perhuman companionship could find
satisfaction.[469] It has disappeared when it has been no longer needed.

PLANTS

+262+. The cult of plants has been as widespread as that of animals,
and, if its role in the history of religion has been less important than
that of the latter, this is because plants show less definite signs of
life than animals and enter less intimately than they into the social
interests of man. But, like all other things, they are regarded by
early man as living, as possessing a nature similar to that of man, and
as having power to work good or ill. Trees are represented as thinking,
speaking, entering into marriage relations, and in general doing
whatever intelligent beings can do. Through thousands of years in the
period before the dawn of written history man was brought into constant
contact with the vegetable world, and learned by experience to
distinguish between plants that were beneficial and those that were
harmful. His observation created an embryonic science of medicine, and
his imagination an embryonic religious cult.

+263+. The value of certain vegetable products (fruits, nuts, wild
plants) as food must have become known at a very early time, and these
would naturally be offered to the extrahuman Powers. At a later time,
when cereals were cultivated, they formed an important part of
sacrificial offerings, and were held--as, for example, among the Greeks
and the Hebrews--to have piacular efficacy.

+264+. Among the discoveries of the early period was that of the
intoxicating quality of certain plants--a quality that came to play a
prominent role in religious life. Valued at first, probably, for the
agreeable sensations they produced, such plants were later supposed to
possess magical power, to exert a mysterious influence on the mind, and
to be the source or medium of superhuman communications. Thus employed
by magicians they were connected with the beginnings of religious
ecstasy and prophecy. Their magical power belongs to them primarily as
living things, but came to be attributed to extrahuman beings.

+265+. Plants as living things were supposed to possess souls.[470]
Probably the soul was conceived of at first as simply the vital
principle, and the power of the plant was thought of as similar to the
power of an animal or any other living thing. In the course of time this
soul, the active principle, was distinguished from the vital principle,
was isolated and regarded as an inde