not been held sacred by some group of men. The Nagas and other tribes of
Northeast India regard all plants as sacred,[481] and every village has
its sacred tree. In Babylonia and Assyria, it is said, there were
hundreds of trees looked on as invested with more or less sanctity. The
oak was revered in some parts of Greece, and among the Romans and the
Celts. The cult of particular species, as the pipal (_Ficus religiosa_),
the vata or banyan (_Ficus Indica_), the karam and others, has been
greatly systematized in India.[482]

+270+. Vegetable spirits in some cases have developed into real gods. A
notable example of such growth is furnished by the history of the
intoxicating soma plant, which in the Rig-Veda is represented not only
as the inspiring drink of the gods but as itself a deity, doing things
that are elsewhere ascribed to Indra, Pushan, and other
well-established deities.[483] The spirit, coming to be regarded as an
anthropomorphic person, under peculiar circumstances assumes the
character of a god. A similar development appears in the Iranian haoma,
and the cultic identity of soma and haoma shows that the deification of
the plant took place in the early Aryan period.[484]

+271+. Another example has been supposed to be furnished by
corn-spirits. The importance of cereal crops for human life gave them a
prominent position in the cult of agricultural communities. The decay
and revival of the corn was an event of prime significance, and appears
to have been interpreted as the death and resurrection of the spirit
that was the life of the crop. Such is the idea in the modern popular
customs collected by Mannhardt and Frazer.[485] The similarity between
these ceremonies and those connected with the Phoenician Tammuz
(Adonis) and the Phrygian Attis makes it probable that the two are based
on the same ideas; that is, that Adonis and Attis (and so also Osiris
and Ishtar) were deities of vegetation. This, however, does not prove
that they were developed out of spirits of vegetation; they may have
been deities charged with the care of crops.[486] The Phoenician name
Adon is merely a title ('lord') that might be given to any god; he whom
the Greeks called Adonis was a Syrian local deity, identical in origin
with the Babylonian Tammuz, and associated in worship with Astarte, whom
the Greeks identified with their Aphrodite.

+272+. A sacred tree often stood by a shrine; that is, probably, the
shrine was put in the spot mad