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object:1.30 - Adonis in Syria
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



XXX. Adonis in Syria

THE MYTH of Adonis was localised and his rites celebrated with much
solemnity at two places in Western Asia. One of these was Byblus on
the coast of Syria, the other was Paphos in Cyprus. Both were great
seats of the worship of Aphrodite, or rather of her Semitic
counterpart, Astarte; and of both, if we accept the legends,
Cinyras, the father of Adonis, was king. Of the two cities Byblus
was the more ancient; indeed it claimed to be the oldest city in
Phoenicia, and to have been founded in the early ages of the world
by the great god El, whom Greeks and Romans identified with Cronus
and Saturn respectively. However that may have been, in historical
times it ranked as a holy place, the religious capital of the
country, the Mecca or Jerusalem of the Phoenicians. The city stood
on a height beside the sea, and contained a great sanctuary of
Astarte, where in the midst of a spacious open court, surrounded by
cloisters and approached from below by staircases, rose a tall cone
or obelisk, the holy image of the goddess. In this sanctuary the
rites of Adonis were celebrated. Indeed the whole city was sacred to
him, and the river Nahr Ibrahim, which falls into the sea a little
to the south of Byblus, bore in antiquity the name of Adonis. This
was the kingdom of Cinyras. From the earliest to the latest times
the city appears to have been ruled by kings, assisted perhaps by a
senate or council of elders.

The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was
beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His
legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of
Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant
a day's journey from the capital. The spot was probably Aphaca, at
the source of the river Adonis, half-way between Byblus and Baalbec;
for at Aphaca there was a famous grove and sanctuary of Astarte
which Constantine destroyed on account of the flagitious character
of the worship. The site of the temple has been discovered by modern
travellers near the miserable village which still bears the name of
Afka at the head of the wild, romantic, wooded gorge of the Adonis.
The hamlet stands among groves of noble walnut-trees on the brink of
the lyn. A little way off the river rushes from a cavern at the foot
of a mighty amphitheatre of towering cliffs to plunge in a series of
cascades into the awful depths of the glen. The deeper it descends,
the ranker and denser grows the vegetation, which, sprouting from
the crannies and fissures of the rocks, spreads a green veil over
the roaring or murmuring stream in the tremendous chasm below. There
is something delicious, almost intoxicating, in the freshness of
these tumbling waters, in the sweetness and purity of the mountain
air, in the vivid green of the vegetation. The temple, of which some
massive hewn blocks and a fine column of Syenite granite still mark
the site, occupied a terrace facing the source of the river and
commanding a magnificent prospect. Across the foam and the roar of
the waterfalls you look up to the cavern and away to the top of the
sublime precipices above. So lofty is the cliff that the goats which
creep along its ledges to browse on the bushes appear like ants to
the spectator hundreds of feet below. Seaward the view is especially
impressive when the sun floods the profound gorge with golden light,
revealing all the fantastic buttresses and rounded towers of its
mountain rampart, and falling softly on the varied green of the
woods which clothe its depths. It was here that, according to the
legend, Adonis met Aphrodite for the first or the last time, and
here his mangled body was buried. A fairer scene could hardly be
imagined for a story of tragic love and death. Yet, sequestered as
the valley is and must always have been, it is not wholly deserted.
A convent or a village may be observed here and there standing out
against the sky on the top of some beetling crag, or clinging to the
face of a nearly perpendicular cliff high above the foam and the din
of the river; and at evening the lights that twinkle through the
gloom betray the presence of human habitations on slopes which might
seem inaccessible to man. In antiquity the whole of the lovely vale
appears to have been dedicated to Adonis, and to this day it is
haunted by his memory; for the heights which shut it in are crested
at various points by ruined monuments of his worship, some of them
overhanging dreadful abysses, down which it turns the head dizzy to
look and see the eagles wheeling about their nests far below. One
such monument exists at Ghineh. The face of a great rock, above a
roughly hewn recess, is here carved with figures of Adonis and
Aphrodite. He is portrayed with spear in rest, awaiting the attack
of a bear, while she is seated in an attitude of sorrow. Her
grief-stricken figure may well be the mourning Aphrodite of the
Lebanon described by Macrobius, and the recess in the rock is
perhaps her lover's tomb. Every year, in the belief of his
worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains, and every
year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So
year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while
the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon,
and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the
blue Mediterranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous
band of crimson.





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