Juan Ponce de Leon never mentioned a magic fountain. His 1513 charter was about land, gold and power, so how did he become the poster child for the ultimate anti-aging quest? This episode traces the biography of an idea, beginning with the Epic of Gilgamesh and its plant of youth stolen by a snake, Herodotus and the violet-scented, zero-density waters of the long-lived Macrobians, and the Alexander Romance, where a cook washing a salted fish discovers the water of life and keeps it for himself.

We follow the myth as the Babylonian Talmud traces the water to the Garden of Eden, as Spanish explorers pasted it onto Arawak tales of a rich land called Bimini, and as Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo launched a 1535 smear campaign painting Ponce de Leon as a vain old man chasing a cure for impotence. Later writers like Fontaneda and Herrera cemented the lie. Then comes Diamond Lil, the Klondike physician Luella Day McConnell, who bought a St. Augustine park in 1904, bottled ordinary well water, faked a coquina cross and unknowingly preserved the site of the 1565 Menendez settlement and the first Christian mission in the United States, revealed by Smithsonian digs starting in 1934.

• Why Gilgamesh’s sleep test and the skin-shedding snake frame immortality as a divine status
• How the water of life shifted from a hidden plant to a mappable geographic destination
• The politics behind Oviedo’s fabricated story and why it replaced the real history
• How Flagler’s railroads primed wealthy tourists to believe in Florida as a place of restoration
• Modern skincare, supplements and biohacking as the latest iteration of a primal story