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. Again, the scarlet anemone is said to have sprung from the

blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; 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." 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. 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.

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.

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. 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. 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 months' 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. The use of myrrh as incense at the festival of

Adonis may have given rise to the fable. We have seen that incense

was burnt at the corresponding Babylonian rites, just as it was

burnt by the idolatrous Hebrews in honour of the Queen of Heaven,

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, is explained most simply and

naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially

the corn, which lies buried in the 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. 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 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 civilisation; 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.

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." 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.

It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for

Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the

corngod, 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. 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. Further, the hypothesis is

confirmed by the practice of the Egyptian reapers, who lamented,

calling upon Isis, when they cut the first corn; and it is

recommended by the analogous customs of many hunting tribes, who

testify great respect for the animals which they kill and eat.

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

husband-man 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.

There is some 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. 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?"

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. 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 endeavouring to enter the temples and 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. 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. 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.

XXXIII. The Gardens of Adonis

PERHAPS the best proof that Adonis was a deity of vegetation, and

especially of the corn, is furnished by the gardens of Adonis, as

they were called. These were baskets or pots filled with earth, in

which wheat, barley, lettuces, fennel, and various kinds of flowers

were sown and tended for eight days, chiefly or exclusively by

women. Fostered by the sun's heat, the plants shot up rapidly, but

having no root they withered as rapidly away, and at the end of

eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis, and

flung with them into the sea or into springs.

These gardens of Adonis are most naturally interpreted as

representatives of Adonis or manifestations of his power; they

represented him, true to his original nature, in vegetable form,

while the images of him, with which they were carried out and cast

into the water, portrayed him in his later human shape. All these

Adonis ceremonies, if I am right, were originally intended as charms

to promote the growth or revival of vegetation; and the principle by

which they were supposed to produce this effect was homoeopathic or

imitative magic. For ignorant people suppose that by mimicking the

effect which they desire to produce they actually help to produce

it; thus by sprinkling water they make rain, by lighting a fire they

make sunshine, and so on. Similarly, by mimicking the growth of

crops they hope to ensure a good harvest. The rapid growth of the

wheat and barley in the gardens of Adonis was intended to make the

corn shoot up; and the throwing of the gardens and of the images

into the water was a charm to secure a due supply of fertilising

rain. The same, I take it, was the object of throwing the effigies

of Death and the Carnival into water in the corresponding ceremonies

of modern Europe. Certainly the custom of drenching with water a

leaf-clad person, who undoubtedly personifies vegetation, is still

resorted to in Europe for the express purpose of producing rain.

Similarly the custom of throwing water on the last corn cut at

harvest, or on the person who brings it home (a custom observed in

Germany and France, and till lately in England and Scotland), is in

some places practised with the avowed intent to procure rain for the

next year's crops. Thus in Wallachia and amongst the Roumanians in

Transylvania, when a girl is bringing home a crown made of the last

ears of corn cut at harvest, all who meet her hasten to throw water

on her, and two farm-servants are placed at the door for the

purpose; for they believe that if this were not done, the crops next

year would perish from drought. At the spring ploughing in Prussia,

when the ploughmen and sowers returned in the evening from their

work in the fields, the farmer's wife and the servants used to

splash water over them. The ploughmen and sowers retorted by seizing

every one, throwing them into the pond, and ducking them under the

water. The farmer's wife might claim exemption on payment of a

forfeit, but every one else had to be ducked. By observing this

custom they hoped to ensure a due supply of rain for the seed.

The opinion that the gardens of Adonis are essentially charms to

promote the growth of vegetation, especially of the crops, and that

they belong to the same class of customs as those spring and

mid-summer folk-customs of modern Europe which I have described

else-where, does not rest for its evidence merely on the intrinsic

probability of the case. Fortunately we are able to show that

gardens of Adonis (if we may use the expression in a general sense)

are still planted, first, by a primitive race at their sowing

season, and, second, by European peasants at midsummer. Amongst the

Oraons and Mundas of Bengal, when the time comes for planting out

the rice which has been grown in seed-beds, a party of young people

of both sexes go to the forest and cut a young Karma-tree, or the

branch of one. Bearing it in triumph they return dancing, singing,

and beating drums, and plant it in the middle of the village

dancing-ground. A sacrifice is offered to the tree; and next morning

the youth of both sexes, linked arm-in-arm, dance in a great circle

round the Karma-tree, which is decked with strips of coloured cloth

and sham bracelets and necklets of plaited straw. As a preparation

for the festival, the daughters of the headman of the village

cultivate blades of barley in a peculiar way. The seed is sown in

moist, sandy soil, mixed with turmeric, and the blades sprout and

unfold of a pale-yellow or primrose colour. On the day of the

festival the girls take up these blades and carry them in baskets to

the dancing-ground, where, prostrating themselves reverentially,

they place some of the plants before the Karma-tree. Finally, the

Karma-tree is taken away and thrown into a stream or tank. The

meaning of planting these barley blades and then presenting them to

the Karma-tree is hardly open to question. Trees are supposed to

exercise a quickening influence upon the growth of crops, and

amongst the very people in question--the Mundas or Mundaris--"the

grove deities are held responsible for the crops." Therefore, when

at the season for planting out the rice the Mundas bring in a tree

and treat it with so much respect, their object can only be to

foster thereby the growth of the rice which is about to be planted

out; and the custom of causing barley blades to sprout rapidly and

then presenting them to the tree must be intended to subserve the

same purpose, perhaps by reminding the tree-spirit of his duty

towards the crops, and stimulating his activity by this visible

example of rapid vegetable growth. The throwing of the Karma-tree

into the water is to be interpreted as a rain-charm. Whether the

barley blades are also thrown into the water is not said; but if my

interpretation of the custom is right, probably they are so. A

distinction between this Bengal custom and the Greek rites of Adonis

is that in the former the tree-spirit appears in his original form

as a tree; whereas in the Adonis worship he appears in human form,

represented as a dead man, though his vegetable nature is indicated

by the gardens of Adonis, which are, so to say, a secondary

manifestation of his original power as a tree-spirit.

Gardens of Adonis are cultivated also by the Hindoos, with the

intention apparently of ensuring the fertility both of the earth and

of mankind. Thus at Oodeypoor in Rajputana a festival is held in

honour of Gouri, or Isani, the goddess of abundance. The rites begin

when the sun enters the sign of the Ram, the opening of the Hindoo

year. An image of the goddess Gouri is made of earth, and a smaller

one of her husband Iswara, and the two are placed together. A small

trench is next dug, barley is sown in it, and the ground watered and

heated artificially till the grain sprouts, when the women dance

round it hand in hand, invoking the blessing of Gouri on their

husbands. After that the young corn is taken up and distributed by

the women to the men, who wear it in their turbans. In these rites

the distribution of the barley shoots to the men, and the invocation

of a blessing on their husbands by the wives, point clearly to the

desire of offspring as one motive for observing the custom. The same

motive probably explains the use of gardens of Adonis at the

marriage of Brahmans in the Madras Presidency. Seeds of five or nine

sorts are mixed and sown in earthen pots, which are made specially

for the purpose and are filled with earth. Bride and bridegroom

water the seeds both morning and evening for four days; and on the

fifth day the seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis,

into a tank or river.

In Sardinia the gardens of Adonis are still planted in connexion

with the great midsummer festival which bears the name of St. John.

At the end of March or on the first of April a young man of the

village presents himself to a girl, and asks her to be his _comare_

(gossip or sweetheart), offering to be her _compare._ The invitation

is considered as an honour by the girl's family, and is gladly

accepted. At the end of May the girl makes a pot of the bark of the

cork-tree, fills it with earth, and sows a handful of wheat and

barley in it. The pot being placed in the sun and often watered, the

corn sprouts rapidly and has a good head by Midsummer Eve (St.

John's Eve, the twenty-third of June). The pot is then called _Erme_

or _Nenneri._ On St. John's Day the young man and the girl, dressed

in their best, accompanied by a long retinue and preceded by

children gambolling and frolicking, move in procession to a church

outside the village. Here they break the pot by throwing it against

the door of the church. Then they sit down in a ring on the grass

and eat eggs and herbs to the music of flutes. Wine is mixed in a

cup and passed round, each one drinking as it passes. Then they join

hands and sing "Sweethearts of St. John" (_Compare e comare di San

Giovanni_) over and over again, the flutes playing the while. When

they tire of singing they stand up and dance gaily in a ring till

evening. This is the general Sardinian custom. As practised at

Ozieri it has some special features. In May the pots are made of

cork-bark and planted with corn, as already described. Then on the

Eve of St. John the window-sills are draped with rich cloths, on

which the pots are placed, adorned with crimson and blue silk and

ribbons of various colours. On each of the pots they used formerly

to place a statuette or cloth doll dressed as a woman, or a

Priapus-like figure made of paste; but this custom, rigorously

forbidden by the Church, has fallen into disuse. The village swains

go about in a troop to look at the pots and their decorations and to

wait for the girls, who assemble on the public square to celebrate

the festival. Here a great bonfire is kindled, round which they

dance and make merry. Those who wish to be "Sweethearts of St. John"

act as follows. The young man stands on one side of the bonfire and

the girl on the other, and they, in a manner, join hands by each

grasping one end of a long stick, which they pass three times

backwards and forwards across the fire, thus thrusting their hands

thrice rapidly into the flames. This seals their relationship to

each other. Dancing and music go on till late at night. The

correspondence of these Sardinian pots of grain to the gardens of

Adonis seems complete, and the images formerly placed in them answer

to the images of Adonis which accompanied his gardens.

Customs of the same sort are observed at the same season in Sicily.

Pairs of boys and girls become gossips of St. John on St. John's Day

by drawing each a hair from his or her head and performing various

ceremonies over them. Thus they tie the hairs together and throw

them up in the air, or exchange them over a potsherd, which they

afterwards break in two, preserving each a fragment with pious care.

The tie formed in the latter way is supposed to last for life. In

some parts of Sicily the gossips of St. John present each other with

plates of sprouting corn, lentils, and canary seed, which have been

planted forty days before the festival. The one who receives the

plate pulls a stalk of the young plants, binds it with a ribbon, and

preserves it among his or her greatest treasures, restoring the

platter to the giver. At Catania the gossips exchange pots of basil

and great cucumbers; the girls tend the basil, and the thicker it

grows the more it is prized.

In these midsummer customs of Sardinia and Sicily it is possible

that, as Mr. R. Wünsch supposes, St. John has replaced Adonis. We

have seen that the rites of Tammuz or Adonis were commonly

celebrated about midsummer; according to Jerome, their date was

June.

In Sicily gardens of Adonis are still sown in spring as well as in

summer, from which we may perhaps infer that Sicily as well as Syria

celebrated of old a vernal festival of the dead and risen god. At

the approach of Easter, Sicilian women sow wheat, lentils, and

canaryseed in plates, which they keep in the dark and water every

two days. The plants soon shoot up; the stalks are tied together

with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the

sepulchres which, with the effigies of the dead Christ, are made up

in Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, just as the gardens

of Adonis were placed on the grave of the dead Adonis. The practice

is not confined to Sicily, for it is observed also at Cosenza in

Calabria, and perhaps in other places. The whole custom--sepulchres

as well as plates of sprouting grain--may be nothing but a

continuation, under a different name, of the worship of Adonis.

Nor are these Sicilian and Calabrian customs the only Easter

ceremonies which resemble the rites of Adonis. "During the whole of

Good Friday a waxen effigy of the dead Christ is exposed to view in

the middle of the Greek churches and is covered with fervent kisses

by the thronging crowd, while the whole church rings with

melancholy, monotonous dirges. Late in the evening, when it has

grown quite dark, this waxen image is carried by the priests into

the street on a bier adorned with lemons, roses, jessamine, and

other flowers, and there begins a grand procession of the multitude,

who move in serried ranks, with slow and solemn step, through the

whole town. Every man carries his taper and breaks out into doleful

lamentation. At all the houses which the procession passes there are

seated women with censers to fumigate the marching host. Thus the

community solemnly buries its Christ as if he had just died. At last

the waxen image is again deposited in the church, and the same

lugubrious chants echo anew. These lamentations, accompanied by a

strict fast, continue till midnight on Saturday. As the clock

strikes twelve, the bishop appears and announces the glad tidings

that 'Christ is risen,' to which the crowd replies, 'He is risen

indeed,' and at once the whole city bursts into an uproar of joy,

which finds vent in shrieks and shouts, in the endless discharge of

carronades and muskets, and the explosion of fire-works of every

sort. In the very same hour people plunge from the extremity of the

fast into the enjoyment of the Easter lamb and neat wine."

In like manner the Catholic Church has been accustomed to bring

before its followers in a visible form the death and resurrection of

the Redeemer. Such sacred dramas are well fitted to impress the

lively imagination and to stir the warm feelings of a susceptible

southern race, to whom the pomp and pageantry of Catholicism are

more congenial than to the colder temperament of the Teutonic

peoples.

When we reflect how often the Church has skilfully contrived to

plant the seeds of the new faith on the old stock of paganism, we

may surmise that the Easter celebration of the dead and risen Christ

was grafted upon a similar celebration of the dead and risen Adonis,

which, as we have seen reason to believe, was celebrated in Syria at

the same season. The type, created by Greek artists, of the

sorrowful goddess with her dying lover in her arms, resembles and

may have been the model of the _Pietà_ of Christian art, the Virgin

with the dead body of her divine Son in her lap, of which the most

celebrated example is the one by Michael Angelo in St. Peters. That

noble group, in which the living sorrow of the mother contrasts so

wonderfully with the languor of death in the son, is one of the

finest compositions in marble. Ancient Greek art has bequeathed to

us few works so beautiful, and none so pathetic.

In this connexion a well-known statement of Jerome may not be

without significance. He tells us that Bethlehem, the traditionary

birthplace of the Lord, was shaded by a grove of that still older

Syrian Lord, Adonis, and that where the infant Jesus had wept, the

lover of Venus was bewailed. Though he does not expressly say so,

Jerome seems to have thought that the grove of Adonis had been

planted by the heathen after the birth of Christ for the purpose of

defiling the sacred spot. In this he may have been mistaken. If

Adonis was indeed, as I have argued, the spirit of the corn, a more

suitable name for his dwelling-place could hardly be found than

Bethlehem, "the House of Bread," and he may well have been

worshipped there at his House of Bread long ages before the birth of

Him who said, "I am the bread of life." Even on the hypothesis that

Adonis followed rather than preceded Christ at Bethlehem, the choice

of his sad figure to divert the allegiance of Christians from their

Lord cannot but strike us as eminently appropriate when we remember

the similarity of the rites which commemorated the death and

resurrection of the two. One of the earliest seats of the worship of

the new god was Antioch, and at Antioch, as we have seen, the death

of the old god was annually celebrated with great solemnity. A

circumstance which attended the entrance of Julian into the city at

the time of the Adonis festival may perhaps throw some light on the

date of its celebration. When the emperor drew near to the city he

was received with public prayers as if he had been a god, and he

marvelled at the voices of a great multitude who cried that the Star

of Salvation had dawned upon them in the East. This may doubtless

have been no more than a fulsome compliment paid by an obsequious

Oriental crowd to the Roman emperor. But it is also possible that

the rising of a bright star regularly gave the signal for the

festival, and that as chance would have it the star emerged above

the rim of the eastern horizon at the very moment of the emperor's

approach. The coincidence, if it happened, could hardly fail to

strike the imagination of a superstitious and excited multitude, who

might thereupon hail the great man as the deity whose coming was

announced by the sign in the heavens. Or the emperor may have

mistaken for a greeting to himself the shouts which were addressed

to the star. Now Astarte, the divine mistress of Adonis, was

identified with the planet Venus, and her changes from a morning to

an evening star were carefully noted by the Babylonian astronomers,

who drew omens from her alternate appearance and disappearance.

Hence we may conjecture that the festival of Adonis was regularly

timed to coincide with the appearance of Venus as the Morning or

Evening Star. But the star which the people of Antioch saluted at

the festival was seen in the East; therefore, if it was indeed

Venus, it can only have been the Morning Star. At Aphaca in Syria,

where there was a famous temple of Astarte, the signal for the

celebration of the rites was apparently given by the flashing of a

meteor, which on a certain day fell like a star from the top of

Mount Lebanon into the river Adonis. The meteor was thought to be

Astarte herself, and its flight through the air might naturally be

interpreted as the descent of the amorous goddess to the arms of her

lover. At Antioch and elsewhere the appearance of the Morning Star

on the day of the festival may in like manner have been hailed as

the coming of the goddess of love to wake her dead leman from his

earthy bed. If that were so, we may surmise that it was the Morning

Star which guided the wise men of the East to Bethlehem, the

hallowed spot which heard, in the language of Jerome, the weeping of

the infant Christ and the lament for Adonis.

XXXIV. The Myth and Ritual of Attis

ANOTHER of those gods whose supposed death and resurrection struck

such deep roots into the faith and ritual of Western Asia is Attis.

He was to Phrygia what Adonis was to Syria. Like Adonis, he appears

to have been a god of vegetation, and his death and resurrection

were annually mourned and rejoiced over at a festival in spring. The

legends and rites of the two gods were so much alike that the

ancients themselves sometimes identified them. Attis was said to

have been a fair young shepherd or herdsman beloved by Cybele, the

Mother of the Gods, a great Asiatic goddess of fertility, who had

her chief home in Phrygia. Some held that Attis was her son. His

birth, like that of many other heroes, is said to have been

miraculous. His mother, Nana, was a virgin, who conceived by putting

a ripe almond or a pomegranate in her bosom. Indeed in the Phrygian

cosmogony an almond figured as the father of all things, perhaps

because its delicate lilac blossom is one of the first heralds of

the spring, appearing on the bare boughs before the leaves have

opened. Such tales of virgin mothers are relics of an age of

childish ignorance when men had not yet recognized the intercourse

of the sexes as the true cause of offspring. Two different accounts

of the death of Attis were current. According to the one he was

killed by a boar, like Adonis. According to the other he unmanned

himself under a pine-tree, and bled to death on the spot. The latter

is said to have been the local story told by the people of Pessinus,

a great seat of the worship of Cybele, and the whole legend of which

the story forms a part is stamped with a character of rudeness and

savagery that speaks strongly for its antiquity. Both tales might

claim the support of custom, or rather both were probably invented

to explain certain customs observed by the worshippers. The story of

the self-mutilation of Attis is clearly an attempt to account for

the self-mutilation of his priests, who regularly castrated

themselves on entering the service of the goddess. The story of his

death by the boar may have been told to explain why his worshippers,

especially the people of Pessinus, abstained from eating swine. In

like manner the worshippers of Adonis abstained from pork, because a

boar had killed their god. After his death Attis is said to have

been changed into a pine-tree.

The worship of the Phrygian Mother of the Gods was adopted by the

Romans in 204 B.C. towards the close of their long struggle with

Hannibal. For their drooping spirits had been opportunely cheered by

a prophecy, alleged to be drawn from that convenient farrago of

nonsense, the Sibylline Books, that the foreign invader would be

driven from Italy if the great Oriental goddess were brought to

Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were despatched to her sacred city

Pessinus in Phrygia. The small black stone which embodied the mighty

divinity was entrusted to them and conveyed to Rome, where it was

received with great respect and installed in the temple of Victory

on the Palatine Hill. It was the middle of April when the goddess

arrived, and she went to work at once. For the harvest that year was

such as had not been seen for many a long day, and in the very next

year Hannibal and his veterans embarked for Africa. As he looked his

last on the coast of Italy, fading behind him in the distance, he

could not foresee that Europe, which had repelled the arms, would

yet yield to the gods, of the Orient. The vanguard of the conquerors

had already encamped in the heart of Italy before the rearguard of

the beaten army fell sullenly back from its shores.

We may conjecture, though we are not told, that the Mother of the

Gods brought with her the worship of her youthful lover or son to

her new home in the West. Certainly the Romans were familiar with

the Galli, the emasculated priests of Attis, before the close of the

Republic. These unsexed beings, in their Oriental costume, with

little images suspended on their breasts, appear to have been a

familiar sight in the streets of Rome, which they traversed in

procession, carrying the image of the goddess and chanting their

hymns to the music of cymbals and tambourines, flutes and horns,

while the people, impressed by the fantastic show and moved by the

wild strains, flung alms to them in abundance, and buried the image

and its bearers under showers of roses. A further step was taken by

the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of

the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis,

in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of

Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was

celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman ceremonies

were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed hardly, if at

all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival seems to

have been as follows.

On the twenty-second day of March, a pine-tree was cut in the woods

and brought into the sanctuary of Cybele, where it was treated as a

great divinity. The duty of carrying the sacred tree was entrusted

to a guild of Tree-bearers. The trunk was swathed like a corpse with

woollen bands and decked with wreaths of violets, for violets were

said to have sprung from the blood of Attis, as roses and anemones

from the blood of Adonis; and the effigy of a young man, doubtless

Attis himself, was tied to the middle of the stem. On the second day

of the festival, the twenty-third of March, the chief ceremony seems

to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day, the twenty-fourth

of March, was known as the Day of Blood: the Archigallus or

highpriest drew blood from his arms and presented it as an offering.

Nor was he alone in making this bloody sacrifice. Stirred by the

wild barbaric music of clashing cymbals, rumbling drums, droning

horns, and screaming flutes, the inferior clergy whirled about in

the dance with waggling heads and streaming hair, until, rapt into a

frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain, they gashed their

bodies with potsherds or slashed them with knives in order to

bespatter the altar and the sacred tree with their flowing blood.

The ghastly rite probably formed part of the mourning for Attis and

may have been intended to strengthen him for the resurrection. The

Australian aborigines cut themselves in like manner over the graves

of their friends for the purpose, perhaps, of enabling them to be

born again. Further, we may conjecture, though we are not expressly

told, that it was on the same Day of Blood and for the same purpose

that the novices sacrificed their virility. Wrought up to the

highest pitch of religious excitement they dashed the severed

portions of themselves against the image of the cruel goddess. These

broken instruments of fertility were afterwards reverently wrapt up

and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to

Cybele, where, like the offering of blood, they may have been deemed

instrumental in recalling Attis to life and hastening the general

resurrection of nature, which was then bursting into leaf and

blossom in the vernal sunshine. Some confirmation of this conjecture

is furnished by the savage story that the mother of Attis conceived

by putting in her bosom a pomegranate sprung from the severed

genitals of a man-monster named Agdestis, a sort of double of Attis.

If there is any truth in this conjectural explanation of the custom,

we can readily understand why other Asiatic goddesses of fertility

were served in like manner by eunuch priests. These feminine deities

required to receive from their male ministers, who personated the

divine lovers, the means of discharging their beneficent functions:

they had themselves to be impregnated by the life-giving energy

before they could transmit it to the world. Goddesses thus

ministered to by eunuch priests were the great Artemis of Ephesus

and the great Syrian Astarte of Hierapolis, whose sanctuary,

frequented by swarms of pilgrims and enriched by the offerings of

Assyria and Babylonia, of Arabia and Phoenicia, was perhaps in the

days of its glory the most popular in the East. Now the unsexed

priests of this Syrian goddess resembled those of Cybele so closely

that some people took them to be the same. And the mode in which

they dedicated themselves to the religious life was similar. The

greatest festival of the year at Hierapolis fell at the beginning of

spring, when multitudes thronged to the sanctuary from Syria and the

regions round about. While the flutes played, the drums beat, and

the eunuch priests slashed themselves with knives, the religious

excitement gradually spread like a wave among the crowd of

onlookers, and many a one did that which he little thought to do

when he came as a holiday spectator to the festival. For man after

man, his veins throbbing with the music, his eyes fascinated by the

sight of the streaming blood, flung his garments from him, leaped

forth with a shout, and seizing one of the swords which stood ready

for the purpose, castrated himself on the spot. Then he ran through

the city, holding the bloody pieces in his hand, till he threw them

into one of the houses which he passed in his mad career. The

household thus honoured had to furnish him with a suit of female

attire and female ornaments, which he wore for the rest of his life.

When the tumult of emotion had subsided, and the man had come to

himself again, the irrevocable sacrifice must often have been

followed by passionate sorrow and lifelong regret. This revulsion of

natural human feeling after the frenzies of a fanatical religion is

powerfully depicted by Catullus in a celebrated poem.

The parallel of these Syrian devotees confirms the view that in the

similar worship of Cybele the sacrifice of virility took place on

the Day of Blood at the vernal rites of the goddess, when the

violets, supposed to spring from the red drops of her wounded lover,

were in bloom among the pines. Indeed the story that Attis unmanned

himself under a pine-tree was clearly devised to explain why his

priests did the same beside the sacred violet-wreathed tree at his

festival. At all events, we can hardly doubt that the Day of Blood

witnessed the mourning for Attis over an effigy of him which was

afterwards buried. The image thus laid in the sepulchre was probably

the same which had hung upon the tree. Throughout the period of

mourning the worshippers fasted from bread, nominally because Cybele

had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but really perhaps

for the same reason which induced the women of Harran to abstain

from eating anything ground in a mill while they wept for Tammuz. To

partake of bread or flour at such a season might have been deemed a

wanton profanation of the bruised and broken body of the god. Or the

fast may possibly have been a preparation for a sacramental meal.

But when night had fallen, the sorrow of the worshippers was turned

to joy. For suddenly a light shone in the darkness: the tomb was

opened: the god had risen from the dead; and as the priest touched

the lips of the weeping mourners with balm, he softly whispered in

their ears the glad tidings of salvation. The resurrection of the

god was hailed by his disciples as a promise that they too would

issue triumphant from the corruption of the grave. On the morrow,

the twenty-fifth day of March, which was reckoned the vernal

equinox, the divine resurrection was celebrated with a wild outburst

of glee. At Rome, and probably elsewhere, the celebration took the

form of a carnival. It was the Festival of Joy (_Hilaria_). A

universal licence prevailed. Every man might say and do what he

pleased. People went about the streets in disguise. No dignity was

too high or too sacred for the humblest citizen to assume with

impunity. In the reign of Commodus a band of conspirators thought to

take advantage of the masquerade by dressing in the uniform of the

Imperial Guard, and so, mingling with the crowd of merrymakers, to

get within stabbing distance of the emperor. But the plot

miscarried. Even the stern Alexander Severus used to relax so far on

the joyous day as to admit a pheasant to his frugal board. The next

day, the twenty-sixth of March, was given to repose, which must have

been much needed after the varied excitements and fatigues of the

preceding days. Finally, the Roman festival closed on the

twenty-seventh of March with a procession to the brook Almo. The

silver image of the goddess, with its face of jagged black stone,

sat in a waggon drawn by oxen. Preceded by the nobles walking

barefoot, it moved slowly, to the loud music of pipes and

tambourines, out by the Porta Capena, and so down to the banks of

the Almo, which flows into the Tiber just below the walls of Rome.

There the high-priest, robed in purple, washed the waggon, the

image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On

returning from their bath, the wain and the oxen were strewn with

fresh spring flowers. All was mirth and gaiety. No one thought of

the blood that had flowed so lately. Even the eunuch priests forgot

their wounds.

Such, then, appears to have been the annual solemnisation of the

death and resurrection of Attis in spring. But besides these public

rites, his worship is known to have comprised certain secret or

mystic ceremonies, which probably aimed at bringing the worshipper,

and especially the novice, into closer communication with his god.

Our information as to the nature of these mysteries and the date of

their celebration is unfortunately very scanty, but they seem to

have included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood. In the

sacrament the novice became a partaker of the mysteries by eating

out of a drum and drinking out of a cymbal, two instruments of music

which figured prominently in the thrilling orchestra of Attis. The

fast which accompanied the mourning for the dead god may perhaps

have been designed to prepare the body of the communicant for the

reception of the blessed sacrament by purging it of all that could

defile by contact the sacred elements. In the baptism the devotee,

crowned with gold and wreathed with fillets, descended into a pit,

the mouth of which was covered with a wooden grating. A bull,

adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead glittering with gold

leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there stabbed to death

with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood poured in torrents

through the apertures, and was received with devout eagerness by the

worshipper on every part of his person and garments, till he emerged

from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head to foot, to

receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows as one who had

been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins in the

blood of the bull. For some time afterwards the fiction of a new

birth was kept up by dieting him on milk like a new-born babe. The

regeneration of the worshipper took place at the same time as the

regeneration of his god, namely at the vernal equinox. At Rome the

new birth and the remission of sins by the shedding of bull's blood

appear to have been carried out above all at the sanctuary of the

Phrygian goddess on the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the

great basilica of St. Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions

relating to the rites were found when the church was being enlarged

in 1608 or 1609. From the Vatican as a centre this barbarous system

of superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman

empire. Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial

sanctuaries modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican. From the

same source we learn that the testicles as well as the blood of the

bull played an important part in the ceremonies. Probably they were

regarded as a powerful charm to promote fertility and hasten the new

birth.

XXXV. Attis as a God of Vegetation

THE ORIGINAL character of Attis as a tree-spirit is brought out

plainly by the part which the pine-tree plays in his legend, his

ritual, and his monuments. The story that he was a human being

transformed into a pine-tree is only one of those transparent

attempts at rationalising old beliefs which meet us so frequently in

mythology. The bringing in of the pine-tree from the woods, decked

with violets and woollen bands, is like bringing in the May-tree or

Summer-tree in modern folk-custom; and the effigy which was attached

to the pine-tree was only a duplicate representative of the

tree-spirit Attis. After being fastened to the tree, the effigy was

kept for a year and then burned. The same thing appears to have been

sometimes done with the May-pole; and in like manner the effigy of

the corn-spirit, made at harvest, is often preserved till it is

replaced by a new effigy at next year's harvest. The original

intention of such customs was no doubt to maintain the spirit of

vegetation in life throughout the year. Why the Phrygians should

have worshipped the pine above other trees we can only guess.

Perhaps the sight of its changeless, though sombre, green cresting

the ridges of the high hills above the fading splendour of the

autumn woods in the valleys may have seemed to their eyes to mark it

out as the seat of a diviner life, of something exempt from the sad

vicissitudes of the seasons, constant and eternal as the sky which

stooped to meet it. For the same reason, perhaps, ivy was sacred to

Attis; at all events, we read that his eunuch priests were tattooed

with a pattern of ivy leaves. Another reason for the sanctity of the

pine may have been its usefulness. The cones of the stone-pine

contain edible nut-like seeds, which have been used as food since

antiquity, and are still eaten, for example, by the poorer classes

in Rome. Moreover, a wine was brewed from these seeds, and this may

partly account for the orgiastic nature of the rites of Cybele,

which the ancients compared to those of Dionysus. Further,

pine-cones were regarded as symbols or rather instruments of

fertility. Hence at the festival of the Thesmophoria they were

thrown, along with pigs and other agents or emblems of fecundity,

into the sacred vaults of Demeter for the purpose of quickening the

ground and the wombs of women.

Like tree-spirits in general, Attis was apparently thought to wield

power over the fruits of the earth or even to be identical with the

corn. One of his epithets was "very fruitful": he was addressed as

the "reaped green (or yellow) ear of corn"; and the story of his

sufferings, death, and resurrection was interpreted as the ripe

grain wounded by the reaper, buried in the granary, and coming to

life again when it is sown in the ground. A statue of him in the

Lateran Museum at Rome clearly indicates his relation to the fruits

of the earth, and particularly to the corn; for it represents him

with a bunch of ears of corn and fruit in his hand, and a wreath of

pine-cones, pomegranates, and other fruits on his head, while from

the top of his Phrygian cap ears of corn are sprouting. On a stone

urn, which contained the ashes of an Archigallus or high-priest of

Attis, the same idea is expressed in a slightly different way. The

top of the urn is adorned with ears of corn carved in relief, and it

is surmounted by the figure of a cock, whose tail consists of ears

of corn. Cybele in like manner was conceived as a goddess of

fertility who could make or mar the fruits of the earth; for the

people of Augustodunum (Autun) in Gaul used to cart her image about

in a waggon for the good of the fields and vineyards, while they

danced and sang before it, and we have seen that in Italy an

unusually fine harvest was attributed to the recent arrival of the

Great Mother. The bathing of the image of the goddess in a river may

well have been a rain-charm to ensure an abundant supply of moisture

for the crops.

XXXVI. Human Representatives of Attis

FROM INSCRIPTIONS it appears that both at Pessinus and Rome the

high-priest of Cybele regularly bore the name of Attis. It is

therefore a reasonable conjecture that he played the part of his

namesake, the legendary Attis, at the annual festival. We have seen

that on the Day of Blood he drew blood from his arms, and this may

have been an imitation of the self-inflicted death of Attis under

the pine-tree. It is not inconsistent with this supposition that

Attis was also represented at these ceremonies by an effigy; for

instances can be shown in which the divine being is first

represented by a living person and afterwards by an effigy, which is

then burned or otherwise destroyed. Perhaps we may go a step farther

and conjecture that this mimic killing of the priest, accompanied by

a real effusion of his blood, was in Phrygia, as it has been

elsewhere, a substitute for a human sacrifice which in earlier times

was actually offered.

A reminiscence of the manner in which these old representatives of

the deity were put to death is perhaps preserved in the famous story

of Marsyas. He was said to be a Phrygian satyr or Silenus, according

to others a shepherd or herdsman, who played sweetly on the flute. A

friend of Cybele, he roamed the country with the disconsolate

goddess to soothe her grief for the death of Attis. The composition

of the Mother's Air, a tune played on the flute in honour of the

Great Mother Goddess, was attributed to him by the people of

Celaenae in Phrygia. Vain of his skill, he challenged Apollo to a

musical contest, he to play on the flute and Apollo on the lyre.

Being vanquished, Marsyas was tied up to a pine-tree and flayed or

cut limb from limb either by the victorious Apollo or by a Scythian

slave. His skin was shown at Celaenae in historical times. It hung

at the foot of the citadel in a cave from which the river Marsyas

rushed with an impetuous and noisy tide to join the Maeander. So the

Adonis bursts full-born from the precipices of the Lebanon; so the

blue river of Ibreez leaps in a crystal jet from the red rocks of

the Taurus; so the stream, which now rumbles deep underground, used

to gleam for a moment on its passage from darkness to darkness in

the dim light of the Corycian cave. In all these copious fountains,

with their glad promise of fertility and life, men of old saw the

hand of God and worshipped him beside the rushing river with the

music of its tumbling waters in their ears. At Celaenae, if we can

trust tradition, the piper Marsyas, hanging in his cave, had a soul

for harmony even in death; for it is said that at the sound of his

native Phrygian melodies the skin of the dead satyr used to thrill,

but that if the musician struck up an air in praise of Apollo it

remained deaf and motionless.

In this Phrygian satyr, shepherd, or herdsman who enjoyed the

friendship of Cybele, practised the music so characteristic of her

rites, and died a violent death on her sacred tree, the pine, may we

not detect a close resemblance to Attis, the favourite shepherd or

herdsman of the goddess, who is himself described as a piper, is

said to have perished under a pine-tree, and was annually

represented by an effigy hung, like Marsyas, upon a pine? We may

conjecture that in old days the priest who bore the name and played

the part of Attis at the spring festival of Cybele was regularly

hanged or otherwise slain upon the sacred tree, and that this

barbarous custom was afterwards mitigated into the form in which it

is known to us in later times, when the priest merely drew blood

from his body under the tree and attached an effigy instead of

himself to its trunk. In the holy grove at Upsala men and animals

were sacrificed by being hanged upon the sacred trees. The human

victims dedicated to Odin were regularly put to death by hanging or

by a combination of hanging and stabbing, the man being strung up to

a tree or a gallows and then wounded with a spear. Hence Odin was

called the Lord of the Gallows or the God of the Hanged, and he is

represented sitting under a gallows tree. Indeed he is said to have

been sacrificed to himself in the ordinary way, as we learn from the

weird verses of the _Havamal,_ in which the god describes how he

acquired his divine power by learning the magic runes:

"I know that I hung on the windy tree

For nine whole nights,

Wounded with the spear, dedicated to Odin,

Myself to myself."

The Bagobos of Mindanao, one of the Philippine Islands, used

annually to sacrifice human victims for the good of the crops in a

similar way. Early in December, when the constellation Orion

appeared at seven o'clock in the evening, the people knew that the

time had come to clear their fields for sowing and to sacrifice a

slave. The sacrifice was presented to certain powerful spirits as

payment for the good year which the people had enjoyed, and to

ensure the favour of the spirits for the coming season. The victim

was led to a great tree in the forest; there he was tied with his

back to the tree and his arms stretched high above his head, in the

attitude in which ancient artists portrayed Marsyas hanging on the

fatal tree. While he thus hung by the arms, he was slain by a spear

thrust through his body at the level of the armpits. Afterwards the

body was cut clean through the middle at the waist, and the upper

part was apparently allowed to dangle for a little from the tree,

while the under part wallowed in blood on the ground. The two

portions were finally cast into a shallow trench beside the tree.

Before this was done, anybody who wished might cut off a piece of

flesh or a lock of hair from the corpse and carry it to the grave of

some relation whose body was being consumed by a ghoul. Attracted by

the fresh corpse, the ghoul would leave the mouldering old body in

peace. These sacrifices have been offered by men now living.

In Greece the great goddess Artemis herself appears to have been

annually hanged in effigy in her sacred grove of Condylea among the

Arcadian hills, and there accordingly she went by the name of the

Hanged One. Indeed a trace of a similar rite may perhaps be detected

even at Ephesus, the most famous of her sanctuaries, in the legend

of a woman who hanged herself and was thereupon dressed by the

compassionate goddess in her own divine garb and called by the name

of Hecate. Similarly, at Melite in Phthia, a story was told of a

girl named Aspalis who hanged herself, but who appears to have been

merely a form of Artemis. For after her death her body could not be

found, but an image of her was discovered standing beside the image

of Artemis, and the people bestowed on it the title of Hecaerge or

Far-shooter, one of the regular epithets of the goddess. Every year

the virgins sacrificed a young goat to the image by hanging it,

because Aspalis was said to have hanged herself. The sacrifice may

have been a substitute for hanging an image or a human

representative of Artemis. Again, in Rhodes the fair Helen was

worshipped under the title of Helen of the Tree, because the queen

of the island had caused her handmaids, disguised as Furies, to

string her up to a bough. That the Asiatic Greeks sacrificed animals

in this fashion is proved by coins of Ilium, which represent an ox

or cow hanging on a tree and stabbed with a knife by a man, who sits

among the branches or on the animal's back. At Hierapolis also the

victims were hung on trees before they were burnt. With these Greek

and Scandinavian parallels before us we can hardly dismiss as wholly

improbable the conjecture that in Phrygia a man-god may have hung

year by year on the sacred but fatal tree.

XXXVII. Oriental Religions in the West

THE WORSHIP of the Great Mother of the Gods and her lover or son was

very popular under the Roman Empire. Inscriptions prove that the two

received divine honours, separately or conjointly, not only in

Italy, and especially at Rome, but also in the provinces,

particularly in Africa, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, and

Bulgaria. Their worship survived the establishment of Christianity

by Constantine; for Symmachus records the recurrence of the festival

of the Great Mother, and in the days of Augustine her effeminate

priests still paraded the streets and squares of Carthage with

whitened faces, scented hair, and mincing gait, while, like the

mendicant friars of the Middle Ages, they begged alms from the

passers-by. In Greece, on the other hand, the bloody orgies of the

Asiatic goddess and her consort appear to have found little favour.

The barbarous and cruel character of the worship, with its frantic

excesses, was doubtless repugnant to the good taste and humanity of

the Greeks, who seem to have preferred the kindred but gentler rites

of Adonis. Yet the same features which shocked and repelled the

Greeks may have positively attracted the less refined Romans and

barbarians of the West. The ecstatic frenzies, which were mistaken

for divine inspiration, the mangling of the body, the theory of a

new birth and the remission of sins through the shedding of blood,

have all their origin in savagery, and they naturally appealed to

peoples in whom the savage instincts were still strong. Their true

character was indeed often disguised under a decent veil of

allegorical or philosophical interpretation, which probably sufficed

to impose upon the rapt and enthusiastic worshippers, reconciling

even the more cultivated of them to things which otherwise must have

filled them with horror and disgust.

The religion of the Great Mother, with its curious blending of crude

savagery with spiritual aspirations, was only one of a multitude of

similar Oriental faiths which in the later days of paganism spread

over the Roman Empire, and by saturating the European peoples with

alien ideals of life gradually undermined the whole fabric of

ancient civilisation. Greek and Roman society was built on the

conception of the subordination of the individual to the community,

of the citizen to the state; it set the safety of the commonwealth,

as the supreme aim of conduct, above the safety of the individual

whether in this world or in the world to come. Trained from infancy

in this unselfish ideal, the citizens devoted their lives to the

public service and were ready to lay them down for the common good;

or if they shrank from the supreme sacrifice, it never occurred to

them that they acted otherwise than basely in preferring their

personal existence to the interests of their country. All this was

changed by the spread of Oriental religions which inculcated the

communion of the soul with God and its eternal salvation as the only

objects worth living for, objects in comparison with which the

prosperity and even the existence of the state sank into

insignificance. The inevitable result of this selfish and immoral

doctrine was to withdraw the devotee more and more from the public

service, to concentrate his thoughts on his own spiritual emotions,

and to breed in him a contempt for the present life which he

regarded merely as a probation for a better and an eternal. The

saint and the recluse, disdainful of earth and rapt in ecstatic

contemplation of heaven, became in popular opinion the highest ideal

of humanity, displacing the old ideal of the patriot and hero who,

forgetful of self, lives and is ready to die for the good of his

country. The earthly city seemed poor and contemptible to men whose

eyes beheld the City of God coming in the clouds of heaven. Thus the

centre of gravity, so to say, was shifted from the present to a

future life, and however much the other world may have gained, there

can be little doubt that this one lost heavily by the change. A

general disintegration of the body politic set in. The ties of the

state and the family were loosened: the structure of society tended

to resolve itself into its individual elements and thereby to

relapse into barbarism; for civilisation is only possible through

the active co-operation of the citizens and their willingness to

subordinate their private interests to the common good. Men refused

to defend their country and even to continue their kind. In their

anxiety to save their own souls and the souls of others, they were

content to leave the material world, which they identified with the

principle of evil, to perish around them. This obsession lasted for

a thousand years. The revival of Roman law, of the Aristotelian

philosophy, of ancient art and literature at the close of the Middle

Ages, marked the return of Europe to native ideals of life and

conduct, to saner, manlier views of the world. The long halt in the

march of civilisation was over. The tide of Oriental invasion had

turned at last. It is ebbing still.

Among the gods of eastern origin who in the decline of the ancient

world competed against each other for the allegiance of the West was

the old Persian deity Mithra. The immense popularity of his worship

is attested by the monuments illustrative of it which have been

found scattered in profusion all over the Roman Empire. In respect

both of doctrines and of rites the cult of Mithra appears to have

presented many points of resemblance not only to the religion of the

Mother of the Gods but also to Christianity. The similarity struck

the Christian doctors themselves and was explained by them as a work

of the devil, who sought to seduce the souls of men from the true

faith by a false and insidious imitation of it. So to the Spanish

conquerors of Mexico and Peru many of the native heathen rites

appeared to be diabolical counterfeits of the Christian sacraments.

With more probability the modern student of comparative religion

traces such resemblances to the similar and independent workings of

the mind of man in his sincere, if crude, attempts to fathom the

secret of the universe, and to adjust his little life to its awful

mysteries. However that may be, there can be no doubt that the

Mithraic religion proved a formidable rival to Christianity,

combining as it did a solemn ritual with aspirations after moral

purity and a hope of immortality. Indeed the issue of the conflict

between the two faiths appears for a time to have hung in the

balance. An instructive relic of the long struggle is preserved in

our festival of Christmas, which the Church seems to have borrowed

directly from its heathen rival. In the Julian calendar the

twenty-fifth of December was reckoned the winter solstice, and it

was regarded as the Nativity of the Sun, because the day begins to

lengthen and the power of the sun to increase from that

turning-point of the year. The ritual of the nativity, as it appears

to have been celebrated in Syria and Egypt, was remarkable. The

celebrants retired into certain inner shrines, from which at

midnight they issued with a loud cry, "The Virgin has brought forth!

The light is waxing!" The Egyptians even represented the new-born

sun by the image of an infant which on his birthday, the winter

solstice, they brought forth and exhibited to his worshippers. No

doubt the Virgin who thus conceived and bore a son on the

twenty-fifth of December was the great Oriental goddess whom the

Semites called the Heavenly Virgin or simply the Heavenly Goddess;

in Semitic lands she was a form of Astarte. Now Mithra was regularly

identified by his worshippers with the Sun, the Unconquered Sun, as

they called him; hence his nativity also fell on the twenty-fifth of

December. The Gospels say nothing as to the day of Christ's birth,

and accordingly the early Church did not celebrate it. In time,

however, the Christians of Egypt came to regard the sixth of January

as the date of the Nativity, and the custom of commemorating the

birth of the Saviour on that day gradually spread until by the

fourth century it was universally established in the East. But at

the end of the third or the beginning of the fourth century the

Western Church, which had never recognised the sixth of January as

the day of the Nativity, adopted the twenty-fifth of December as the

true date, and in time its decision was accepted also by the Eastern

Church. At Antioch the change was not introduced till about the year

375 A.D.

What considerations led the ecclesiastical authorities to institute

the festival of Christmas? The motives for the innovation are stated

with great frankness by a Syrian writer, himself a Christian. "The

reason," he tells us, "why the fathers transferred the celebration

of the sixth of January to the twenty-fifth of December was this. It

was a custom of the heathen to celebrate on the same twenty-fifth of

December the birthday of the Sun, at which they kindled lights in

token of festivity. In these solemnities and festivities the

Christians also took part. Accordingly when the doctors of the

Church perceived that the Christians had a leaning to this festival,

they took counsel and resolved that the true Nativity should be

solemnised on that day and the festival of the Epiphany on the sixth

of January. Accordingly, along with this custom, the practice has

prevailed of kindling fires till the sixth." The heathen origin of

Christmas is plainly hinted at, if not tacitly admitted, by

Augustine when he exhorts his Christian brethren not to celebrate

that solemn day like the heathen on account of the sun, but on

account of him who made the sun. In like manner Leo the Great

rebuked the pestilent belief that Christmas was solemnised because

of the birth of the new sun, as it was called, and not because of

the nativity of Christ.

Thus it appears that the Christian Church chose to celebrate the

birthday of its Founder on the twenty-fifth of December in order to

transfer the devotion of the heathen from the Sun to him who was

called the Sun of Righteousness. If that was so, there can be no

intrinsic improbability in the conjecture that motives of the same

sort may have led the ecclesiastical authorities to assimilate the

Easter festival of the death and resurrection of their Lord to the

festival of the death and resurrection of another Asiatic god which

fell at the same season. Now the Easter rites still observed in

Greece, Sicily, and Southern Italy bear in some respects a striking

resemblance to the rites of Adonis, and I have suggested that the

Church may have consciously adapted the new festival to its heathen

predecessor for the sake of winning souls to Christ. But this

adaptation probably took place in the Greek-speaking rather than in

the Latin-speaking parts of the ancient world; for the worship of

Adonis, while it flourished among the Greeks, appears to have made

little impression on Rome and the West. Certainly it never formed

part of the official Roman religion. The place which it might have

taken in the affections of the vulgar was already occupied by the

similar but more barbarous worship of Attis and the Great Mother.

Now the death and resurrection of Attis were officially celebrated

at Rome on the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of March, the latter

being regarded as the spring equinox, and therefore as the most

appropriate day for the revival of a god of vegetation who had been

dead or sleeping throughout the winter. But according to an ancient

and widespread tradition Christ suffered on the twenty-fifth of

March, and accordingly some Christians regularly celebrated the

Crucifixion on that day without any regard to the state of the moon.

This custom was certainly observed in Phrygia, Cappadocia, and Gaul,

and there seem to be grounds for thinking that at one time it was

followed also in Rome. Thus the tradition which placed the death of

Christ on the twenty-fifth of March was ancient and deeply rooted.

It is all the more remarkable because astronomical considerations

prove that it can have had no historical foundation. The inference

appears to be inevitable that the passion of Christ must have been

arbitrarily referred to that date in order to harmonise with an

older festival of the spring equinox. This is the view of the

learned ecclesiastical historian Mgr. Duchesne, who points out that

the death of the Saviour was thus made to fall upon the very day on

which, according to a widespread belief, the world had been created.

But the resurrection of Attis, who combined in himself the

characters of the divine Father and the divine Son, was officially

celebrated at Rome on the same day. When we remember that the

festival of St. George in April has replaced the ancient pagan

festival of the Parilia; that the festival of St. John the Baptist

in June has succeeded to a heathen midsummer festival of water: that

the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin in August has ousted

the festival of Diana; that the feast of All Souls in November is a

continuation of an old heathen feast of the dead; and that the

Nativity of Christ himself was assigned to the winter solstice in

December because that day was deemed the Nativity of the Sun; we can

hardly be thought rash or unreasonable in conjecturing that the

other cardinal festival of the Christian church--the solemnisation

of Easter--may have been in like manner, and from like motives of

edification, adapted to a similar celebration of the Phrygian god

Attis at the vernal equinox.

At least it is a remarkable coincidence, if it is nothing more, that

the Christian and the heathen festivals of the divine death and

resurrection should have been solemnised at the same season and in

the same places. For the places which celebrated the death of Christ

at the spring equinox were Phrygia, Gaul, and apparently Rome, that

is, the very regions in which the worship of Attis either originated

or struck deepest root. It is difficult to regard the coincidence as

purely accidental. If the vernal equinox, the season at which in the

temperate regions the whole face of nature testifies to a fresh

outburst of vital energy, had been viewed from of old as the time

when the world was annually created afresh in the resurrection of a

god, nothing could be more natural than to place the resurrection of

the new deity at the same cardinal point of the year. Only it is to

be observed that if the death of Christ was dated on the

twenty-fifth of March, his resurrection, according to Christian

tradition, must have happened on the twenty-seventh of March, which

is just two days later than the vernal equinox of the Julian

calendar and the resurrection of Attis. A similar displacement of

two days in the adjustment of Christian to heathen celebrations

occurs in the festivals of St. George and the Assumption of the

Virgin. However, another Christian tradition, followed by Lactantius

and perhaps by the practice of the Church in Gaul, placed the death

of Christ on the twenty-third and his resurrection on the

twenty-fifth of March. If that was so, his resurrection coincided

exactly with the resurrection of Attis.

In point of fact it appears from the testimony of an anonymous

Christian, who wrote in the fourth century of our era, that

Christians and pagans alike were struck by the remarkable

coincidence between the death and resurrection of their respective

deities, and that the coincidence formed a theme of bitter

controversy between the adherents of the rival religions, the pagans

contending that the resurrection of Christ was a spurious imitation

of the resurrection of Attis, and the Christians asserting with

equal warmth that the resurrection of Attis was a diabolical

counterfeit of the resurrection of Christ. In these unseemly

bickerings the heathen took what to a superficial observer might

seem strong ground by arguing that their god was the older and

therefore presumably the original, not the counterfeit, since as a

general rule an original is older than its copy. This feeble

argument the Christians easily rebutted. They admitted, indeed, that

in point of time Christ was the junior deity, but they triumphantly

demonstrated his real seniority by falling back on the subtlety of

Satan, who on so important an occasion had surpassed himself by

inverting the usual order of nature.

Taken altogether, the coincidences of the Christian with the heathen

festivals are too close and too numerous to be accidental. They mark

the compromise which the Church in the hour of its triumph was

compelled to make with its vanquished yet still dangerous rivals.

The inflexible Protestantism of the primitive missionaries, with

their fiery denunciations of heathendom, had been exchanged for the

supple policy, the easy tolerance, the comprehensive charity of

shrewd ecclesiastics, who clearly perceived that if Christianity was

to conquer the world it could do so only by relaxing the too rigid

principles of its Founder, by widening a little the narrow gate

which leads to salvation. In this respect an instructive parallel

might be drawn between the history of Christianity and the history

of Buddhism. Both systems were in their origin essentially ethical

reforms born of the generous ardour, the lofty aspirations, the

tender compassion of their noble Founders, two of those beautiful

spirits who appear at rare intervals on earth like beings come from

a better world to support and guide our weak and erring nature. Both

preached moral virtue as the means of accomplishing what they

regarded as the supreme object of life, the eternal salvation of the

individual soul, though by a curious antithesis the one sought that

salvation in a blissful eternity, the other in a final release from

suffering, in annihilation. But the austere ideals of sanctity which

they inculcated were too deeply opposed not only to the frailties

but to the natural instincts of humanity ever to be carried out in

practice by more than a small number of disciples, who consistently

renounced the ties of the family and the state in order to work out

their own salvation in the still seclusion of the cloister. If such

faiths were to be nominally accepted by whole nations or even by the

world, it was essential that they should first be modified or

transformed so as to accord in some measure with the prejudices, the

passions, the superstitions of the vulgar. This process of

accommodation was carried out in after ages by followers who, made

of less ethereal stuff than their masters, were for that reason the

better fitted to mediate between them and the common herd. Thus as

time went on, the two religions, in exact proportion to their

growing popularity, absorbed more and more of those baser elements

which they had been instituted for the very purpose of suppressing.

Such spiritual decadences are inevitable. The world cannot live at

the level of its great men. Yet it would be unfair to the generality

of our kind to ascribe wholly to their intellectual and moral

weakness the gradual divergence of Buddhism and Christianity from

their primitive patterns. For it should never be forgotten that by

their glorification of poverty and celibacy both these religions

struck straight at the root not merely of civil society but of human

existence. The blow was parried by the wisdom or the folly of the

vast majority of mankind, who refused to purchase a chance of saving

their souls with the certainty of extinguishing the species.

XXXVIII. The Myth of Osiris

IN ANCIENT EGYPT the god whose death and resurrection were annually

celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the most

popular of all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds for

classing him in one of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a

personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature,

especially of the corn. But the immense vogue which he enjoyed for

many ages induced his devoted worshippers to heap upon him the

attributes and powers of many other gods; so that it is not always

easy to strip him, so to say, of his borrowed plumes and to restore

them to their proper owners.

The story of Osiris is told in a connected form only by Plutarch,

whose narrative has been confirmed and to some extent amplified in

modern times by the evidence of the monuments.

Osiris was the offspring of an intrigue between the earth-god Seb

(Keb or Geb, as the name is sometimes transliterated) and the

sky-goddess Nut. The Greeks identified his parents with their own

deities Cronus and Rhea. When the sun-god Ra perceived that his wife

Nut had been unfaithful to him, he declared with a curse that she

should be delivered of the child in no month and no year. But the

goddess had another lover, the god Thoth or Hermes, as the Greeks

called him, and he playing at draughts with the moon won from her a

seventy-second part of every day, and having compounded five whole

days out of these parts he added them to the Egyptian year of three

hundred and sixty days. This was the mythical origin of the five

supplementary days which the Egyptians annually inserted at the end

of every year in order to establish a harmony between lunar and

solar time. On these five days, regarded as outside the year of

twelve months, the curse of the sun-god did not rest, and

accordingly Osiris was born on the first of them. At his nativity a

voice rang out proclaiming that the Lord of All had come into the

world. Some say that a certain Pamyles heard a voice from the temple

at Thebes bidding him announce with a shout that a great king, the

beneficent Osiris, was born. But Osiris was not the only child of

his mother. On the second of the supplementary days she gave birth

to the elder Horus, on the third to the god Set, whom the Greeks

called Typhon, on the fourth to the goddess Isis, and on the fifth

to the goddess Nephthys. Afterwards Set married his sister Nephthys,

and Osiris married his sister Isis.

Reigning as a king on earth, Osiris reclaimed the Egyptians from

savagery, gave them laws, and taught them to worship the gods.

Before his time the Egyptians had been cannibals. But Isis, the

sister and wife of Osiris, discovered wheat and barley growing wild,

and Osiris introduced the cultivation of these grains amongst his

people, who forthwith abandoned cannibalism and took kindly to a

corn diet. Moreover, Osiris is said to have been the first to gather

fruit from trees, to train the vine to poles, and to tread the

grapes. Eager to communicate these beneficent discoveries to all

mankind, he committed the whole government of Egypt to his wife

Isis, and travelled over the world, diffusing the blessings of

civilisation and agriculture wherever he went. In countries where a

harsh climate or niggardly soil forbade the cultivation of the vine,

he taught the inhabitants to console themselves for the want of wine

by brewing beer from barley. Loaded with the wealth that had been

showered upon him by grateful nations, he returned to Egypt, and on

account of the benefits he had conferred on mankind he was

unanimously hailed and worshipped as a deity. But his brother Set

(whom the Greeks called Typhon) with seventy-two others plotted

against him. Having taken the measure of his good brother's body by

stealth, the bad brother Typhon fashioned and highly decorated a

coffer of the same size, and once when they were all drinking and

making merry he brought in the coffer and jestingly promised to give

it to the one whom it should fit exactly. Well, they all tried one

after the other, but it fitted none of them. Last of all Osiris

stepped into it and lay down. On that the conspirators ran and

slammed the lid down on him, nailed it fast, soldered it with molten

lead, and flung the coffer into the Nile. This happened on the

seventeenth day of the month Athyr, when the sun is in the sign of

the Scorpion, and in the eight-and-twentieth year of the reign or

the life of Osiris. When Isis heard of it she sheared off a lock of

her hair, put on a mourning attire, and wandered disconsolately up

and down, seeking the body.

By the advice of the god of wisdom she took refuge in the papyrus

swamps of the Delta. Seven scorpions accompanied her in her flight.

One evening when she was weary she came to the house of a woman,

who, alarmed at the sight of the scorpions, shut the door in her

face. Then one of the scorpions crept under the door and stung the

child of the woman that he died. But when Isis heard the mother's

lamentation, her heart was touched, and she laid her hands on the

child and uttered her powerful spells; so the poison was driven out

of the child and he lived. Afterwards Isis herself gave birth to a

son in the swamps. She had conceived him while she fluttered in the

form of a hawk over the corpse of her dead husband. The infant was

the younger Horus, who in his youth bore the name of Harpocrates,

that is, the child Horus. Him Buto, the goddess of the north, hid

from the wrath of his wicked uncle Set. Yet she could not guard him

from all mishap; for one day when Isis came to her little son's

hiding-place she found him stretched lifeless and rigid on the

ground: a scorpion had stung him. Then Isis prayed to the sun-god Ra

for help. The god hearkened to her and staid his bark in the sky,

and sent down Thoth to teach her the spell by which she might

restore her son to life. She uttered the words of power, and

straightway the poison flowed from the body of Horus, air passed

into him, and he lived. Then Thoth ascended up into the sky and took

his place once more in the bark of the sun, and the bright pomp

passed onward jubilant.

Meantime the coffer containing the body of Osiris had floated down

the river and away out to sea, till at last it drifted ashore at

Byblus, on the coast of Syria. Here a fine _erica_-tree shot up

suddenly and enclosed the chest in its trunk. The king of the

country, admiring the growth of the tree, had it cut down and made

into a pillar of his house; but he did not know that the coffer with

the dead Osiris was in it. Word of this came to Isis and she

journeyed to Byblus, and sat down by the well, in humble guise, her

face wet with tears. To none would she speak till the king's

handmaidens came, and them she greeted kindly, and braided their

hair, and breathed on them from her own divine body a wondrous

perfume. But when the queen beheld the braids of her handmaidens'

hair and smelt the sweet smell that emanated from them, she sent for

the stranger woman and took her into her house and made her the

nurse of her child. But Isis gave the babe her finger instead of her

breast to suck, and at night she began to burn all that was mortal

of him away, while she herself in the likeness of a swallow

fluttered round the pillar that contained her dead brother,

twittering mournfully. But the queen spied what she was doing and

shrieked out when she saw her child in flames, and thereby she

hindered him from becoming immortal. Then the goddess revealed

herself and begged for the pillar of the roof, and they gave it her,

and she cut the coffer out of it, and fell upon it and embraced it

and lamented so loud that the younger of the king's children died of

fright on the spot. But the trunk of the tree she wrapped in fine

linen, and poured ointment on it, and gave it to the king and queen,

and the wood stands in a temple of Isis and is worshipped by the

people of Byblus to this day. And Isis put the coffer in a boat and

took the eldest of the king's children with her and sailed away. As

soon as they were alone, she opened the chest, and laying her face

on the face of her brother she kissed him and wept. But the child

came behind her softly and saw what she was about, and she turned

and looked at him in anger, and the child could not bear her look

and died; but some say that it was not so, but that he fell into the

sea and was drowned. It is he whom the Egyptians sing of at their

banquets under the name of Maneros.

But Isis put the coffer by and went to see her son Horus at the city

of Buto, and Typhon found the coffer as he was hunting a boar one

night by the light of a full moon. And he knew the body, and rent it

into fourteen pieces, and scattered them abroad. But Isis sailed up

and down the marshes in a shallop made of papyrus, looking for the

pieces; and that is why when people sail in shallops made of

papyrus, the crocodiles do not hurt them, for they fear or respect

the goddess. And that is the reason, too, why there are many graves

of Osiris in Egypt, for she buried each limb as she found it. But

others will have it that she buried an image of him in every city,

pretending it was his body, in order that Osiris might be worshipped

in many places, and that if Typhon searched for the real grave he

might not be able to find it. However, the genital member of Osiris

had been eaten by the fishes, so Isis made an image of it instead,

and the image is used by the Egyptians at their festivals to this

day. "Isis," writes the historian Diodorus Siculus, "recovered all

the parts of the body except the genitals; and because she wished

that her husband's grave should be unknown and honoured by all who

dwell in the land of Egypt, she resorted to the following device.

She moulded human images out of wax and spices, corresponding to the

stature of Osiris, round each one of the parts of his body. Then she

called in the priests according to their families and took an oath

of them all that they would reveal to no man the trust she was about

to repose in them. So to each of them privately she said that to

them alone she entrusted the burial of the body, and reminding them

of the benefits they had received she exhorted them to bury the body

in their own land and to honour Osiris as a god. She also besought

them to dedicate one of the animals of their country, whichever they

chose, and to honour it in life as they had formerly honoured

Osiris, and when it died to grant it obsequies like his. And because

she would encourage the priests in their own interest to bestow the

aforesaid honours, she gave them a third part of the land to be used

by them in the service and worship of the gods. Accordingly it is

said that the priests, mindful of the benefits of Osiris, desirous

of gratifying the queen, and moved by the prospect of gain, carried

out all the injunctions of Isis. Wherefore to this day each of the

priests imagines that Osiris is buried in his country, and they

honour the beasts that were consecrated in the beginning, and when

the animals die the priests renew at their burial the mourning for

Osiris. But the sacred bulls, the one called Apis and the other

Mnevis, were dedicated to Osiris, and it was ordained that they

should be worshipped as gods in common by all the Egyptians, since

these animals above all others had helped the discoverers of corn in

sowing the seed and procuring the universal benefits of

agriculture."

Such is the myth or legend of Osiris, as told by Greek writers and

eked out by more or less fragmentary notices or allusions in native

Egyptian literature. A long inscription in the temple at Denderah

has preserved a list of the god's graves, and other texts mention

the parts of his body which were treasured as holy relics in each of

the sanctuaries. Thus his heart was at Athribis, his backbone at

Busiris, his neck at Letopolis, and his head at Memphis. As often

happens in such cases, some of his divine limbs were miraculously

multiplied. His head, for example, was at Abydos as well as at

Memphis, and his legs, which were remarkably numerous, would have

sufficed for several ordinary mortals. In this respect, however,

Osiris was nothing to St. Denys, of whom no less than seven heads,

all equally genuine, are extant.

According to native Egyptian accounts, which supplement that of

Plutarch, when Isis had found the corpse of her husband Osiris, she

and her sister Nephthys sat down beside it and uttered a lament

which in after ages became the type of all Egyptian lamentations for

the dead. "Come to thy house," they wailed. "Come to thy house. O

god On! come to thy house, thou who hast no foes. O fair youth, come

to thy house, that thou mayest see me. I am thy sister, whom thou

lovest; thou shalt not part from me. O fair boy, come to thy house.

. . . I see thee not, yet doth my heart yearn after thee and mine

eyes desire thee. Come to her who loves thee, who loves thee,

Unnefer, thou blessed one! Come to thy sister, come to thy wife, to

thy wife, thou whose heart stands still. Come to thy housewife. I am

thy sister by the same mother, thou shalt not be far from me. Gods

and men have turned their faces towards thee and weep for thee

together. . . . I call after thee and weep, so that my cry is heard

to heaven, but thou hearest not my voice; yet am I thy sister, whom

thou didst love on earth; thou didst love none but me, my brother!

my brother!" This lament for the fair youth cut off in his prime

reminds us of the laments for Adonis. The title of Unnefer or "the

Good Being" bestowed on him marks the beneficence which tradition

universally ascribed to Osiris; it was at once his commonest title

and one of his names as king.

The lamentations of the two sad sisters were not in vain. In pity

for her sorrow the sun-god Ra sent down from heaven the

jackal-headed god Anubis, who, with the aid of Isis and Nephthys, of

Thoth and Horus, pieced together the broken body of the murdered

god, swathed it in linen bandages, and observed all the other rites

which the Egyptians were wont to perform over the bodies of the

departed. Then Isis fanned the cold clay with her wings: Osiris

revived, and thenceforth reigned as king over the dead in the other

world. There he bore the titles of Lord of the Underworld, Lord of

Eternity, Ruler of the Dead. There, too, in the great Hall of the

Two Truths, assisted by forty-two assessors, one from each of the

principal districts of Egypt, he presided as judge at the trial of

the souls of the departed, who made their solemn confession before

him, and, their heart having been weighed in the balance of justice,

received the reward of virtue in a life eternal or the appropriate

punishment of their sins.

In the resurrection of Osiris the Egyptians saw the pledge of a life

everlasting for themselves beyond the grave. They believed that

every man would live eternally in the other world if only his

surviving friends did for his body what the gods had done for the

body of Osiris. Hence the ceremonies observed by the Egyptians over

the human dead were an exact copy of those which Anubis, Horus, and

the rest had performed over the dead god. "At every burial there was

enacted a representation of the divine mystery which had been

performed of old over Osiris, when his son, his sisters, his friends

were gathered round his mangled remains and succeeded by their

spells and manipulations in converting his broken body into the

first mummy, which they afterwards reanimated and furnished with the

means of entering on a new individual life beyond the grave. The

mummy of the deceased was Osiris; the professional female mourners

were his two sisters Isis and Nephthys; Anubis, Horus, all the gods

of the Osirian legend gathered about the corpse." In this way every

dead Egyptian was identified with Osiris and bore his name. From the

Middle Kingdom onwards it was the regular practice to address the

deceased as "Osiris So-and-So," as if he were the god himself, and

to add the standing epithet "true of speech," because true speech

was characteristic of Osiris. The thousands of inscribed and

pictured tombs that have been opened in the valley of the Nile prove

that the mystery of the resurrection was performed for the benefit

of every dead Egyptian; as Osiris died and rose again from the dead,

so all men hoped to arise like him from death to life eternal.

Thus according to what seems to have been the general native

tradition Osiris was a good and beloved king of Egypt, who suffered

a violent death but rose from the dead and was henceforth worshipped

as a deity. In harmony with this tradition he was regularly

represented by sculptors and painters in human and regal form as a

dead king, swathed in the wrappings of a mummy, but wearing on his

head a kingly crown and grasping in one of his hands, which were

left free from the bandages, a kingly sceptre. Two cities above all

others were associated with his myth or memory. One of them was

Busiris in Lower Egypt, which claimed to possess his backbone; the

other was Abydos in Upper Egypt, which gloried in the possession of

his head. Encircled by the nimbus of the dead yet living god,

Abydos, originally an obscure place, became from the end of the Old

Kingdom the holiest spot in Egypt; his tomb there would seem to have

been to the Egyptians what the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at

Jerusalem is to Christians. It was the wish of every pious man that

his dead body should rest in hallowed earth near the grave of the

glorified Osiris. Few indeed were rich enough to enjoy this

inestimable privilege; for, apart from the cost of a tomb in the

sacred city, the mere transport of mummies from great distances was

both difficult and expensive. Yet so eager were many to absorb in

death the blessed influence which radiated from the holy sepulchre

that they caused their surviving friends to convey their mortal

remains to Abydos, there to tarry for a short time, and then to be

brought back by river and interred in the tombs which had been made

ready for them in their native land. Others had cenotaphs built or

memorial tablets erected for themselves near the tomb of their dead

and risen Lord, that they might share with him the bliss of a joyful

resurrection.

XXXIX. The Ritual of Osiris

1. The Popular Rites

A USEFUL clue to the original nature of a god or goddess is often

furnished by the season at which his or her festival is celebrated.

Thus, if the festival falls at the new or the full moon, there is a

certain presumption that the deity thus honoured either is the moon

or at least has lunar affinities. If the festival is held at the

winter or summer solstice, we naturally surmise that the god is the

sun, or at all events that he stands in some close relation to that

luminary. Again, if the festival coincides with the time of sowing

or harvest, we are inclined to infer that the divinity is an

embodiment of the earth or of the corn. These presumptions or

inferences, taken by themselves, are by no means conclusive; but if

they happen to be confirmed by other indications, the evidence may

be regarded as fairly strong.

Unfortunately, in dealing with the Egyptian gods we are in a great

measure precluded from making use of this clue. The reason is not

that the dates of the festivals are always unknown, but that they

shifted from year to year, until after a long interval they had

revolved through the whole course of the seasons. This gradual

revolution of the festal Egyptian cycle resulted from the employment

of a calendar year which neither corresponded exactly to the solar

year nor was periodically corrected by intercalation.

If the Egyptian farmer of the olden time could get no help, except

at the rarest intervals, from the official or sacerdotal calendar,

he must have been compelled to observe for himself those natural

signals which marked the times for the various operations of

husbandry. In all ages of which we possess any records the Egyptians

have been an agricultural people, dependent for their subsistence on

the growth of the corn. The cereals which they cultivated were

wheat, barley, and apparently sorghum (_Holcus sorghum,_ Linnaeus),

the _doora_ of the modern fellaheen. Then as now the whole country,

with the exception of a fringe on the coast of the Mediterranean,

was almost rainless, and owed its immense fertility entirely to the

annual inundation of the Nile, which, regulated by an elaborate

system of dams and canals, was distributed over the fields, renewing

the soil year by year with a fresh deposit of mud washed down from

the great equatorial lakes and the mountains of Abyssinia. Hence the

rise of the river has always been watched by the inhabitants with

the utmost anxiety; for if it either falls short of or exceeds a

certain height, dearth and famine are the inevitable consequences.

The water begins to rise early in June, but it is not until the

latter half of July that it swells to a mighty tide. By the end of

September the inundation is at its greatest height. The country is

now submerged, and presents the appearance of a sea of turbid water,

from which the towns and villages, built on higher ground, rise like

islands. For about a month the flood remains nearly stationary, then

sinks more and more rapidly, till by December or January the river

has returned to its ordinary bed. With the approach of summer the

level of the water continues to fall. In the early days of June the

Nile is reduced to half its ordinary breadth; and Egypt, scorched by

the sun, blasted by the wind that has blown from the Sahara for many

days, seems a mere continuation of the desert. The trees are choked

with a thick layer of grey dust. A few meagre patches of vegetables,

watered with difficulty, struggle painfully for existence in the

immediate neighbourhood of the villages. Some appearance of verdure

lingers beside the canals and in the hollows from which the moisture

has not wholly evaporated. The plain appears to pant in the pitiless

sunshine, bare, dusty, ash-coloured, cracked and seamed as far as

the eye can see with a network of fissures. From the middle of April

till the middle of June the land of Egypt is but half alive, waiting

for the new Nile.

For countless ages this cycle of natural events has determined the

annual labours of the Egyptian husbandman. The first work of the

agricultural year is the cutting of the dams which have hitherto

prevented the swollen river from flooding the canals and the fields.

This is done, and the pent-up waters released on their beneficent

mission, in the first half of August. In November, when the

inundation has subsided, wheat, barley, and sorghum are sown. The

time of harvest varies with the district, falling about a month

later in the north than in the south. In Upper or Southern Egypt

barley is reaped at the beginning of March, wheat at the beginning

of April, and sorghum about the end of that month.

It is natural to suppose that the various events of the agricultural

year were celebrated by the Egyptian farmer with some simple

religious rites designed to secure the blessing of the gods upon his

labours. These rustic ceremonies he would continue to perform year

after year at the same season, while the solemn festivals of the

priests continued to shift, with the shifting calendar, from summer

through spring to winter, and so backward through autumn to summer.

The rites of the husbandman were stable because they rested on

direct observation of nature: the rites of the priest were unstable

because they were based on a false calculation. Yet many of the

priestly festivals may have been nothing but the old rural festivals

disguised in the course of ages by the pomp of sacerdotalism and

severed, by the error of the calendar, from their roots in the

natural cycle of the seasons.

These conjectures are confirmed by the little we know both of the

popular and of the official Egyptian religion. Thus we are told that

the Egyptians held a festival of Isis at the time when the Nile

began to rise. They believed that the goddess was then mourning for

the lost Osiris, and that the tears which dropped from her eyes

swelled the impetuous tide of the river. Now if Osiris was in one of

his aspects a god of the corn, nothing could be more natural than

that he should be mourned at midsummer. For by that time the harvest

was past, the fields were bare, the river ran low, life seemed to be

suspended, the corn-god was dead. At such a moment people who saw

the handiwork of divine beings in all the operations of nature might

well trace the swelling of the sacred stream to the tears shed by

the goddess at the death of the beneficent corn-god her husband.

And the sign of the rising waters on earth was accompanied by a sign

in heaven. For in the early days of Egyptian history, some three or

four thousand years before the beginning of our era, the splendid

star of Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, appeared at

dawn in the east just before sunrise about the time of the summer

solstice, when the Nile begins to rise. The Egyptians called it

Sothis, and regarded it as the star of Isis, just as the Babylonians

deemed the planet Venus the star of Astarte. To both peoples

apparently the brilliant luminary in the morning sky seemed the

goddess of life and love come to mourn her departed lover or spouse

and to wake him from the dead. Hence the rising of Sirius marked the

beginning of the sacred Egyptian year, and was regularly celebrated

by a festival which did not shift with the shifting official year.

The cutting of the dams and the admission of the water into the

canals and fields is a great event in the Egyptian year. At Cairo

the operation generally takes place between the sixth and the

sixteenth of August, and till lately was attended by ceremonies

which deserve to be noticed, because they were probably handed down

from antiquity. An ancient canal, known by the name of the Khalíj,

formerly passed through the native town of Cairo. Near its entrance

the canal was crossed by a dam of earth, very broad at the bottom

and diminishing in breadth upwards, which used to be constructed

before or soon after the Nile began to rise. In front of the dam, on

the side of the river, was reared a truncated cone of earth called

the '_arooseh_ or "bride," on the top of which a little maize or

millet was generally sown. This "bride" was commonly washed down by

the rising tide a week or a fortnight before the cutting of the dam.

Tradition runs that the old custom was to deck a young virgin in gay

apparel and throw her into the river as a sacrifice to obtain a

plentiful inundation. Whether that was so or not, the intention of

the practice appears to have been to marry the river, conceived as a

male power, to his bride the cornland, which was so soon to be

fertilised by his water. The ceremony was therefore a charm to

ensure the growth of the crops. In modern times money used to be

thrown into the canal on this occasion, and the populace dived into

the water after it. This practice also would seem to have been

ancient, for Seneca tells us that at a place called the Veins of the

Nile, not far from Philae, the priests used to cast money and

offerings of gold into the river at a festival which apparently took

place at the rising of the water.

The next great operation of the agricultural year in Egypt is the

sowing of the seed in November, when the water of the inundation has

retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many peoples

of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the

character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let

Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the

gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to

omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions

of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many

rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about

the same time. Thus at the festival of the Thesmophoria in Athens

women sit on the ground and fast. And the Boeotians open the vaults

of the Sorrowful One, naming that festival sorrowful because Demeter

is sorrowing for the descent of the Maiden. The month is the month

of sowing about the setting of the Pleiades. The Egyptians call it

Athyr, the Athenians Pyanepsion, the Boeotians the month of Demeter.

. . . For it was that time of year when they saw some of the fruits

vanishing and failing from the trees, while they sowed others

grudgingly and with difficulty, scraping the earth with their hands

and huddling it up again, on the uncertain chance that what they

deposited in the ground would ever ripen and come to maturity. Thus

they did in many respects like those who bury and mourn their dead."

The Egyptian harvest, as we have seen, falls not in autumn but in

spring, in the months of March, April, and May. To the husbandman

the time of harvest, at least in a good year, must necessarily be a

season of joy: in bringing home his sheaves he is requited for his

long and anxious labours. Yet if the old Egyptian farmer felt a

secret joy at reaping and garnering the grain, it was essential that

he should conceal the natural emotion under an air of profound

dejection. For was he not severing the body of the corn-god with his

sickle and trampling it to pieces under the hoofs of his cattle on

the threshing-floor? Accordingly we are told that it was an ancient

custom of the Egyptian corn-reapers to beat their breasts and lament

over the first sheaf cut, while at the same time they called upon

Isis. The invocation seems to have taken the form of a melancholy

chant, to which the Greeks gave the name of Maneros. Similar

plaintive strains were chanted by corn-reapers in Phoenicia and

other parts of Western Asia. Probably all these doleful ditties were

lamentations for the corn-god killed by the sickles of the reapers.

In Egypt the slain deity was Osiris, and the name _Maneros,_ applied

to the dirge, appears to be derived from certain words meaning "Come

to thy house," which often occur in the lamentations for the dead

god.

Ceremonies of the same sort have been observed by other peoples,

probably for the same purpose. Thus we are told that among all

vegetables corn, by which is apparently meant maize, holds the first

place in the household economy and the ceremonial observance of the

Cherokee Indians, who invoke it under the name of "the Old Woman" in

allusion to a myth that it sprang from the blood of an old woman

killed by her disobedient sons. After the last working of the crop a

priest and his assistant went into the field and sang songs of

invocation to the spirit of the corn. After that a loud rustling

would be heard, which was thought to be caused by the Old Woman

bringing the corn into the field. A clean trail was always kept from

the field to the house, "so that the corn might be encouraged to

stay at home and not go wandering elsewhere." "Another curious

ceremony, of which even the memory is now almost forgotten, was

enacted after the first working of the corn, when the owner or

priest stood in succession at each of the four corners of the field

and wept and wailed loudly. Even the priests are now unable to give

a reason for this performance, which may have been a lament for the

bloody death of Selu," the Old Woman of the Corn. In these Cherokee

practices the lamentations and the invocations of the Old Woman of

the Corn resemble the ancient Egyptian customs of lamenting over the

first corn cut and calling upon Isis, herself probably in one of her

aspects an Old Woman of the Corn. Further, the Cherokee precaution

of leaving a clear path from the field to the house resembles the

Egyptian invitation to Osiris, "Come to thy house." So in the East

Indies to this day people observe elaborate ceremonies for the

purpose of bringing back the Soul of the Rice from the fields to the

barn. The Nandi of East Africa perform a ceremony in September when

the eleusine grain is ripening. Every woman who owns a plantation

goes out with her daughters into the cornfields and makes a bonfire

of the branches and leaves of certain trees. After that they pluck

some of the eleusine, and each of them puts one grain in her

necklace, chews another and rubs it on her forehead, throat, and

breast. "No joy is shown by the womenfolk on this occasion, and they

sorrowfully cut a basketful of the corn which they take home with

them and place in the loft to dry."

The conception of the corn-spirit as old and dead at harvest is very

clearly embodied in a custom observed by the Arabs of Moab. When the

harvesters have nearly finished their task and only a small corner

of the field remains to be reaped, the owner takes a handful of

wheat tied up in a sheaf. A hole is dug in the form of a grave, and

two stones are set upright, one at the head and the other at the

foot, just as in an ordinary burial. Then the sheaf of wheat is laid

at the bottom of the grave, and the sheikh pronounces these words,

"The old man is dead." Earth is afterwards thrown in to cover the

sheaf, with a prayer, "May Allah bring us back the wheat of the

dead."

2. The Official Rites

SUCH, then, were the principal events of the farmer's calendar in

ancient Egypt, and such the simple religious rites by which he

celebrated them. But we have still to consider the Osirian festivals

of the official calendar, so far as these are described by Greek

writers or recorded on the monuments. In examining them it is

necessary to bear in mind that on account of the movable year of the

old Egyptian calendar the true or astronomical dates of the official

festivals must have varied from year to year, at least until the

adoption of the fixed Alexandrian year in 30 B.C. From that time

onward, apparently, the dates of the festivals were determined by

the new calendar, and so ceased to rotate throughout the length of

the solar year. At all events Plutarch, writing about the end of the

first century, implies that they were then fixed, not movable; for

though he does not mention the Alexandrian calendar, he clearly

dates the festivals by it. Moreover, the long festal calendar of

Esne, an important document of the Imperial age, is obviously based

on the fixed Alexandrian year; for it assigns the mark for New

Year's Day to the day which corresponds to the twenty-ninth of

August, which was the first day of the Alexandrian year, and its

references to the rising of the Nile, the position of the sun, and

the operations of agriculture are all in harmony with this

supposition. Thus we may take it as fairly certain that from 30 B.C.

onwards the Egyptian festivals were stationary in the solar year.

Herodotus tells us that the grave of Osiris was at Sais in Lower

Egypt, and that there was a lake there upon which the sufferings of

the god were displayed as a mystery by night. This commemoration of

the divine passion was held once a year: the people mourned and beat

their breasts at it to testify their sorrow for the death of the

god; and an image of a cow, made of gilt wood with a golden sun

between its horns, was carried out of the chamber in which it stood

the rest of the year. The cow no doubt represented Isis herself, for

cows were sacred to her, and she was regularly depicted with the

horns of a cow on her head, or even as a woman with the head of a

cow. It is probable that the carrying out of her cow-shaped image

symbolised the goddess searching for the dead body of Osiris; for

this was the native Egyptian interpretation of a similar ceremony

observed in Plutarch's time about the winter solstice, when the gilt

cow was carried seven times round the temple. A great feature of the

festival was the nocturnal illumination. People fastened rows of

oil-lamps to the outside of their houses, and the lamps burned all

night long. The custom was not confined to Sais, but was observed

throughout the whole of Egypt.