the true,” admonished Strabo, centuries later.
Alexander’s official historian, Callisthenes, claimed that the sea prostrated itself before them, allowing safe passage. That book, like every other contemporaneous text, is now lost. What did survive, however, is a fictional and fantastical historical narrative known as The Alexander Romance.
In the oldest extant versions of the Romance (the earliest of which appears to date from the third century CE), Alexander’s foray into India doesn’t have anything to do with the Waters of Life. As of the fifth or sixth century CE, recensions of the tale depict Alexander searching for the fountain of youth in the Land of Darkness beyond the northern limits of the world (with Khidr as his guide). These stories weren’t yet known in Europe, and they are what inspired Prester John’s letter. It’s not quite clear how the fountain trope entered the picture. From the start, however, The Alexander Romance does explore the theme of immortality in India.5
At one point in the original story, Alexander bumps into some Indian Brahmans. “Ask me for whatever you like,” he tells the cave-dwelling gymnosophists.
“Give us immortality, that we might not die,” they respond.
Alexander explains that he cannot grant them eternal life, as he himself is merely mortal. Shortly thereafter, he encounters a god named Serapis who informs him that his name will live on forever. This “dying and yet not dying” is the only immortality available to him. Alexander, wanting some here-and-now answers, demands to know when he’ll actually pass on. The oracle refuses to indulge him, explaining that it’s better not to know: “to be ignorant of it brings the secret forgetfulness of not remembering that one is ever going to die.”
* * *
In Europe, The Alexander Romance became one of the most popular stories from the tenth century until the fourteenth century (only the Gospels were translated more times). Its success spawned countless fairy tales employing the Indian motif of rejuvenating waters. Variations on the fons juventutis appeared in numerous pre-Renaissance fables, from Swan Knight to Le Bestiaire of Philippe de Thaun. It ended up in the land of Cockaigne as well as The Arabian Nights. Ballads about people throwing themselves into magic springs and coming out transformed were on heavy rotation for traveling minstrels.
Just as heads of state did when confronted with Prester John’s letter, many people continued confusing a divine Hindu construct with literal reality. Others stepped in to exploit that credulity. The story of the fountain of youth—always a story about belief—became a story about our willingness to be deceived, and of the lengths some go to deceive others.
In the fourteenth century, Sir John Mandeville published his Voiage and Travails, a travelogue in which he claimed to have actually drunk from the fountain of youth on the Malabar c
oast of India. A smirksome jester in pointy shoes, Mandeville was thoroughly unreliable, claiming, for example, that cotton came from tiny sheep that grew on the end of plants and that watering diamonds makes them grow bigger. His Welle of Youthe smelled like every spice imaginable, and its taste changed every hour. “Whoso drynkethe three tymes fasting of that Watre of that Welle, he is hool of alle maner sykenesse, that he hathe. And thei that duellen there and drynken often of that Welle, thei never han sykenesse, and thei semen alle weys yong.”
Fountain-mania mounted when the Americas were discovered by Europeans looking for a shortcut to India. If we can discover a new world, the thinking went, why, surely we can find the fountain of youth as well? Conquistadors were instructed to keep their eyes peeled for any “sprynge of runnynge water [that] maketh owld men younge ageyne.” Medieval cartographers inscribed the words Here nobody dies next to Insula Jovis, the Island of the Young, located somewhere in the Atlantic. Christopher Columbus thought he’d found the site of paradise when he spotted the Orinoco delta in Venezuela. “I believe that this water may originate from there [Eden],” he wrote. “I believe and I still believe what so many saints and holy theologians believed and still believe: that there in that region is the Terrestrial Paradise.”
In the Age of Exploration, the West Indies were considered part of South Asia, which intensified the hope of stumbling upon paradise. Most Europeans were convinced the fountain was somewhere in the Bahamas. “And here I must make protestation to your Holiness not to think this to be said lightly, or rashly,” Peter Martyr d’Anghiera wrote to Pope Leo X, “for they have so spread this rumor for a truth throughout all the court, that not only all the people, but also many of them whom wisdom or fortune hath divided from the common sort think it to be true.” D’Anghiera, who coined the term the New World, said people thought the fountain was somewhere on the island of Boynca—not far from David Copperfield’s place.
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