a bed of
lettuce. In memorial of this supposed fact, on the first day of the
celebration, when funeral rites were performed, lettuces were carried in
the procession, _newly planted_ in shells of earth. Hence the lettuce
became the sacred plant of the Adonia, or Adonisian Mysteries.

The lotus was the sacred plant of the Brahminical rites of India, and was
considered as the symbol of their elemental trinity,--earth, water, and
air,--because, as an aquatic plant, it derived its nutriment from all of
these elements combined, its roots being planted in the earth, its stem
rising through the water, and its leaves exposed to the air.[192] The
Egyptians, who borrowed a large portion of their religious rites from the
East, adopted the lotus, which was also indigenous to their country, as a
mystical plant, and made it the symbol of their initiation, or the birth
into celestial light. Hence, as Champollion observes, they often on their
monuments represented the god Phre, or the sun, as borne within the
expanded calyx of the lotus. The lotus bears a flower similar to that of
the poppy, while its large, tongue-shaped leaves float upon the surface of
the water. As the Egyptians had remarked that the plant expands when the
sun rises, and closes when it sets, they adopted it as a symbol of the
sun; and as that luminary was the principal object of the popular worship,
the lotus became in all their sacred rites a consecrated and mystical
plant.

The Egyptians also selected the _erica_[193] or heath, as a sacred plant.
The origin of the consecration of this plant presents us with a singular
coincidence, that will be peculiarly interesting to the masonic student.
We are informed that there was a legend in the mysteries of Osiris, which
related, that Isis, when in search of the body of her murdered husband,
discovered it interred at the brow of a hill, near which an erica, or
heath plant, grew; and hence, after the recovery of the body and the
resurrection of the god, when she established the mysteries to
commemorate her loss and her recovery, she adopted the erica, as a sacred
plant,[194] in memory of its having pointed out the spot where the
_mangled remains_ of Osiris were concealed.[195]

The _mistletoe_ was the sacred plant of Druidism. Its consecrated
character was derived from a legend of the Scandinavian mythology, and
which is thus related in the Edda, or sacred books. The god Balder, the
son of Odin, having dreamed that he was