Fountain of Youth

The Fountain of Youth , or fountain of life , or fountain of immortality is a Symbole of Immortalité or perpetual renovation.

This mythical fountain seems to derive from the biblical Mythologie and traditional and evokes the concepts of Purification and Régénération.

History of the myth and myths close

This legend has probably old origins dependant on the fascination of the man for water and to its importance for its survival. One of its known origins would be the Biblical story of the garden of Eden, this fountain being able to be the source of water emerging with the feet of the Arbre of knowledge, in the center of the Paradis, considered to feed the four rivers of the paradise running towards the cardinal points.

This legend evokes other myths related to liquids considered as sources of immortality at certain times (Ambroisie, Soma, Hydromel crowned or sacrificial), wants that whoever drinks of its water or bathes there is cured of its diseases, renovates or does not age any more.

At the old German ones, leau of the knowledge , knowledge and Prophétie ran in the Fontaine of Mimir. To be able to drink some, God Odin agree to lose an eye. ()

In the Irish Celtic Mythology, the Cath Maighe Tuireadh (account of the Battle of Mag Tured) evokes a fountain where the Tuatha Dé Danann (people of the goddess Dana, they are the gods of the Celtes of Ireland) pouvaientt to soak the casualties. They cured thanks to a seedling of each one of many the medicinal plants pushing in Ireland, placed there by the God-doctor Diancecht . The casualties - known as the myth - could thus as of the following day again fight.

The Eastern tradition evokes also a “fountain of life” , which would have been found in the polar regions (hyperborean; one of the sites supposed of the paradise at certain times). Alexandre the large one would have sought it, without being able to find it, for lack of patience. He would have died about it in 33 years.

Later, it is the alchemical Élixir of long life which will be supposed to confer immortality (symbolically or really according to interpretations that one made some.

The Spanish explorer Juan Ponce of León, which made the voyage towards the New World with Christophe Colomb, sought it in America, in the north of Cuba. He discovered the Florida thus.

In art and the literature

The Fountain of Youth was often evoked.

It for example is represented in the Jardin of the delights of the famous triptych of Jerome Bosch.

Various novels or films allot to the contents Saint graal (blood of Christ collected by Joseph d' Arimathie) of the virtues which evoke that of the fountain of life, the conquests of Alexandre being connected then with a search of the graal.

Persistence of the myth?

Roman, Arab constructions and araboandalouses made in square around a fountain or of a basin could point out the legend or the fountain of the lost paradise.
On allotted miraculous, profane and religious virtues, with many sources, of which that of Doors, but without relationship with physical immortality.

Nowadays, some see in the unrestrained research of the Jeunisme, and in part of the medical research which seeks to reverse the process of ageing an echo of the myth of the Fountain of Youth.

See too

fountain
Youth
Ageing
List of legendary objects

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