search.

A concise summary of the Grail literature will be found in Jessie L.
Weston's "The Quest of the Holy Grail" (1913). Her theory will be found,
after some slight modifications, to fall into line with the general
argument of this book.

Mr. F. Ll. Griffith tells me that the Egyptian hieroglyphic for the verb
"coire cum" gives frank expression to the real meaning of the symbolism
of the pot as the matrix which receives the seed. The same idea provides
the material for the incident of the birth of Drona (the pot-born) in
the Adi Parva (Sections CXXXI, CXXXIX, and CLXVIII, in Roy's
translation) of the Mahabharata, to which Mr. Donald A. Mackenzie has
kindly called my attention. Drona was conceived in a pot from the seed
of a Rishi. A widespread variant of the same story is the conception of
a child from a drop of blood in a pot (see, for example, Hartland,
"Legend of Perseus," Vol. I, pp. 98 and 144). If the pot can thus create
a human being, it is easy to understand how it acquired its reputation
of being also able to multiply food and provide an inexhaustible supply.
Similarly, all substances, such as barley, rice, gold, pearls, and jade,
to which the possession of a special vital essence or "soul substance"
was attributed, were believed to be able to reproduce themselves and so
increase in quantity of their own activities. As "givers of life" they
were also able to add to their own life-substance, in other words to
grow like any other living being.]

[338: "An American Dragon," _Man_, November, 1918.]

Artemis and the Guardian of the Portal.

Sir Gardner Wilkinson states (see text-figure, p. 179, _b_) that "a
basket of sycamore figs" was originally the hieroglyphic sign for a
woman, a goddess, or a mother. Later on (p. 199) I shall refer to the
possible bearing of this Egyptian idea upon the origin of the Hebrew
word for mandrakes and the allusion to "a basket of figs" in the Book
of Jeremiah.

The life-giving powers attributed to "love-apples" and the association
of these ideas with the fig-tree may have facilitated the transference
of these attributes of "apples" to those actually growing upon a tree.

We know that Aphrodite was intimately associated, not only with
"love-apples," but also with real apples. The sun-god Apollo's connexion
with the apple-tree, which Dr. Rendel Harris, with great daring, wants
to convert into an identity of name, was probably only one of the
results of that long series of