having [it] like the cluster of wild asparagus. It is close to the so-called talapē, like the wild beet. And the amulets are of this kind:

The plant that opens a mortal's eyes to a god is pinned down, in the end, by the vegetables. Its fruit is 'like the cluster of wild asparagus'; the whole plant is 'close to the so-called talapē, like the wild beet.' After the seven-rayed scarab and the eight-lettered name, the identification key is a produce-stall: asparagus, beet, a local herb the reader is assumed to know by its market name. This is how real plant-lore was transmitted — by comparison to the common and familiar, because a description is only useful if it ends at something you have already seen. And that homeliness is the deepest thing the passage has to say about this religion. The sublime and the ordinary sit on one continuum here with no felt contradiction: the same paragraph that says 'the lord showed me this' says 'it looks like wild beet.' The marvelous is not somewhere else; it is this plant, in this ditch, that looks like that vegetable — and also unmakes a feather and opens the eye to God. Then the manual pivots, with a bureaucrat's neatness, to its last piece of business: 'and the amulets are of this kind.' Two charms to write, and the book is nearly done.