"The religious beliefs of the lower races are in no small measure based on the evidence of visions and dreams, regarded as actual intercourse with spiritual being. From the earliest stages of culture we find religion in close alliance with ecstatic physical conditions. These are brought on by various means of interference with the healthy action of body and mind, and it is scarcely needful to remind the reader that, according to philosophic theories antecedent to those of modern medicine, such morbid disturbances are explained as symptoms of divine visitation, or at least of superhuman spirituality. Among the strongest means of disturbing the functions of the mind so as to produce ecstatic vision, is fasting, accompanied, as it usually is, with other privations, and with prolonged solitary contemplation in the desert or in the forest. Among the ordinary vicissitudes of savage life, the wild hunter has many a time to try involuntarily the effects of such a life for days together, and under these circumstances he soon comes to see and talk with phantoms which are to him invisible spirits. The secret of spiritual intercourse thus learnt, he has thence-forth but to reproduce the cause in order to renew the effects."[22] As a means, then, of strengthening and perpetuating a consciousness of intercourse with the spiritual world, we have to reckon with, not merely the accidental occurrence of abnormal nervous conditions, but with their deliberate cultivation. The practice is world-wide, and persists in some form or other in all ages. Thus we find the Australians and many tribes of North American Indians use tobacco for this purpose. In Western Siberia a species of fungi, the 'fly Agaric,' so called because it is often steeped and the solution used to destroy house flies, is used to produce religious ecstasy. Its action on the muscular system is stimulatory, and it greatly excites the nervous system.[23] An early Spanish observer says of the ancient Mexicans that they used a kind of mushroom, "which are eaten raw, and on account of being bitter, they drink after them, or eat with them a little honey of bees, and shortly after they see a thousand visions."[24] The mushroom was called the "bread of the gods." The Californian Indians give children tobacco, in order to receive instruction from the resulting visions. North American Indians held intoxication by tobacco to be supernatural ecstasy, and the dreams of men in this state to be inspired. The Darien Indians use the seeds of the Datura Sanguinea to induce visions. In Peru the priests prepared themselves for intercourse with the gods by partaking of a narcotic drink from the same plant. In Guiana the priest was prepared for his functions by fasting and flagellation, and was afterwards dosed with tobacco juice.[25] In India the Laws of Manu give explicit instructions as to the means of producing visions. Chief of these is the use of the 'Soma' drink. This is prepared from the flower of the lotus.