 CHAPTER 29 THE MYTH OF ADONIS. The spectacle of the great changes which annually pass over the face of the earth has powerfully impressed the minds of men in all ages, and stirred them to meditate on the causes of transformation so vast and wonderful. Their curiosity has not been purely disinterested, for even the savage cannot fail to perceive how intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and how the same processes, which freeze the stream and strip the earth of vegetation, menace him with extinction. At a certain stage of development men seem to have imagined that the means of averting the threatened calamity were in their own hands, and that they could hasten or retard the flight of the seasons by magic art. Accordingly, they performed ceremonies and recited spells to make the rain to fall, the sun to shine, animals to multiply, and the fruits of the earth to grow. In course of time the slow advance of knowledge which has dispelled so many cherished illusions convinced at least the more thoughtful portion of mankind that the alternations of summer and winter, of spring and autumn, were not merely the result of their own magical rites, but that some deeper cause, some mightier power, was at work behind the shifting scenes of nature. They now pictured to themselves the growth and decay of vegetation, the birth and death of living creatures as effects of the waxing or waning strength of divine beings, of gods and goddesses who were born and died, who married and begot children on the pattern of human life. Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god who was the principle of life in his struggle with the opposing principle of death. They imagined that they could recruit his failing energies and even raise him from the dead. The ceremonies which they observed for this purpose were in substance a dramatic representation of the natural processes which they wished to facilitate, for it is a familiar tenet of magic that you can produce any desired effect by merely imitating it. And as they now explained the fluctuations of growth and decay, of reproduction and dissolution, by the marriage, the death, and the rebirth or revival of the gods, their religious or rather magical dramas turned in great measure on these themes. They set forth the fruitful union of the powers of fertility, the sad death of one at least of the divine partners, and his joyful resurrection. Thus a religious theory was blended with a magical practice. The combination is familiar in history. In history few religions have ever succeeded in wholly extricating themselves from the old trammels of magic. The inconsistency of acting on two opposite principles, however it may vex the soul of the philosopher, rarely troubles the common man. Indeed he is seldom even aware of it. His affair is to act, not to analyze the motives of his action. If mankind had always been logical and wise, history would not be a long chronicle of folly and crime. Of the changes which the seasons bring with them, the most striking within the temperate zone are those which affect vegetation. The influence of the seasons on animals, though great, is not nearly so manifest. Perhaps it is natural that in the magical dramas designed to dispel winter and bring back spring, the emphasis should be laid on vegetation, and that trees and plants should figure in them more prominently than beasts and birds. Yet the two sides of life, the vegetable and the animal, were not dissociated in the minds of those who observed the ceremonies. Indeed they commonly believed that the tie between the animal and the vegetable world was even closer than it really is. Hence they often combined the dramatic representations of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for the purpose of furthering at the same time and by the same act the multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To them the principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was one and indivisible. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary once of men in the past, and they will be the primary once of men in the future so long as the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify human life, but unless these once are first satisfied, humanity itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons. Nowhere apparently have these rites been more widely and solemnly celebrated than in the lands which border the eastern Mediterranean. Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead. In name and detail the rites varied from place to place. In substance they were the same. The supposed death and resurrection of this oriental deity, a god of many names but of essentially one nature, is now to be examined. We begin with Tammuz or Adonis. The worship of Adonis was practiced by the Semitic peoples of Babylonia and Syria, and the Greeks borrowed it from them as early as the 7th century before Christ. The true name of the deity was Tammuz. The appellation of Adonis is merely the Semitic Adon, Lord, a title of honor by which his worshipers addressed him. But the Greeks, through a misunderstanding, converted the title of honor into a proper name. In the religious literature of Babylonia, Tammuz appears as the youthful spouse or lover of Ishtar, the great mother goddess, the embodiment of the reproductive energies of nature. The references to their connection with each other in myth and ritual are both fragmentary and obscure, but we gather from them that every year Tammuz was believed to die, passing away from the cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world, and that every year his divine mistress journeyed in quest of him, to the land from which there is no returning, to the house of darkness, where dust lies on door and bolt. During her absence, the passion of love ceased to operate, men and beasts alike forgot to reproduce their kinds, all life was threatened with extinction. So intimately bound up with the goddess were the sexual functions of the whole animal kingdom that without her presence they could not be discharged. A messenger of the great god Ea was accordingly dispatched to rescue the goddess on whom so much depended. The stern queen of the infernal regions, Alatu, or Aresh Kigal by name, reluctantly allowed Ishtar to be sprinkled with the water of life and to depart in company probably with her lover Tammuz, that the two might return together to the upper world and that with their return all nature might revive. Lament for the departed Tammuz are contained in several Babylonian hymns, which liken him to plants that quickly fade. He is, quote, a tamarisk that in the garden has drunk no water, whose crown in the field has brought forth no blossom, a willow that rejoiced not by the water-course, a willow whose roots were torn up, a herb that in the garden had drunk no water, unquote. His death appears to have been annually mourned, to the shrill music of flutes by men and women about mid-summer in the month named after him, the month of Tammuz. The dirges were seemingly chanted over an effigy of the dead god, which was washed with pure water, anointed with oil, and clad in a red robe, while the fumes of incense rose into the air as if to stir his dormant senses by their pungent fragrance and wake him from the sleep of death. In one of these dirges, inscribed, Lament of the Flutes for Tammuz, we seem still to hear the voices of the singers chanting the sad refrain and to catch, like faraway music, the wailing notes of the flutes, quote, at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament, O my child, at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament, at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament, my enchanter and priest, at his vanishing away she lifts up a lament. At the shining cedar, rooted in a spacious place, in Iana above and below, she lifts up a lament, like the lament that a house lifts up for its master, lifts she up a lament, like the lament that a city lifts up for its lord, lifts she up a lament. Her lament is the lament for a herb that grows not in the bed, her lament is the lament for the corn that grows not in the ear, her chamber is a possession that brings not forth a possession, a weary woman, a weary child for spent. Her lament is for a great river where no willows grow, her lament is for a field where corn and herbs grow not, her lament is for a pool where fishes grow not, her lament is for a thicket of reeds where no reeds grow, her lament is for woods where tamarisks grow not, her lament is for a wilderness where no cypresses grow, her lament is for the depth of a garden of trees where honey and wine grow not. Her lament is for meadows where no plants grow. Her lament is for a palace where length of life grows not." The tragical story and the melancholy rites of Adonis are better known to us from the descriptions of Greek writers than from the fragments of Babylonian literature or the brief reference of the prophet Ezekiel, who saw the women of Jerusalem weeping for Tammuz at the north gate of the temple. Mirrored in the glass of Greek mythology the Oriental deity appears as a comely youth beloved by Aphrodite. In his infancy the goddess hid him in a chest, which she gave in charge to Persephone, queen of the netherworld. But when Persephone opened the chest and beheld the beauty of the babe she refused to give him back to Aphrodite, though the goddess of love went down herself to hell to ransom her dear one from the power of the grave. The dispute between the two goddesses of love and death was settled by Zeus, who decreed that Adonis should abide with Persephone in the underworld for one part of the year and with Aphrodite in the upper world for another part. At last the fair youth was killed in hunting by a wild boar, or by the jealous Ares who turned himself into the likeness of a boar in order to compass the death of his rival. Bitterly did Aphrodite lament her loved and lost Adonis. In this form of the myth the contest between Aphrodite and Persephone for the possession of Adonis clearly reflects the struggle between Ishtar and Alatu in the land of the dead, while the decision of Zeus that Adonis is to spend one part of the year underground and another part above ground is merely a Greek version of the annual disappearance and reappearance of Tammuz. Chapter 30. Adonis in Syria. The myth of Adonis was localized and his rites celebrated with much solemnity at two places in western Asia. One of these was Biblis on the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both were great seats of worship of Aphrodite or rather her Semitic counterpart, Astarti, and of both if we accept the legends, Siniris the father of Adonis was king. Of the two cities Biblis 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 Astarti, 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 Naar Ibrahim which falls into the sea a little to the south of Biblis bore in antiquity the name of Adonis. This was the kingdom of Siniris. 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. The last king of Biblis bore the ancient name of Siniris and was beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His legendary namesake Siniris is said to have founded a sanctuary of Aphrodite, that is of Astarti, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant a day's journey from the capital. The spot was probably Aphaka, at the source of the river Adonis, halfway between Biblis and Baalbeck. For at Aphaka there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astarti which Constantine destroyed on account of the flegitious character of the worship. The site of the temple has been discovered by modern travelers near the miserable village which still bears the name of Aphaka 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 Linn. A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot of a mighty amphitheater of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends the rancour 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 cienite 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 close 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 beatling 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 betrayed the presence of human habitations on slopes which might seem inaccessible to man. In antiquity the whole of the lovely veil 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 Guinea. 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 in the mountains, and every year the face of nature itself was died 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 winds set in shore with a sinuous band of crimson. Chapter 31 Adonis in Cyprus The island of Cyprus lies but one day's sail from the coast of Syria. Indeed, on fine summer evenings its mountains may be described looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset. With its rich mines of copper, and its forests of furs and stately cedars, the island naturally attracted a commercial and maritime people like the Phoenicians, while the abundance of its corn, its wine, and its oil must have rendered it, in their eyes, a land of promise by comparison with the niggardly nature of their own rugged coast, hemmed in between the mountains and the sea. Accordingly they settled in Cyprus at a very early date, and remained there long after the Greeks had also established themselves on its shores, for we know from inscriptions and coins that Phoenician kings reigned at Citium, the Chitim of the Hebrews, down to the time of Alexander the Great. Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their gods with them from the motherland. They worshiped Baal of the Lebanon, who may well have been Adonis, and at Amathas on the south coast they instituted the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather Astartii. Here, as at Biblis, these rites resembled the Egyptian worship of Osiris so closely that some people even identified the Adonis of Amathas with Osiris. But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in Cyprus was Paphos on the southwestern side of the island. Among the petty kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest times until the end of the fourth century, before our era, Paphos must have ranked with the best. It is a land of hills and billowy ridges diversified by fields and vineyards and intersected by rivers, which in the course of ages have carved for themselves beds of such tremendous depth that traveling in the interior is difficult and tedious. The lofty range of Mount Olympus, the modern Troodos, capped with snow the greater part of the year, screens Paphos from the northernly and easterly winds and cuts it off from the rest of the island. On the slopes of the range, the last pine woods of Cyprus linger, sheltering here and there monasteries in scenery not unworthy of the Apennines. The old city of Paphos occupied the summit of a hill about a mile from the sea. The newer city sprang up at the harbor some ten miles off. The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos, the modern Cuclia, was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world. According to Herodotus, it was founded by Phoenician colonists from Ascalon, but it is possible that the native goddess of fertility was worshipped on the spot before the arrival of the Phoenicians and that the newcomers identified her with their own Balath or Astarty, whom she may have closely resembled. If two deities were thus fused in one, we may suppose that they were both varieties of that great goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have been spread all over western Asia from a very early time. The supposition is confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as by the licentious character of her rites, for both that shape and those rites were shared by her with other Asiatic deities. Her image was simply a white cone or pyramid. In like manner a cone was the emblem of Astarty at Biblas of the native goddess whom the Greeks called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia and of the sun god Heliogabalus at Emisa in Syria. Conical stones, which apparently served as idols, have also been found at Golgi in Cyprus and in the Phoenician temples of Malta and cones of sandstone came to light at the shrine of the mistress of Turquoise among the barren hills and frowning precipices of Sinai. In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary of the goddess whether she went by the name of Aphrodite, Astarty or whatnot. Similar customs prevailed in many parts of western Asia. Whatever its motive the practice was clearly regarded not as an orgy of lust but as a solemn religious duty performed in the service of that great mother goddess of western Asia whose name varied while her type remained constant from place to place. Thus at Babylon every woman whether rich or poor had once in her life to submit to the embraces of a stranger at the temple of Malta, that is of Ishtar or Astarty, and to dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry. The sacred precinct was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some of them had to wait there for years. At Heliopolis or Balbak in Syria famous for the imposing grandeur of its ruined temples the custom of the country required that every maiden should prostitute herself to a stranger at the temple of Astarty and matrons as well as maids testified their devotion to the goddess in the same manner. The emperor Constantine abolished the custom, destroyed the temple, and built a church in its stead. In Phoenician temples women prostituted themselves for hire in the service of religion believing that by this conduct they propitiated the goddess and won her favor. It was a law of the Amorites that she who was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate. At Biblas the people shaved their heads in the annual mourning for Adonis. Women who refused to sacrifice their hair had to give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival and the money which they thus earned was devoted to the goddess. A Greek inscription found at Trolis in Lydia proves that the practice of religious prostitution survived in that country as late as the second century of our era. It records of a certain woman, Aurelia Amelia by name, not only that she herself served the god in the capacity of a harlot at his express command, but that her mother and other female ancestors had done the same before her, and the publicity of the record engraved on a marble column which supported a votive offering shows that no stain attached to such a life and such a parentage. In Armenia the noblest families dedicated their daughters to the service of the goddess Anaitis, in her temple of Asilicina, where the damsels acted as prostitutes for a long time before they were given in marriage. Nobody scrupled to take one of these girls to wife when her period of service was over. Again, the goddess Ma was served by a multitude of sacred harlots at Komana in Pontus, and crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from the neighboring cities and country to attend the biennial festivals, or to pay their vows to the goddess. If we survey the whole of the evidence on this subject, some of which has still to be laid before the reader, we may conclude that a great mother goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of nature, was worshipped under different names but with a substantial similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of western Asia. That associated with her was a lover, or rather series of lovers, divine yet mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their commerce being deemed essential to the propagation of animals and plants, each in their several kind, and further that the fabulous union of the divine pair was simulated, and as it were multiplied on earth by the real though temporary union of the human sexes at the sanctuary of the goddess, for the sake of thereby ensuring the fruitfulness of the ground and the increase of man and beast. At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been instituted by King Siniris and to have been practiced by his daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who having incurred the wrath of Aphrodite mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt. In this form of the tradition the wrath of Aphrodite is probably a feature added by a later authority, who could only regard conduct which shocked his own moral sense as a punishment inflicted by the goddess, instead of as a sacrifice regularly enjoined by her on all her devotees. At all events the story indicates that the princesses of Paphos had to conform to the custom, as well as women of humble birth. Among the stories which were told of Siniris, the ancestor of the priestly king of Paphos and the father of Adonis, there are some that deserve our attention. In the first place he is said to have begotten his son Adonis in incestuous intercourse with his daughter Myra at a festival of the corn goddess, at which women robed in white were want to offer corn wreaths as first fruits of the harvest, and to observe strict chastity for nine days. Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. It seems unlikely that such reports are without foundation and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced through women only, and where consequently the king held office merely in virtue of his marriage with an hereditary princess, who was the real sovereign, it appears to have often happened that a prince married his own sister, the princess royal, in order to obtain with her hand the crown which otherwise would have gone to another man, perhaps to a stranger. May not the same rule of descent have furnished a motive for incest with a daughter? For it seems unnatural corollary from such a rule that the king was bound to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, the queen, since he occupied it only by virtue of his marriage with her. When that marriage terminated, his right to the throne terminated with it, and passed at once to his daughter's husband. Hence if the king desired to reign after his wife's death, the only way in which he could legitimately continue to do so was by marrying his daughter, and thus prolonging through her the title which had formally been his through her mother. Cenerus is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty, and to have been wooed by Aphrodite herself. Thus it would appear as scholars have already observed that Cenerus was in a sense a duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the Inflammable Goddess also lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of Aphrodite for two members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly be dissociated from the corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, a Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed. When we consider that Pygmalion was the brother-in-law of Cenerus, that the son of Cenerus was Adonis, and that all three in successive generations are said to have been concerned in a love intrigue with Aphrodite, we can hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician kings of Paphos or their sons regularly claimed to be not merely the priests of the goddess, but also her lovers. In other words, that in their official capacity they personated Adonis. At all events, Adonis is said to have reigned in Cyprus, and it appears to be certain that the title of Adonis was regularly born by the sons of all the Phoenician kings of the island. It is true that the title strictly signifies no more than Lord, yet the legends which connect these Cyprian princes with the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed the divine nature as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the king wedded the image of Aphrodite or rather of Astartii. If that was so, the tale was in a sense true not of a single man only, but of a whole series of men, and it would be all the more likely to be told of Pygmalion if that was a common name of Semitic kings in general and of Cyprian kings in particular. Pygmalion at all events is known as the name of the king of Tyre from whom his sister Dido fled, and a king of Citium and Idallium in Cyprus, who reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called Pygmalion, or rather Pomyathan, the Phoenician name which the Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further it deserves to be noted that the names Pygmalion and Astartii occur together in a Punic inscription on a gold medallion which was found in a grave at Carthage. The characters of the inscription are of the earliest type. As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to have been founded by King Siniris and observed by his daughters, we may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine bridegroom in a less innocent right than the form of marriage with a statue, in fact that at certain festivals each of them had to mate with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple who played Astartii to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by the Christian Fathers that the Aphrodite worshipped by Siniris was a common horror. The fruit of their union would rank as sons and daughters of the deity, and would in time become the parents of gods and goddesses, like their fathers and mothers before them. In this manner Paphos and perhaps all sanctuaries of the great Asiatic goddess where sacred prostitution was practiced might be well stocked with human deities, the offspring of the divine king by his wives, concubines, and temple harlots. Any one of these might probably succeed his father on the throne or be sacrificed in his stead whenever stress of war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes did, for the death of a royal victim. Such attacks levied occasionally on the king's numerous progeny for the good of the country would neither extinguish the divine stock nor break the father's heart, who divided his paternal affection among so many. At all events, if, as there seems reason to believe, Semitic kings were often regarded at the same time as hereditary deities, it is easy to understand the frequency of Semitic personal names, which imply that the bearers of them were the sons or daughters, the brothers or sisters, the fathers or mothers of a god, and we need not resort to the shifts employed by some scholars to evade the plain sense of the words. This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel Egyptian usage, for in Egypt where the kings were worshipped as divine, the queen was called the wife of the god, or the mother of the god, and the title father of the god was born not only by the king's real father, but also by his father-in-law. Similarly, perhaps among the Semites, any man who sent his daughter to swell the royal harem may have been allowed to call himself the father of the god. If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name of Siniris was, like King David, a harper, for the name of Siniris is clearly connected with Greek Sinira, a lyre, which in its turn comes from the Semitic, Kinor, a lyre, the very word applied to the instrument on which David played before Saul. We shall probably not err in assuming that at Paphos, as at Jerusalem, the music of the lyre or harp was not a mere pastime designed to wile away an idle hour, but formed part of the service of religion, the moving influence of its melodies perhaps being set down, like the effect of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity. Certainly at Jerusalem, the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the music of harps, of sultries, and of cymbals. And it appears that the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took for immediate converse with the divinity. Thus we read of a band of prophets coming down from a high place with a sultry, a timbrel, a pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went. Again, when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were transversing the wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water for three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the beasts of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence of the music, he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless wadi through which lay the line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that had drained down into them from underground from the desolate, forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet's successes in striking water in the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dousers, though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally, he rendered another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from their lairs among the rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected in the water and, taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an omen of the blood of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack the camp, and were defeated with great slaughter. Again, just as a cloud of melancholy which from time to time darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts, may well have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God, or of his good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious writer himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music has said that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more. No, they have escaped from some higher sphere. They are outpourings of eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the magnificat of saints. It is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured, and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study, for we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet and the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example, which divides the wild revels of Sebel from the stately ritual of the Catholic Church, is measured by the gulf which severs the dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies of Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the difference of the music. End of chapters 29 to 31 of The Golden Bough. Recording by Tisto, tysto.com 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 flowerpots, 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 beard breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonis to the seashore and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed, knocked without hope, for they sang that the lost one would come back again. The date at which this Alexandrian ceremony was observed is not expressed, he 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 Astati at Biblis 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 ball 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 Astati the wages of their shame. 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 died 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 mid-summer, and by an ominous coincidence the somber 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 circumstances 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 mid-summer 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 mercury, the bark of which bursting, after a ten-month gestation, allowed the lovely infant to come forth. According to some, a boar rent the bark with his tusk, and so opened a passage for the babe. A faint rationalistic colour was given to the legend, by saying that his mother was a woman named Myr, who had been turned into a mercury soon after she had conceived the child. The use of Myr 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 Astati. 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 the 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 Bailey 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, combined 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, assured by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to similar rights 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 rights in other lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable body of opinion among the ancients themselves, who again and again interpreted the dying and reviving God as the reaped and sprouting grain. The character of Tamuz, 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 rights and sacrifices observed at the different seasons of the year by the heathen Syrians of Haram, he says, Tamuz, July. In the middle of this month is the festival of El-Bugart, that is, of the weeping women, and this is the Ta'uz festival, which is celebrated in honour of the god Ta'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 veches, dates, raisins, and the like. Ta'uz, who is no other than Tamuz, is here like Burns's John Barley corn. They wasted ore, a scorching flame, the marrow of his bones, but a miller used him worst of all, for he crushed him between two stones. This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the cereal crops, is characteristic of the state 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 rude 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 Fr. Lagrange that the mourning for Adonis was essentially a harvest rite, designed to propitiate the corn god, who was then either perishing under the sickles of the reapers, or being trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on the threshing floor. While the men slew him, the women wept crocodile tears at home to appease his natural indignation by a show of grief for his death. 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 people of the Levant, may be admitted, but whether from the beginning he had been the corn and nothing but the corn may be doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the herdsman above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain, offering rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still he may have embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the autumn woods yield to the savage hunter and his squaw, and just as the husbandman must propitiate the spirit of the corn which he consumes, so the herdsman must appease the spirit of the grass and leaves which his cattle munch, and the hunter must soothe the spirit of the roots which he digs, and of the fruits which he gathers from the bough. In all cases the propitiation of the injured and angry sprite would naturally comprise elaborate excuses and apologies accompanied by loud lamentations at his decease, whenever, through some deplorable accident or necessity, he happened to be murdered as well as robbed. Only we must bear in mind that the savage hunter and herdsman of those early days are 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 addon 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 were 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 years 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 act 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 impurpled 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-blade, that every hyacinth the garden wears dropped 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 Landon, the most sanguinary battle of the 17th century in Europe, the earth, saturated with the blood of 20,000 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 a 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 Renon, 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 victim 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 blunt 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 Renon'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. Chapter 33 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 the 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 homeopathic 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 fertilizing 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 resulted 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, until lately in England and Scotland, is in some places practiced with the avowed intent to procure rain for the next year's crops. Thus, in Wallachia and amongst the Romanians in Transylvania, when a girl is bringing home a crown made of the last years of corn cut at harvest, or who meet her hastened 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 plowing in Prussia, when the ploughmen and sows 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 sows retorted by seizing everyone, throwing them into the pond and ducking them under the water. The farmer's wife might claim exemption on payment of a forfeit, but everyone 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 midsummer folk customs of modern Europe, which I have described elsewhere, 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 aura-ons and moonders 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 necklids of plated 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, frustrating 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 Hindus, with the intention apparently of ensuring the fertility both of the earth and of mankind. Thus at Udaipur in Rajputana the festival is held in honor of Guri or Isani, the goddess of abundance. The rites begin when the sun enters the sign of the ram, the opening of the Hindu year. An image of the goddess Guri is made of earth and a smaller one of her husband Iswari, and the two are placed together. A small trench is next dug, barley is sewn in it, and the ground watered and heated artificially till the grain sprouts, when the women dance around it hand in hand invoking the blessing of Guri 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 sewn 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 connection with the great Midsummer Festival which bears the name of Saint John. At the end of March or on the 1st of April a young man of the village presents himself to a girl and asks her to be his comrade, gossip or sweetheart, offering to be her compadre. 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 23rd 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, gambling 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 Ozzieri 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 formally 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 troupe 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 formally 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 potchard, which they afterwards break into, 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 Cattania 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. Vinch supposes, St John has replaced the Donis. We have seen that the rites of Tammuz, or a Donis, were commonly celebrated about Midsummer, according to Jerome, their date was June. In Sicily gardens of a Donis 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 canary seed 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 a Donis were placed on the grave of the dead a Donis. The practice is not confined to Sicily, for it is observed also at Cossenza 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 a Donis. Nor are these Sicilian and Calabrian customs the only Easter ceremonies which resemble the rites of a Donis. During the whole of Good Friday, a waxant 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 beer adorned with lemons, roses, jesamine, and other flowers, and there begins a grand procession of the multitude, who move in serid ranks with slow and solemn step through the whole town. Every man carries his taper, and breaks into doleful lamentation. At all the houses which the procession passes, there are seated women with sensors 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 legubrious 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 caronades and muskets, and the explosion of fireworks 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. End of quotation. In night 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 the 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 Michelangelo in St. Peter's. That noble group in which the living sorrow of the mother contrasts so wonderfully with the languor of death in the sun 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 connection 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, 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 marveled 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 Astati, 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 Afaka in Syria, where there was a famous temple of Astati, 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 Astati 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 lemon 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. And of Chapter 33, chapters 34, 35 and 36 of The Golden Bough. This is a Librivox recording. All Librivox recordings are in the public domain. For further information or to volunteer, please visit Librivox.org. The Golden Bough, Busser James Fraser, chapters 34, 35 and 36. Chapter 34. 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 Cibbele, 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, Nanna, 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 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 recognised 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 a donis. 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 Pesinos, a great seat of the worship of Kibbele, 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 Pesinos, abstained from eating swine. In like manner the worshippers of a donis 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 BC towards the close of their long struggle with Hannibal, for their drooping spirits had been opportunally cheered by a prophecy alleged to be drawn from that convenient farago of nonsense, the Sibyline books, that the foreign invader would be driven from Italy if the great oriental goddess were brought to Rome. Accordingly ambassadors were dispatched to her sacred city Pesinos 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 sonnally 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 galley, 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 arms 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 Augustic rites of Attis in the established religion of Rome. The great spring festival of Cibbele 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 22nd day of March a pine tree was cut in the woods and brought into the sanctuary of Cibbele 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 23rd of March the chief ceremony seems to have been a blowing of trumpets. The third day the 24th of March was known as the Day of Blood. The Archigalus or High Priest 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 wracked into a frenzy of excitement and insensible to pain. They gashed their bodies with potchards 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 morning 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. Brought 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 wrapped up and buried in the earth or in subterranean chambers sacred to Kibbele, 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 storied 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 Astati 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 Kibbele 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, leapt 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 Kibbele 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-read 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 worshipers fasted from bread, nominally because Kibbele had done so in her grief for the death of Attis, but really perhaps for the same reason which induced the women of Hurran to abstain from eating anything ground in a mill while they wept for tamils. 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 worshipers was turned to joy, for suddenly a light shone in the darkness, the tomb was open, 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, Hyleria, a universal license 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 merry-makers 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 the procession to the brook Almol. The silver image of the goddess, with its face of jagged black stone, sat in a wagon drawn by oxen, preceded by the nobles walking barefoot, it moved slowly to the loud music of pipes and tambourines out by the Porta Capina, and so down to the banks of the Almol, which flows into the Tiber just below the walls of Rome. There the high priest robed in purple, washed the wagon, the image, and the other sacred objects in the water of the stream. On returning from their bath the wane 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 solemnization 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 morning 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 onto 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 newborn 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 the 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. Chapter 35. 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 maitry 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 burnt. The same thing appears to have been sometimes done with the maypole, 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 those somber 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 part the account for the orgiastic nature of the rites of Cibbele 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 frigid cap ears of corn are sprouting. On a stone urn which contained the ashes of an archigalus 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. Cibella in light manner was conceived as a goddess of fertility who could make or mar the fruits of the earth. For the people of Augusto Dunem, Alten, in Gaul used to cart her image about in a wagon 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. Chapter 36 Human Representatives of Attis From inscriptions it appears that both at Pesinos and Rome the high priest of Cibella 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 burnt 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 Marcius. He was said to be a Phrygian satire of Silenus according to others, a shepherd or herdsman who played sweetly on the flute. A friend of Cibella 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 Kelainai in Phrygia. Dane of his skill he challenged Apollo to a musical contest, he to play on the flute and Apollo on the lyre. Being vanquished Marcius was tied 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 Kelainai in historical times. It hung at the foot of the citadel in a cave from which the river Marcius rushed with an impetuous and noisy tide to join the meander. So the Adonis bursts full-born from the precipices of the Lebanon. So the blue river of Ybriz 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 Corisian cave. In all these copious fountains, with their glad promise of fertility and life, men of old saw the hand of God and worshiped him beside the rushing river, with the music of its tumbling waters in their ears. At Kelainai, if we can trust tradition, the Piper Marcius, 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 satire used to thrill, but that if the musician struck up an air in praise of Apollo, it remained deaf and motionless. In this Phrygian satire, Shepard or Herdsman, who enjoyed the friendship of Kibela, practiced 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 Shepard 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 Marcius 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 Kibela 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 Uppsala 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 Hava Mahal, 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. 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 Marcius 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 off by the spear-thrust, and 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 Condilaea 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 Thea 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 Hecate Erge, or Far Shooter, one of the regular epithets of the goddess. Every year the virgin 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. But here Apollis 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.