Chapter 30. Adonis in Syria.
THE MYTH of Adonis was localised and his rites celebrated with
much solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was
Byblus on the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both
were great seats of the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her
Semitic counterpart, Astarte; and of both, if we accept the legends,
Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was king. Of the two cities Byblus
was the more ancient; indeed it claimed to be the oldest city in
Phoenicia, and to have been founded in the early ages of the
world by the great god El, whom Greeks and Romans identified with
Cronus and Saturn respectively. However that may have been, in
historical times it ranked as a holy place, the religious capital of the
country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city
stood on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary
of Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded
by cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall
cone or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary
the rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was
sacred to him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a
little to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of Adonis.
This was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest to the latest
times the city appears to have been ruled by kings, assisted
perhaps by a senate or council of elders. 1
The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and
was beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses.
His legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a
sanctuary of Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount
Lebanon, distant a day's journey from the capital. The spot was
probably Aphaca, at the source of the river Adonis, half-way
between Byblus and Baalbec; for at Aphaca there was a famous
grove and sanctuary of Astarte which Constantine destroyed on
account of the flagitious character of the worship. The site of the
temple has been discovered by modern travellers near the
miserable village which still bears the name of Afka at the head of
the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis. The hamlet stands
among groves of noble walnut-trees on the brink of the lyn. A little
way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty
amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades
into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends, the
ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from the
crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over the
roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There
is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of these
tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain air, in
the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark
the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and
commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar
of the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of
the sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats
which creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like
ants to the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is
especially impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with
golden light, revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded
towers of its mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green
of the woods which clothe its depths. It was here that, according to
the legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time, and
here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene could hardly be
imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as
the valley is and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted.
A convent or a village may be observed here and there standing
out against the sky on the top of some beetling crag, or clinging to
the face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the
din of the river; and at evening the lights that twinkle through the
gloom betray the presence of human habitations on slopes which
might seem inaccessible to man. In antiquity the whole of the lovely
vale appears to have been dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it
is haunted by his memory; for the heights which shut it in are
crested at various points by ruined monuments of his worship, some
of them overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns the
head dizzy to look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests
far below. One such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a
great rock, above a roughly hewn recess, is here carved with
figures of Adonis and Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest,
awaiting the attack of a bear, while she is seated in an attitude of
sorrow. Her grief-stricken figure may well be the mourning
Aphrodite of the Lebanon described by Macrobius, and the recess
in the rock is perhaps her lover's tomb. Every year, in the belief of
his worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains,
and every year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred
blood. So year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely
fate, while the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars
of Lebanon, and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding
shores of the blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore,
with a sinuous band of crimson. 2