+281+. It appears to be the aloofness of trees that prevents their becoming gods; they are revered and worshiped, but without becoming personalities. Babylonian seal engravings and wall pictures often represent a tree before which men or higher beings stand in adoration; according to Maspero[511] there was actual worship of trees in Egypt, and similar cults are found among the wild tribes of India.[512] Adoration, however, does not necessarily imply a god; the Buddhist's worship under the bo-tree is not directed to any being; it is only the recognition of something that he thinks worthy of reverence.[513]
+282+. The cult of the corn-spirit is referred to above,[514] and doubt is there expressed as to whether such a spirit has grown into a true god. The question is confessedly a difficult one on account of the absence of full data for the period involved. The chief ground for the doubt as to the development in question lies in what we know of early gods. The term 'Adon,' as is remarked above, is the Phoenician title of the local deity. The origin of such deities is involved in the obscurity of the remote past, but they are, each in his community, universal powers; their functions embrace all that their communities desire, and they represent each the total life of a people. It is the general rule that any popular custom may be introduced into the cult of the local god; of such sort of procedure there are many examples. In the case under consideration the god may have become the hero of a ceremony with which he had originally nothing to do, as the Hebrews when they entered Canaan connected Canaanite festivals with their national god, Yahweh, and later a cult of the wilderness deity Azazel[515] was adopted and modified by the Yahwist leaders. Various cults attached themselves to the worship of Zeus, Apollo, Dionysos, and other Greek deities.[516]
+283+. A similar explanation may be given of the ceremonies of death and resurrection connected with Attis and Osiris. Of Attis we have only late accounts, and do not know his early history. Osiris is an old underground deity (later the judge of the Underworld), with functions that included more than the vivification of vegetation, and the absorption of the corn-spirit into his cult would be natural. The collocation of a male with a female deity, common to the three cults, may be merely the elaboration of the myth in accordance with human social usage (the dead deity is mourned by his consort).[517] The descent of Ishtar has been interpreted of the weakening of the sun's heat in winter; but as she is obviously a deity of fertility and, in her descent, disappears entirely from among men, while the sun does not disappear entirely, she rather, in this story, represents or is connected with the decay and rebirth of vegetation.