(M171) Thus far we have dealt with the myth of Adonis and the legends
which associated him with Byblus and Paphos. A discussion of these legends
led us to the conclusion that among Semitic peoples in early times,
Adonis, the divine lord of the city, was often personated by priestly
kings or other members of the royal family, and that these his human
representatives were of old put to death, whether periodically or
occasionally, in their divine character. Further, we found that certain
traditions and monuments of Asia Minor seem to preserve traces of a
similar practice. As time went on, the cruel custom was apparently
mitigated in various ways; for example, by substituting an effigy or an
animal for the man, or by allowing the destined victim to escape with a
merely make-believe sacrifice. The evidence of all this is drawn from a
variety of scattered and often ambiguous indications: it is fragmentary,
it is uncertain, and the conclusions built upon it inevitably partake of
the weakness of the foundation. Where the records are so imperfect, as
they happen to be in this branch of our subject, the element of hypothesis
must enter largely into any attempt to piece together and interpret the
disjointed facts. How far the interpretations here proposed are sound, I
leave to future inquiries to determine.
(M172) From dim regions of the past, where we have had to grope our way
with small help from the lamp of history, it is a relief to pass to those
later periods of classical antiquity on which contemporary Greek writers
have shed the light of their clear intelligence. To them we owe almost all
that we know for certain about the rites of Adonis. The Semites who
practised the worship have said little about it; at all events little that
they said has come down to us. Accordingly, the following account of the
ritual is derived mainly from Greek authors who saw what they describe;
and it applies to ages in which the growth of humane feeling had softened
some of the harsher features of the worship.
(M173) At the festivals of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and in
Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a bitter
wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble corpses,
were carried out as to burial and then thrown into the sea or into
springs;(668) and in some places his revival was celebrated on the
following day.(669) But at different places the ceremonies varied somewhat
in the manner and apparently also in the season of their celebration. At
Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis were displayed on two couches;
beside them were set ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in
flower-pots, and green bowers twined with anise. The marriage of the
lovers was celebrated one day, and on the morrow women attired as
mourners, with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the
dead Adonis to the sea-shore and committed it to the waves. Yet they
sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that the lost one would come back
again.(670) The date at which this Alexandrian ceremony was observed is
not expressly stated; but from the mention of the ripe fruits it has been
inferred that it took place in late summer.(671) In the great Phoenician
sanctuary of Astarte at Byblus the death of Adonis was annually mourned,
to the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation, and
beating of the breast; but next day he was believed to come to life again
and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his worshippers. The
disconsolate believers, left behind on earth, shaved their heads as the
Egyptians did on the death of the divine bull Apis; women who could not
bring themselves to sacrifice their beautiful tresses had to give
themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and to
dedicate to Astarte the wages of their shame.(672)
(M174) This Phoenician festival appears to have been a vernal one, for its
date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis, and this has
been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring. At that season the
red earth washed down from the mountains by the rain tinges the water of
the river, and even the sea, for a great way with a blood-red hue, and the
crimson stain was believed to be the blood of Adonis, annually wounded to
death by the boar on Mount Lebanon.(673) Again, the scarlet anemone is
said to have sprung from the blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by
it;(674) and as the anemone blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be
thought to show that the festival of Adonis, or at least one of his
festivals, was held in spring. The name of the flower is probably derived
from Naaman (“darling”), which seems to have been an epithet of Adonis.
The Arabs still call the anemone “wounds of the Naaman.”(675) The red rose
also was said to owe its hue to the same sad occasion; for Aphrodite,
hastening to her wounded lover, trod on a bush of white roses; the cruel
thorns tore her tender flesh, and her sacred blood dyed the white roses
for ever red.(676) It would be idle, perhaps, to lay much weight on
evidence drawn from the calendar of flowers, and in particular to press an
argument so fragile as the bloom of the rose. Yet so far as it counts at
all, the tale which links the damask rose with the death of Adonis points
to a summer rather than to a spring celebration of his passion. In Attica,
certainly, the festival fell at the height of summer. For the fleet which
Athens fitted out against Syracuse, and by the destruction of which her
power was permanently crippled, sailed at midsummer, and by an ominous
coincidence the sombre rites of Adonis were being celebrated at the very
time. As the troops marched down to the harbour to embark, the streets
through which they passed were lined with coffins and corpse-like
effigies, and the air was rent with the noise of women wailing for the
dead Adonis. The circumstance cast a gloom over the sailing of the most
splendid armament that Athens ever sent to sea.(677) Many ages afterwards,
when the Emperor Julian made his first entry into Antioch, he found in
like manner the gay, the luxurious capital of the East plunged in mimic
grief for the annual death of Adonis: and if he had any presentiment of
coming evil, the voices of lamentation which struck upon his ear must have
seemed to sound his knell.(678)
(M175) The resemblance of these ceremonies to the Indian and European
ceremonies which I have described elsewhere is obvious. In particular,
apart from the somewhat doubtful date of its celebration, the Alexandrian
ceremony is almost identical with the Indian.(679) In both of them the
marriage of two divine beings, whose affinity with vegetation seems
indicated by the fresh plants with which they are surrounded, is
celebrated in effigy, and the effigies are afterwards mourned over and
thrown into the water.(680) From the similarity of these customs to each
other and to the spring and midsummer customs of modern Europe we should
naturally expect that they all admit of a common explanation. Hence, if
the explanation which I have adopted of the latter is correct, the
ceremony of the death and resurrection of Adonis must also have been a
dramatic representation of the decay and revival of plant life. The
inference thus based on the resemblance of the customs is confirmed by the
following features in the legend and ritual of Adonis. His affinity with
vegetation comes out at once in the common story of his birth. He was said
to have been born from a myrrh-tree, the bark of which bursting, after a
ten month’ gestation, allowed the lovely infant to come forth. According
to some, a boar rent the bark with his tusk and so opened a passage for
the babe. A faint rationalistic colour was given to the legend by saying
that his mother was a woman named Myrrh, who had been turned into a
myrrh-tree soon after she had conceived the child.(681) The use of myrrh
as incense at the festival of Adonis may have given rise to the
fable.(682) We have seen that incense was burnt at the corresponding
Babylonian rites,(683) just as it was burnt by the idolatrous Hebrews in
honour of the Queen of Heaven,(684) who was no other than Astarte. Again,
the story that Adonis spent half, or according to others a third, of the
year in the lower world and the rest of it in the upper world,(685) is
explained most simply and naturally by supposing that he represented
vegetation, especially the corn, which lies buried in earth half the year
and reappears above ground the other half. Certainly of the annual
phenomena of nature there is none which suggests so obviously the idea of
death and resurrection as the disappearance and reappearance of vegetation
in autumn and spring. Adonis has been taken for the sun; but there is
nothing in the sun’s annual course within the temperate and tropical zones
to suggest that he is dead for half or a third of the year and alive for
the other half or two-thirds. He might, indeed, be conceived as weakened
in winter, but dead he could not be thought to be; his daily reappearance
contradicts the supposition.(686) Within the Arctic Circle, where the sun
annually disappears for a continuous period which varies from twenty-four
hours to six months according to the latitude, his yearly death and
resurrection would certainly be an obvious idea; but no one except the
unfortunate astronomer Bailly(687) has maintained that the Adonis worship
came from the Arctic regions. On the other hand, the annual death and
revival of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men
in every stage of savagery and civilization; and the vastness of the scale
on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes place, together
with man’s intimate dependence on it for subsistence, combine to render it
the most impressive annual occurrence in nature, at least within the
temperate zones. It is no wonder that a phenomenon so important, so
striking, and so universal should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given
rise to similar rites in many lands. We may, therefore, accept as probable
an explanation of the Adonis worship which accords so well with the facts
of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other lands. Moreover,
the explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion amongst
the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying and
reviving god as the reaped and sprouting grain.(688)
(M176) The character of Tammuz or Adonis as a corn-spirit comes out
plainly in an account of his festival given by an Arabic writer of the
tenth century. In describing the rites and sacrifices observed at the
different seasons of the year by the heathen Syrians of Harran, he says:
“Tammuz (July). In the middle of this month is the festival of el-Bûgât,
that is, of the weeping women, and this is the Tâ-uz festival, which is
celebrated in honour of the god Tâ-uz. The women bewail him, because his
lord slew him so cruelly, ground his bones in a mill, and then scattered
them to the wind. The women (during this festival) eat nothing which has
been ground in a mill, but limit their diet to steeped wheat, sweet
vetches, dates, raisins, and the like.”(689) Tâ-uz, who is no other than
Tammuz, is here like Burns’s John Barleycorn—
“_They wasted o’er a scorching flame_
_The marrow of his bones;_
_But a miller us’d him worst of all—_
_For he crush’d him between two stones._”
This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the cereal
crops is characteristic of the stage of culture reached by his worshippers
in historical times. They had left the nomadic life of the wandering
hunter and herdsman far behind them; for ages they had been settled on the
land, and had depended for their subsistence mainly on the products of
tillage. The berries and roots of the wilderness, the grass of the
pastures, which had been matters of vital importance to their ruder
forefathers, were now of little moment to them: more and more their
thoughts and energies were engrossed by the staple of their life, the
corn; more and more accordingly the propitiation of the deities of
fertility in general and of the corn-spirit in particular tended to become
the central feature of their religion. The aim they set before themselves
in celebrating the rites was thoroughly practical. It was no vague
poetical sentiment which prompted them to hail with joy the rebirth of
vegetation and to mourn its decline. Hunger, felt or feared, was the
mainspring of the worship of Adonis.
(M177) It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for
Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the corn-god,
who was then either perishing under the sickles of the reapers, or being
trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on the threshing-floor. While
the men slew him, the women wept crocodile tears at home to appease his
natural indignation by a show of grief for his death.(690) The theory fits
in well with the dates of the festivals, which fell in spring or summer;
for spring and summer, not autumn, are the seasons of the barley and wheat
harvests in the lands which, worshipped Adonis.(691) Further, the
hypothesis is confirmed by the practice of the Egyptian reapers, who
lamented, calling upon Isis, when they cut the first corn;(692) and it is
recommended by the analogous customs of many hunting tribes, who testify
great respect for the animals which they kill and eat.(693)
(M178) Thus interpreted the death of Adonis is not the natural decay of
vegetation in general under the summer heat or the winter cold; it is the
violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on the field,
stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds it to powder in the
mill. That this was indeed the principal aspect in which Adonis presented
himself in later times to the agricultural peoples of the Levant, may be
admitted; but whether from the beginning he had been the corn and nothing
but the corn, may be doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the
herdsman, above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain, offering
rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still he may have
embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the autumn woods yield
to the savage hunter and his squaw. And just as the husbandman must
propitiate the spirit of the corn which he consumes, so the herdsman must
appease the spirit of the grass and leaves which his cattle munch, and the
hunter must soothe the spirit of the roots which he digs, and of the
fruits which he gathers from the bough. In all cases the propitiation of
the injured and angry sprite would naturally comprise elaborate excuses
and apologies, accompanied by loud lamentations at his decease whenever,
through some deplorable accident or necessity, he happened to be murdered
as well as robbed. Only we must bear in mind that the savage hunter and
herdsman of those early days had probably not yet attained to the abstract
idea of vegetation in general; and that accordingly, so far as Adonis
existed for them at all, he must have been the _Adon_ or lord of each
individual tree and plant rather than a personification of vegetable life
as a whole. Thus there would be as many Adonises as there were trees and
shrubs, and each of them might expect to receive satisfaction for any
damage done to his person or property. And year by year, when the trees
were deciduous, every Adonis would seem to bleed to death with the red
leaves of autumn and to come to life again with the fresh green of spring.
(M179) We have seen reason to think that in early times Adonis was
sometimes personated by a living man who died a violent death in the
character of the god. Further, there is evidence which goes to show that
among the agricultural peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean, the
corn-spirit, by whatever name he was known, was often represented, year by
year, by human victims slain on the harvest-field.(694) If that was so, it
seems likely that the propitiation of the corn-spirit would tend to fuse
to some extent with the worship of the dead. For the spirits of these
victims might be thought to return to life in the ears which they had
fattened with their blood, and to die a second death at the reaping of the
corn. Now the ghosts of those who have perished by violence are surly and
apt to wreak their vengeance on their slayers whenever an opportunity
offers. Hence the attempt to appease the souls of the slaughtered victims
would naturally blend, at least in the popular conception, with the
attempt to pacify the slain corn-spirit. And as the dead came back in the
sprouting corn, so they might be thought to return in the spring flowers,
waked from their long sleep by the soft vernal airs. They had been laid to
their rest under the sod. What more natural than to imagine that the
violets and the hyacinths, the roses and the anemones, sprang from their
dust, were empurpled or incarnadined by their blood, and contained some
portion of their spirit?
“_I sometimes think that never blows so red_
_The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;_
_That every Hyacinth the Garden wears_
_Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head._
“_And this reviving Herb whose tender Green_
_Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean—_
_Ah, lean upon it lightly, for who knows_
_From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen?_”
(M180) In the summer after the battle of Landen, the most sanguinary
battle of the seventeenth century in Europe, the earth, saturated with the
blood of twenty thousand slain, broke forth into millions of poppies, and
the traveller who passed that vast sheet of scarlet might well fancy that
the earth had indeed given up her dead.(695) At Athens the great
Commemoration of the Dead fell in spring about the middle of March, when
the early flowers are in bloom. Then the dead were believed to rise from
their graves and go about the streets, vainly endeavoring to enter the
temples and the dwellings, which were barred against these perturbed
spirits with ropes, buckthorn, and pitch. The name of the festival,
according to the most obvious and natural interpretation, means the
Festival of Flowers, and the title would fit well with the substance of
the ceremonies if at that season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to
creep from the narrow house with the opening flowers.(696) There may
therefore be a measure of truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the
Adonis worship a dreamy voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the
King of Terrors, but as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to
himself and lulls them into an eternal sleep. The infinite charm of nature
in the Lebanon, he thought, lends itself to religious emotions of this
sensuous, visionary sort, hovering vaguely between pain and pleasure,
between slumber and tears.(697) It would doubtless be a mistake to
attribute to Syrian peasants the worship of a conception so purely
abstract as that of death in general. Yet it may be true that in their
simple minds the thought of the reviving spirit of vegetation was blent
with the very concrete notion of the ghosts of the dead, who come to life
again in spring days with the early flowers, with the tender green of the
corn and the many-tinted blossoms of the trees. Thus their views of the
death and resurrection of nature would be coloured by their views of the
death and resurrection of man, by their personal sorrows and hopes and
fears. In like manner we cannot doubt that Renan’s theory of Adonis was
itself deeply tinged by passionate memories, memories of the slumber akin
to death which sealed his own eyes on the slopes of the Lebanon, memories
of the sister who sleeps in the land of Adonis never again to wake with
the anemones and the roses.