ial rather than spiritual joys, and where, according to the
earliest conceptions, the spirits of the departed carried on the same
pursuits, reaped and sowed and hunted, as they had done while in life.
Thus the old Accadian dwellers by the Euphrates pictured the sky as the
counterpart of their own fertile plains, and the sun as a ploughman
yoking his oxen to the glittering plough, with which he tilled the
heavenly pasture.[307] The same idea is exemplified in the names of the
zodiacal constellations, which are of extremely ancient origin, the sign
we still know as Taurus being called by the Accadians "the bull who
guides the year." So near was heaven that it was not impossible to climb
up to it, if you could but find the cosmic tree by which it was upheld.
The Khasias of India have a legend that the stars are men who have
climbed into heaven by a tree.[308] The Mbocobis of Paraguay still
believe that the souls of the dead go up "to the earth on high" by the
tree which joins us to heaven, and find an entrance by means of the
holes in the sky-roof through which the rain descends.[309] There is a
Chinese story of a king, who having heard of the glories of paradise,
set forth in search of it. After long wanderings he came to a mighty
column, which, he had been told, must be climbed in order to reach the
wished-for goal. But it was too slippery, and he was compelled to fall
back upon the alternative route, a steep and rugged mountain path. When
almost fainting with fatigue he was assisted by some friendly nymphs,
and at length arrived at a beautiful garden, with a wondrous tree in its
midst, and a fountain of immortality, from which four rivers, flowing to
the four corners of the earth, took their rise.[310]

The same notion of the similarity and propinquity of the heavenly field
is illustrated by the story of the Etruscan priest, who by his charms
brought down to earth a bit of heaven whereon to build his temple. The
Mahometans assert that the Caaba was lowered directly from the celestial
paradise exactly at the centr