+270+. Vegetable spirits in some cases have developed into real gods. A notable example of such growth is furnished by the history of the intoxicating soma plant, which in the Rig-Veda is represented not only as the inspiring drink of the gods but as itself a deity, doing things that are elsewhere ascribed to Indra, Pushan, and other well-established deities.[483] The spirit, coming to be regarded as an anthropomorphic person, under peculiar circumstances assumes the character of a god. A similar development appears in the Iranian haoma, and the cultic identity of soma and haoma shows that the deification of the plant took place in the early Aryan period.[484] +271+. Another example has been supposed to be furnished by corn-spirits. The importance of cereal crops for human life gave them a prominent position in the cult of agricultural communities. The decay and revival of the corn was an event of prime significance, and appears to have been interpreted as the death and resurrection of the spirit that was the life of the crop. Such is the idea in the modern popular customs collected by Mannhardt and Frazer.[485] The similarity between these ceremonies and those connected with the Phoenician Tammuz (Adonis) and the Phrygian Attis makes it probable that the two are based on the same ideas; that is, that Adonis and Attis (and so also Osiris and Ishtar) were deities of vegetation. This, however, does not prove that they were developed out of spirits of vegetation; they may have been deities charged with the care of crops.[486] The Phoenician name Adon is merely a title ('lord') that might be given to any god; he whom the Greeks called Adonis was a Syrian local deity, identical in origin with the Babylonian Tammuz, and associated in worship with Astarte, whom the Greeks identified with their Aphrodite. +272+. A sacred tree often stood by a shrine; that is, probably, the shrine was put in the spot made sacred by a tree, and a ritual connection between the two was thus established. Later, when a shrine for any reason (in consequence of a theophany, for example) was built where there was no tree, its place was supplied by a wooden post, which inherited the cultic value of a sacred tree. In the Canaanite cult, which was adopted by the Hebrews, the sacred post (called "ashera") stood by the side of every shrine, and was denounced by the prophets as an accompaniment of foreign (that is, non-Yahwistic) worship.[487] The transition from tree to post is illustrated, perhaps, by the conventionalized form of trees frequent on Babylonian seal cylinders.[488] How far the sacred post was an object of worship by the people we have no means of knowing; but by the more intelligent, doubtless, it came to be regarded simply as a symbol, a sign of the presence of a deity, and was, in so far, in the same category with images.[489]