Note 26 — Chapter XI · Tree-, Herb-, and Stone-lore

In Ancient Egypt it was believed that the creative or fertilizing tears of the beneficent deities, like those of Osiris and Isis, caused good shrubs to spring up, and that the tears of a deity like Set, who became the personification of evil, produced poisonous plants. The weeping Prajapati of the Aryo-Indians resembles the weeping sun-god Ra of Egypt. At the beginning, Prajapati’s tears fell into the water and “became the air”, and the tears he “wiped away, upwards, became the sky”.26