ate sword.]

[389: See Gauthier, _op. cit._, pp. 2 and 3.]

[390: Compare the dog-incident in the mandrake story.]

[391: Bostock and Riley add the comment that "the peony has no medicinal
virtues whatever".]

[392: _Proceedings of the British Academy_, Vol. VIII, 1917, p. 16 (in
the reprint).]

[393: I am indebted to Dr. Alphonse Mingana for this information. But
the philological question is discussed in a learned memoir by the late
Professor P. J. Veth, "De Leer der Signatuur," _Internationales Archiv
fuer Ethnographie_, Leiden, Bd. VII, 1894, pp. 75 and 105, and especially
the appendix, p. 199 _et seq._, "De Mandragora, Naschrift op het tweede
Hoofdstuk der Verhandeling over de Leer der Signatuur".]

[394: Like the _Purpura_ and the _Pterocera_, the bryony and other
shells and plants.]

[395: Larousse, Article "Mandragore".]

[396: I have already referred to another version of the churning of the
ocean in which Mount Meru was used as a churn-stick and identified with
the Great Mother, of whom the _mandara_ was also an avatar.]

[397: Which I shall discuss in my forthcoming book on "The Story of the
Flood".]

[398: The phallic interpretation is certainly a secondary
rationalization of an incident which had no such implication
originally.]

[399: The "tree of the knowledge of good and evil" (Genesis ii. 17)
produced fruit the eating of which opened the eyes of Adam and Eve, so
that they realized their nakedness: they became conscious of sex and
made girdles of fig-leaves (_vide supra_, p. 155). In other words, the
tree of life had the power of love-provoking like the mandrake. In
Henderson's "Celtic Dragon Myth" (p. xl) we read: "The berries for which
she [Medb] craved were from the Tree of Life, the food of the gods, the
eating of which by mortals brings death," and further: "The berries of
the rowan tree are the berries of the gods" (p. xliii). I have already
suggested the homology between these red berries, the mandrake, and the
red ochre of Hathor's elixir. Thus we have another suggestion of the
identity of the tree of paradise and the mandrake.]

The Measurement of Time.

It was the similarity of the periodic phases of the moon and of
womankind that originally suggested the identification of the Great
Mother with the moon, and originated the belief that the moon was the
regulator of human beings.[400] This was the starting-point of the
system of astrology and the belief in Fates. The goddess of