A serpent glides to the body of its dead mate, lays a certain plant upon it, and the dead thing stirs and lives again. A watcher marks the herb and takes it for himself. This is the shape the record keeps for the magic plant: the leaf that undoes death, first read off the ground by an animal, then stolen up into human hands.

The fullest Greek witness comes to us through the editor's note to Apollodorus's Library (a Greek mythography compiled in the 1st–2nd century CE), where Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941), the Scottish classicist and comparativist who translated the work, gathers the old resurrection-herbs into one place. He tells how the seer Polyidus "restored the dead Glaucus to life by laying on" him "a magical herb which he had seen a serpent apply" to a dead serpent. The same trick reaches back to a Lydian hero, Tylon: after a snake kills him, the snake's mate fetches "the flower of Zeus" in her mouth, the dead serpent revives, and the man's sister repeats the cure on her brother. Frazer notes plainly that the magical herb "brings the dead to life again by" simple contact — the whole apparatus of resurrection folded into one green leaf. His briefer note to the same book records a Tongan strand of it, where "a dead boy is brought to life" "by being covered with the leaves of a certain tree."

The Chinese witness, gathered in E. T. C. Werner's Myths & Legends of China (published 1922), keeps a gentler magic plant. Among the feats of the immortal Han Hsiang Tzu is "the production from a little earth in a flower-pot of some" "marvellous flowering plants," "on the leaves of which were written in" letters of gold a small verse of prophecy — foliage that grows not toward life restored but toward things not yet spoken, a fortune coming true only when its planter reads the leaves against the world.

One shape lifts the dead from the grass; the other writes the future onto it. What is it in the plant, of all things rooted and mute, that the record keeps trusting to carry what a person cannot say or save alone?