Chapter 32. The Ritual of Adonis.
AT THE FESTIVALS of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia
and in Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned,
with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to
resemble corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown
into the sea or into springs; and in some places his revival was
celebrated on the following day. But at different places the
ceremonies varied somewhat in the manner and apparently also in
the season of their celebration. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite
and Adonis were displayed on two couches; beside them were set
ripe fruits of all kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and
green bowers twined with anise. The marriage of the lovers was
celebrated one day, and on the morrow women attired as mourners,
with streaming hair and bared breasts, bore the image of the dead
Adonis to the sea-shore and committed it to the waves. Yet they
sorrowed not without hope, for they sang that the lost one would
come back again. The date at which this Alexandrian ceremony
was observed is not expressly stated; but from the mention of the
ripe fruits it has been inferred that it took place in late summer. In
the great Phoenician sanctuary of Astarte at Byblus the death of
Adonis was annually mourned, to the shrill wailing notes of the
flute, with weeping, lamentation, and beating of the breast; but next
day he was believed to come to life again and ascend up to
heaven in the presence of his worshippers. The disconsolate
believers, left behind on earth, shaved their heads as the
Egyptians did on the death of the divine bull Apis; women who
could not bring themselves to sacrifice their beautiful tresses had to
give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival,
and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of their shame. 1
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. 2
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. 3
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-Bôgât, 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." 4
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. 5
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. 6
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. 7
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?" 8
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. 9
