In pharaonic times, religion, magic and medicine had little distinction between each other due to the commonly held belief that all parts of life were influenced and even controlled by divinity and the supernatural. To navigate life easier, and in true Egyptian fashion, a large corpus of text was composed of magic, medicine and religion. The latter includes the arguably most well-known work, the Egyptian Book of the dead, the religious scripture that would help the deceased navigate the netherworld in the hopes for eternal life. The papyri depict numerous plants and remedies as well as spell and healing methods accompanied by magical incorporation such as incantation or invocation of a god or goddess. These can be considered a basis for the fundamental ideas of religion and daily life of ancient Egypt, always consisting of divine involvement. This essay will deal with a symbol that the ancient Egyptians saw as synonymous with life, and immortality: The narcotic blue water lily, Nymphaea Caerulea. The study will be a work on the human religious experience with a plant that I will theorize as having been used for an entheogenic effect in order to connect with the divine by asking some key questions: How and why was the lily used? How is the flowers depiction on art, in texts, and different iconography indicative to a usage in religious experience and through the mythology produced in the civilisation?

ABSTRACT SALT DRIVE IN THE BEAVER (Castor canadensis): AN EXPERIMENTAL ASSESSMENT WITH FIELD FEEDING TRIALS SEPTEMBER 2012 JENNIFER E. STRULES, B.M. BERKLEE COLLEGE OF MUSIC M.S., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Stephen DeStefano Salt drive is a seasonal phenomenon common to several classes of wild herbivores. Coincident with shifts of nutrient quality when plants resume growth in the spring, sodium is secondarily lost as surplus potassium is excreted. The beaver (Castor canadensis) is an herbivore whose dietary niche closely follows that of other herbivores that are subject to salt drive, but no published studies to date have assessed the likelihood of its occurrence. To quantify if beavers experience seasonal salt drive, we designed a field experiment to measure the foraging responses of beavers to sodium-enhanced foods. We used sodium-treated (salted) and control food items (aspen [Populus tremuloides] and pine [Pinus spp.] sticks) during monthly feeding trials at beaver-occupied wetlands where water lily (Nymphaea spp. and Nuphar spp.) was present and where water lily was absent. If conventional ontogeny of salt drive was operant, we expected to observe greater utility of sodium-treated food items by beavers in May and June. Further, if water lilies supplied beavers with sodium to meet dietary requirements as is widely speculated, we expected foraging responses to sodium-treated food items at wetlands where water lilies were absent to be greater than at wetlands where water lily was present. Aspen was selected by beavers in significantly greater amounts than pine. There was no difference between the mean percent consumed of salted and control aspen sticks by beavers at lily and non-lily wetlands, and no differences in temporal consumption associated with salted or control pine sticks at either wetland type. Salted pine was consumed in greater amounts than unsalted pine. We propose that the gastrointestinal or renal physiology of beavers may predispose them to low solute loss, thereby preventing salt drive.