+273+. It is not impossible that totem posts may be connected with original totem trees or other sacred trees. A tree as totem would naturally be the object of some sort of cult, and when it took the form of a post or pole, would have totemic symbols carved on it. Oftener, probably, it was the sacred pole of a village (itself descended from a sacred tree) that would be adorned with totemic figures, as among the Indians of Northwestern America.[490] In all such cases there is a coalescence of totemism and tree worship. +274+. It was natural in early times, when most men lived in forests, which supplied all their needs, that trees should be looked on as intimately connected with human life. A tree might be regarded as in itself an independent personality, having, of course, a body and a soul, but not as dependent on an isolated spirit. A group of men might think itself descended from a tree--a conception that may have been widespread, though there is little direct evidence of its existence.[491] Indirect evidence of such a view is found in the custom of marrying girls to trees,[492] and in the belief in "trees of life," which are sometimes connected with individual men in such a way that when the tree or a part of it is destroyed the man dies, as in the case of Meleager whose life depended on the preservation of a piece of wood,[493] the representative, probably, of a tree, and the priest of Nemi whose life was bound up in the "golden bough"[494]; sometimes the tree has a magical power of conferring life on whoever eats of its fruit, as in the case of the tree of Eden.[495] +275+. These stories involve the conception of blood-kinship between man and tree. Closely related to the "tree of life" is the "tree of knowledge"--life is knowledge and knowledge is life. In the original form of the story in Genesis there was only one tree--the tree of the knowledge of good and evil[496]--whose fruit, if eaten, made one the equal of the gods;[497] that is, the tree (in the original form of the conception, in remote times) was allied in nature (that is, in blood) to gods and to men, so that whoever partook of its substance shared its attribute of knowledge in sharing its life, and the command not to eat of it was due apparently to Yahweh's unwillingness that man should equal the gods in knowledge. The serpent-god, who belongs to the inner divine circle, but for some unexplained reason is hostile to the god of the garden,[498] reveals the secret.