object:1.31 - Adonis in Cyprus
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XXXI. 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 descried
looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset. With its rich
mines of copper and its forests of firs 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
Chittim of the Hebrews, down to the time of Alexander the Great.
Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their gods with them from
the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the Lebanon, who may well
have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south coast they instituted
the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather Astarte. Here, as at
Byblus, these rites resembled the Egyptian worship of Osiris so
closely that some people even identified the Adonis of Amathus with
Osiris.
But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in Cyprus
was Paphos on the south-western 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 travelling 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 northerly 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 harbour some ten miles
off. The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern Kuklia)
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 a native goddess of fertility was
worshipped on the spot before the arrival of the Phoenicians, and
that the newcomers identified her with their own Baalath or Astarte,
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 Astarte at Byblus, of the native goddess whom the Greeks
called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia, and of the sun-god
Heliogabalus at Emesa 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 Torquoise" 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,
Astarte, or what not. 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 Mylitta, that is, of Ishtar or Astarte, 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 Baalbec 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 Astarte, 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 favour. "It was a law of the Amorites, that she who was about to
marry should sit in fornication seven days by the gate." At Byblus
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 Tralles 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 Aemilia 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 Acilisena,
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 Comana in Pontus, and
crowds of men and women flocked to her sanctuary from the
neighbouring 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 Cinyras, and to have been practised 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 Cinyras, the ancestor of the
priestly kings 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
Myrrha at a festival of the corn-goddess, at which women robed in
white were wont 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 a
natural 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 formerly been his through her
mother.
Cinyras 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 Cinyras 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 father-in-law of Cinyras, that the son of Cinyras
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 borne by the sons of all the Phoenician
kings of the island. It is true that the title strictly signified 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 Astarte. 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 Idalium in Cyprus, who
reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called
Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the
Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion. Further, it deserves to be noted
that the names Pygmalion and Astarte 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 Cinyras and observed by his daughters, we
may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine
bridegroom in a less innocent rite 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
Astarte 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 Cinyras was a common whore. 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 practised, 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 a tax, 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 borne 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
Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras is
clearly connected with the Greek _cinyra,_ "a lyre," which in its
turn comes from the Semitic _kinnor,_ "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
while away an idle hour, but formed part of the service of religion,
the moving influence of its melodies being perhaps 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 psalteries, 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 psaltery, a timbrel, a
pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went. Again,
when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing 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 waddy 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 underground from the desolate, forbidding
mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in
the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers,
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 the 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 Cybele 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.
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