The Golden Bough
Studies in the History of Oriental Religion
By
James George Frazer, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D.
Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge
Professor of Social Anthropology in the University of Liverpool
Vol. V. of XII.
Part IV: Adonis Attis Osiris.
Vol. 1 of 2.
New York and London
MacMillan and Co.
1914
CONTENTS
Preface to the First Edition.
Preface to the Second Edition.
Preface to the Third Edition.
Book First. Adonis.
Chapter I. The Myth of Adonis.
Chapter II. Adonis in Syria.
Chapter III. Adonis in Cyprus.
Chapter IV. Sacred Men and Women.
§ 1. An Alternative Theory.
§ 2. Sacred Women in India.
§ 3. Sacred Men and Women in West Africa.
§ 4. Sacred Women in Western Asia.
§ 5. Sacred Men in Western Asia.
§ 6. Sons of God.
§ 7. Reincarnation of the Dead.
§ 8. Sacred Stocks and Stones among the Semites.
Chapter V. The Burning of Melcarth.
Chapter VI. The Burning of Sandan.
§ 1. The Baal of Tarsus.
§ 2. The God of Ibreez.
§ 3. Sandan of Tarsus.
§ 4. The Gods of Boghaz-Keui.
§ 5. Sandan and Baal at Tarsus.
§ 6. Priestly Kings of Olba.
§ 7. The God of the Corycian Cave.
§ 8. Cilician Goddesses.
§ 9. The Burning of Cilician Gods.
Chapter VII. Sardanapalus and Hercules.
§ 1. The Burning of Sardanapalus.
§ 2. The Burning of Croesus.
§ 3. Purification by Fire.
§ 4. The Divinity of Lydian Kings.
§ 5. Hittite Gods at Tarsus and Sardes.
§ 6. The Resurrection of Tylon.
Chapter VIII. Volcanic Religion.
§ 1. The Burning of a God.
§ 2. The Volcanic Region of Cappadocia.
§ 3. Fire-Worship in Cappadocia.
§ 4. The Burnt Land of Lydia.
§ 5. The Earthquake God.
§ 6. The Worship of Mephitic Vapours.
§ 7. The Worship of Hot Springs.
§ 8. The Worship of Volcanoes in other Lands.
Chapter IX. The Ritual of Adonis.
Chapter X. The Gardens of Adonis.
Book Second. Attis.
Chapter I. The Myth and Ritual of Attis.
Chapter II. Attis As a God of Vegetation.
Chapter III. Attis As The Father God.
Chapter IV. Human Representatives of Attis.
Chapter V. The Hanged God.
Chapter VI. Oriental Religions in the West.
Chapter VII. Hyacinth.
Footnotes
[Cover Art]
[Transcriber’s Note: The above cover image was produced by the submitter
at Distributed Proofreaders, and is being placed into the public domain.]
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION.
These studies are an expansion of the corresponding sections in my book
_The Golden Bough_, and they will form part of the third edition of that
work, on the preparation of which I have been engaged for some time. By
far the greater portion of them is new, and they make by themselves a
fairly complete and, I hope, intelligible whole. I shall be glad if
criticisms passed on the essays in their present shape should enable me to
correct and improve them when I come to incorporate them in my larger
work.
In studying afresh these three Oriental worships, akin to each other in
character, I have paid more attention than formerly to the natural
features of the countries in which they arose, because I am more than ever
persuaded that religion, like all other institutions, has been profoundly
influenced by physical environment, and cannot be understood without some
appreciation of those aspects of external nature which stamp themselves
indelibly on the thoughts, the habits, the whole life of a people. It is a
matter of great regret to me that I have never visited the East, and so
cannot describe from personal knowledge the native lands of Adonis, Attis,
and Osiris. But I have sought to remedy the defect by comparing the
descriptions of eye-witnesses, and painting from them what may be called
composite pictures of some of the scenes on which I have been led to touch
in the course of this volume. I shall not have wholly failed if I have
caught from my authorities and conveyed to my readers some notion, however
dim, of the scenery, the atmosphere, the gorgeous colouring of the East.
J. G. Frazer.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
_22nd July 1906_.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
In this second edition some minor corrections have been made and some
fresh matter added. Where my views appear to have been misunderstood, I
have endeavoured to state them more clearly; where they have been
disputed, I have carefully reconsidered the evidence and given my reasons
for adhering to my former opinions. Most of the additions thus made to the
volume are comprised in a new chapter (“Sacred Men and Women”), a new
section (“Influence of Mother-kin on Religion”), and three new appendices
(“Moloch the King,” “The Widowed Flamen,” and “Some Customs of the Pelew
Islanders”). Among the friends and correspondents who have kindly helped
me with information and criticisms of various sorts I wish to thank
particularly Mr. W. Crooke, Professor W. M. Flinders Petrie, Mr. G. F.
Hill of the British Museum, the Reverend J. Roscoe of the Church
Missionary Society, and Mr. W. Wyse. Above all I owe much to my teacher
the Reverend Professor R. H. Kennett, who, besides initiating me into the
charms of the Hebrew language and giving me a clearer insight into the
course of Hebrew history, has contributed several valuable suggestions to
the book and enhanced the kindness by reading and criticizing some of the
proofs.
J. G. Frazer.
TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE,
_22nd September 1907_.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
In revising the book for this third edition I have made use of several
important works which have appeared since the last edition was published.
Among these I would name particularly the learned treatises of Count
Baudissin on Adonis, of Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge on Osiris, and of my
colleague Professor J. Garstang on the civilization of the Hittites, that
still mysterious people, who begin to loom a little more distinctly from
the mists of the past. Following the example of Dr. Wallis Budge, I have
indicated certain analogies which may be traced between the worship of
Osiris and the worship of the dead, especially of dead kings, among the
modern tribes of Africa. The conclusion to which these analogies appear to
point is that under the mythical pall of the glorified Osiris, the god who
died and rose again from the dead, there once lay the body of a dead man.
Whether that was so or not, I will not venture to say. The longer I occupy
myself with questions of ancient mythology the more diffident I become of
success in dealing with them, and I am apt to think that we who spend our
years in searching for solutions of these insoluble problems are like
Sisyphus perpetually rolling his stone up hill only to see it revolve
again into the valley, or like the daughters of Danaus doomed for ever to
pour water into broken jars that can hold no water. If we are taxed with
wasting life in seeking to know what can never be known, and what, if it
could be discovered, would not be worth knowing, what can we plead in our
defence? I fear, very little. Such pursuits can hardly be defended on the
ground of pure reason. We can only say that something, we know not what,
drives us to attack the great enemy Ignorance wherever we see him, and
that if we fail, as we probably shall, in our attack on his entrenchments,
it may be useless but it is not inglorious to fall in leading a Forlorn
Hope.
J. G. Frazer
CAMBRIDGE,
_16th January 1914_.
BOOK FIRST. ADONIS.
Chapter I. The Myth of Adonis.
(M1) The spectacle of the great changes which annually pass over the face
of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all ages, and
stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformations so vast and
wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely disinterested; for even the
savage cannot fail to perceive how intimately his own life is bound up
with the life of nature, and how the same processes which freeze the
stream and strip the earth of vegetation menace him with extinction. At a
certain stage of development men seem to have imagined that the means of
averting the threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they
could hasten or retard the flight of the seasons by magic art. Accordingly
they performed ceremonies and recited spells to make the rain to fall, the
sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the fruits of the earth to grow. In
course of time the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many
cherished illusions, convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of
mankind that the alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn,
were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some
deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes
of nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of
vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures, as effects of the
waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses, who
were born and died, who married and begot children, on the pattern of
human life.
(M2) Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather
supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the
annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their
deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they
could aid the god, who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the
opposing principle of death. They imagined that they could recruit his
failing energies and even raise him from the dead. The ceremonies which
they observed for this purpose were in substance a dramatic representation
of the natural processes which they wished to facilitate; for it is a
familiar tenet of magic that you can produce any desired effect by merely
imitating it. And as they now explained the fluctuations of growth and
decay, of reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage, the death, and
the rebirth or revival of the gods, their religious or rather magical
dramas turned in great measure on these themes. They set forth the
fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of one at least
of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a religious
theory was blended with a magical practice. The combination is familiar in
history. Indeed, few religions have ever succeeded in wholly extricating
themselves from the old trammels of magic. The inconsistency of acting on
two opposite principles, however it may vex the soul of the philosopher,
rarely troubles the common man; indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His
affair is to act, not to analyse the motives of his action. If mankind had
always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of
folly and crime.(1)
(M3) Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most striking
within the temperate zone are those which affect vegetation. The influence
of the seasons on animals, though great, is not nearly so manifest. Hence
it is natural that in the magical dramas designed to dispel winter and
bring back spring the emphasis should be laid on vegetation, and that
trees and plants should in them more prominently than beasts and birds.
Yet the two sides of life, the vegetable and the animal, were not
dissociated in the minds of those who observed the ceremonies. Indeed they
commonly believed that the tie between the animal and the vegetable world
was even closer than it really is; hence they often combined the dramatic
representation of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the
sexes for the purpose of furthering at the same time and by the same act
the multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To them the
principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and
indivisible. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget
children, these were the primary wants of men in the past, and they will
be the primary wants of men in the future so long as the world lasts.
Other things may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but unless
these wants are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist.
These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly
sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation
of the seasons.
(M4) Nowhere, apparently, have these rites been more widely and solemnly
celebrated than in the lands which border the Eastern Mediterranean. Under
the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and
Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially
of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and
rose again from the dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place
to place: in substance they were the same. The supposed death and
resurrection of this oriental deity, a god of many names but of
essentially one nature, is the subject of the present inquiry. We begin
with Tammuz or Adonis.(2)
(M5) The worship of Adonis was practised by the Semitic peoples of
Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as early as the
seventh century before Christ.(3) The true name of the deity was Tammuz:
the appellation of Adonis is merely the Semitic _Adon_, “lord,” a title of
honour by which his worshippers addressed him.(4) In the Hebrew text of
the Old Testament the same name Adonai, originally perhaps Adoni, “my
lord,” is often applied to Jehovah.(5) But the Greeks through a
misunderstanding converted the title of honour into a proper name. While
Tammuz or his equivalent Adonis enjoyed a wide and lasting popularity
among peoples of the Semitic stock, there are grounds for thinking that
his worship originated with a race of other blood and other speech, the
Sumerians, who in the dawn of history inhabited the flat alluvial plain at
the head of the Persian Gulf and created the civilization which was
afterwards called Babylonian. The origin and affinities of this people are
unknown; in physical type and language they differed from all their
neighbours, and their isolated position, wedged in between alien races,
presents to the student of mankind problems of the same sort as the
isolation of the Basques and Etruscans among the Aryan peoples of Europe.
An ingenious, but unproved, hypothesis would represent them as immigrants
driven from central Asia by that gradual desiccation which for ages seems
to have been converting once fruitful lands into a waste and burying the
seats of ancient civilization under a sea of shifting sand. Whatever their
place of origin may have been, it is certain that in Southern Babylonia
the Sumerians attained at a very early period to a considerable pitch of
civilization; for they tilled the soil, reared cattle, built cities, dug
canals, and even invented a system of writing, which their Semitic
neighbours in time borrowed from them.(6) In the pantheon of this ancient
people Tammuz appears to have been one of the oldest, though certainly not
one of the most important figures.(7) His name consists of a Sumerian
phrase meaning “true son” or, in a fuller form, “true son of the deep
water,”(8) and among the inscribed Sumerian texts which have survived the
wreck of empires are a number of hymns in his honour, which were written
down not later than about two thousand years before our era but were
almost certainly composed at a much earlier time.(9)
(M6) In the religious literature of Babylonia Tammuz appears as the
youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the great mother goddess, the
embodiment of the reproductive energies of nature. The references to their
connexion with each other in myth and ritual are both fragmentary and
obscure, but we gather from them that every year Tammuz was believed to
die, passing away from the cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean
world, and that every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him
“to the land from which there is no returning, to the house of darkness,
where dust lies on door and bolt.” During her absence the passion of love
ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their kinds:
all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound up with the
goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal kingdom that without
her presence they could not be discharged. A messenger of the great god Ea
was accordingly despatched to rescue the goddess on whom so much depended.
The stern queen of the infernal regions, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal by name,
reluctantly allowed Ishtar to be sprinkled with the Water of Life and to
depart, in company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two might
return together to the upper world, and that with their return all nature
might revive.
(M7) Laments for the departed Tammuz are contained in several Babylonian
hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He is
“_A tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water,_
_Whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom._
_A willow that rejoiced not by the watercourse,_
_A willow whose roots were torn up._
_A herb that in the garden had drunk no water._”
His death appears to have been annually mourned, to the shrill music of
flutes, by men and women about midsummer in the month named after him, the
month of Tammuz. The dirges were seemingly chanted over an effigy of the
dead god, which was washed with pure water, anointed with oil, and clad in
a red robe, while the fumes of incense rose into the air, as if to stir
his dormant senses by their pungent fragrance and wake him from the sleep
of death. In one of these dirges, inscribed _Lament of the Flutes for
Tammuz_, we seem still to hear the voices of the singers chanting the sad
refrain and to catch, like far-away music, the wailing notes of the
flutes:—
“_At his vanishing away she lifts up a lament,_
_‘__Oh my child!__’__ at his vanishing away she lifts up a
lament;_
_‘__My Damu!__’__ at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament._
_‘__My enchanter and priest!__’__ at his vanishing away she
lifts up a lament,_
_At the shining cedar, rooted in a spacious place,_
_In Eanna, above and below, she lifts up a lament._
_Like the lament that a house lifts up for its master, lifts she
up a lament,_
_Like the lament that a city lifts up for its lord, lifts she up
a lament._
_Her lament is the lament for a herb that grows not in the bed,_
_Her lament is the lament for the corn that grows not in the
ear._
_Her chamber is a possession that brings not forth a possession,_
_A weary woman, a weary child, forspent._
_Her lament is for a great river, where no willows grow,_
_Her lament is for a field, where corn and herbs grow not._
_Her lament is for a pool, where fishes grow not._
_Her lament is for a thicket of reeds, where no reeds grow._
_Her lament is for woods, where tamarisks grow not._
_Her lament is for a wilderness where no cypresses (?) grow._
_Her lament is for the depth of a garden of trees, where honey and
wine grow not._
_Her lament is for meadows, where no plants grow._
_Her lament is for a palace, where length of life grows not._”(10)
(M8) The tragical story and the melancholy rites of Adonis are better
known to us from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the fragments
of Babylonian literature or the brief reference of the prophet Ezekiel,
who saw the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the
temple.(11) Mirrored in the glass of Greek mythology, the oriental deity
appears as a comely youth beloved by Aphrodite. In his infancy the goddess
hid him in a chest, which she gave in charge to Persephone, queen of the
nether world. But when Persephone opened the chest and beheld the beauty
of the babe, she refused to give him back to Aphrodite, though the goddess
of love went down herself to hell to ransom her dear one from the power of
the grave. The dispute between the two goddesses of love and death was
settled by Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should abide with Persephone in
the under world for one part of the year, and with Aphrodite in the upper
world for another part. At last the fair youth was killed in hunting by a
wild boar, or by the jealous Ares, who turned himself into the likeness of
a boar in order to compass the death of his rival. Bitterly did Aphrodite
lament her loved and lost Adonis.(12) The strife between the divine rivals
for the possession of Adonis appears to be depicted on an Etruscan mirror.
The two goddesses, identified by inscriptions, are stationed on either
side of Jupiter, who occupies the seat of judgment and lifts an admonitory
finger as he looks sternly towards Persephone. Overcome with grief the
goddess of love buries her face in her mantle, while her pertinacious
rival, grasping a branch in one hand, points with the other at a closed
coffer, which probably contains the youthful Adonis.(13) In this form of
the myth, the contest between Aphrodite and Persephone for the possession
of Adonis clearly reflects the struggle between Ishtar and Allatu in the
land of the dead, while the decision of Zeus that Adonis is to spend one
part of the year under ground and another part above ground is merely a
Greek version of the annual disappearance and reappearance of Tammuz.