Vegetation
VEGETATION. The world's mythology and folklore offer one example after another of sacred plants, both wild and cultivated, as well as stories about the divine origins of plants, their magic or medicinal properties, and heroic quests to obtain them. These stories reflect a dual tendency, shared by humanity's forebears in history and by its contemporaries in the so-called nonliterate societies: On the one hand there has been the tendency to "humanize" nature with sacred narratives whose purpose is to explain how the world and humankind came to be the way they are; on the other hand analogies have been consistently drawn from the physical world—in this case, plants or perhaps the tools and techniques for cultivating them—to express those things about human living that can never be fully expressed, especially the perennial anxieties, fervent hopes, and nostalgias that expose immediately the limits of one's situation in the world.
For example, the Warao Indians of the Orinoco Delta in South America have endowed basket making with a quite explicit religious meaning derived ultimately from their experience with a certain plant. Besides calabashes and makeshift containers put together by folding leaves or palm stipules, the Warao have only baskets for storage and carrying.
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