"that which keeps off death," in the ninth chapter of the _Yaçna_ of the Zoroastrians. It is for this reason that, both with the Indians and the Iranians, the personification of the sacred plant and its juice, the god Soma, or Haoma, prototype of the Greek Dionysius, becomes a lunar divinity, inasmuch as he is the guardian of the ambrosia stored by the gods in the moon. And here we have another similarity forced upon us when we stand before Assyrian bas-reliefs, where the sacred plant is guarded by winged genii, having heads of eagles or peripterous vultures. These symbolic beings present, indeed, a singular analogy with the Garuda, or rather the Garsudas of Indian Aryans, genii, half men, half eagles. Now, in the Indian myths, more particularly in the beautiful story of the _Astika-parva_ of the Mahâbhârata, it is Garuda who reconquers the ambrosia _Amritam_--that is, the sacred juice of the Soma, used for libations, that had been stolen by demons, and who restores it to the celestial god, himself remaining its guardian. The part played by him and by the eagle-headed genii of Assyrian monuments, with regard to the tree of life, is consequently the same as that which we find in Genesis assigned to _Kerubin_, armed with flaming swords, who were placed by God at the gate of Eden, after the expulsion of the first human pair, to prevent the entrance into Paradise, and to guard its tree of life. In one part at least of Chaldea properly so called, to the south of Babylon, it appears as though it were no longer the type we have just been considering that was employed to represent the tree of life. It was the palm, the tree that furnished the majority of the inhabitants of the district with food, and with fruit from which they distilled a fermented and intoxicating liquor, a kind of wine; the tree to which they were wont to attribute in a popular song as many benefits as there are days in the year--this palm it was that was there considered the sacred, the paradisiacal tree. We have the proof of this in cylinders that show us the palm surmounted by the emblem of the Supreme God, and guarded by two eagle-headed genii. Moreover, the essential character of the tree of life lies in its fruits affording an intoxicating juice, the beverage of immortality; and accordingly the books of the Sabians or Mendaites associate it with the tree Setarvan, "the perfumed vine," Sam Gufro, above which hovers "the Supreme Life" in the same way as does the emblematic image of divinity in its highest and most abstract form above the plant of life in the monumental representations of Babylon and Assyria.