Turning to A.S. Murray’s Manual of Mythology, we read on page 173 that “the Gardens of the Hesperides with the golden apples were believed to exist in some island in the ocean . . . They were far-famed in antiquity; for it was there that springs of nectar flowed by the couch of Zeus, and there that the earth displayed the rarest blessings of the gods: it was another Eden.” The tree that produced the golden apples was entrusted to the care of the Hesperides, the daughters of Atlas. However, they could not resist the temptation to pluck and eat its fruit. So the serpent Ladon was placed to keep watch over it. And who held to this idea? The ancient Greeks.

Many of the natives of Papua in the Pacific believe in an invisible tree in and around which all those who have led good lives before they died live eternally, happy and free from care. Harold Bailey in his book The Lost Language of Symbolism reports what a visitor there observed about this belief. He noted that “it is not hard to understand that [the Papuan] still possesses dim memories of faiths learnt from lost peoples of higher development when the world was younger and perhaps nearer its Creator than it is to-day.”

Awake!  March 22, 1970 p. 19-20

Manual of Mythology

Shakespeare’s plays draw on an extraordinary wealth of secular experience. For example, he had a grasp of the law and made impressive use of legal language and precedents. In 1860, in Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare, Sir John Bucknill indicated that Shakespeare’s knowledge of medicine was deep. The same can be said of his comprehension of hunting, falconry, and other sports, as well as royal court etiquette. He was, says Shakespeare historian John Michell, “the writer who knew everything.”

Awake!  August 8, 1998 p. 22

Medical Knowledge of Shakespeare