object:1.32 - The Ritual of Adonis
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter
XXXII. The Ritual of Adonis
AT THE FESTIVALS of Adonis, which were held in Western Asia and in
Greek lands, the death of the god was annually mourned, with a
bitter wailing, chiefly by women; images of him, dressed to resemble
corpses, were carried out as to burial and then thrown into the sea
or into springs; and in some places his revival was celebrated on
the following day. But at different places the ceremonies varied
somewhat in the manner and apparently also in the season of their
celebration. At Alexandria images of Aphrodite and Adonis were
displayed on two couches; beside them were set ripe fruits of all
kinds, cakes, plants growing in flower-pots, and green bowers twined
with anise. The marriage of the lovers was celebrated one day, and
on the morrow women attired as mourners, with streaming hair and
bared breasts, bore the image of the dead Adonis to the sea-shore
and committed it to the waves. Yet they sorrowed not without hope,
for they sang that the lost one would come back again. The date at
which this Alexandrian ceremony was observed is not expressly
stated; but from the mention of the ripe fruits it has been inferred
that it took place in late summer. In the great Phoenician sanctuary
of Astarte at Byblus the death of Adonis was annually mourned, to
the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation,
and beating of the breast; but next day he was believed to come to
life again and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his
worshippers. The disconsolate believers, left behind on earth,
shaved their heads as the Egyptians did on the death of the divine
bull Apis; women who could not bring themselves to sacrifice their
beautiful tresses had to give themselves up to strangers on a
certain day of the festival, and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of
their shame.
This Phoenician festival appears to have been a vernal one, for its
date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis, and
this has been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring. At
that season the red earth washed down from the mountains by the rain
tinges the water of the river, and even the sea, for a great way
with a blood-red hue, and the crimson stain was believed to be the
blood of Adonis, annually wounded to death by the boar on Mount
Lebanon. Again, the scarlet anemone is said to have sprung from the
blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; and as the anemone
blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be thought to show that the
festival of Adonis, or at least one of his festivals, was held in
spring. The name of the flower is probably derived from Naaman
("darling"), which seems to have been an epithet of Adonis. The
Arabs still call the anemone "wounds of the Naaman." The red rose
also was said to owe its hue to the same sad occasion; for
Aphrodite, hastening to her wounded lover, trod on a bush of white
roses; the cruel thorns tore her tender flesh, and her sacred blood
dyed the white roses for ever red. It would be idle, perhaps, to lay
much weight on evidence drawn from the calendar of flowers, and in
particular to press an argument so fragile as the bloom of the rose.
Yet so far as it counts at all, the tale which links the damask rose
with the death of Adonis points to a summer rather than to a spring
celebration of his passion. In Attica, certainly, the festival fell
at the height of summer. For the fleet which Athens fitted out
against Syracuse, and by the destruction of which her power was
permanently crippled, sailed at midsummer, and by an ominous
coincidence the sombre rites of Adonis were being celebrated at the
very time. As the troops marched down to the harbour to embark, the
streets through which they passed were lined with coffins and
corpse-like effigies, and the air was rent with the noise of women
wailing for the dead Adonis. The circumstance cast a gloom over the
sailing of the most splendid armament that Athens ever sent to sea.
Many ages afterwards, when the Emperor Julian made his first entry
into Antioch, he found in like manner the gay, the luxurious capital
of the East plunged in mimic grief for the annual death of Adonis;
and if he had any presentiment of coming evil, the voices of
lamentation which struck upon his ear must have seemed to sound his
knell.
The resemblance of these ceremonies to the Indian and European
ceremonies which I have described elsewhere is obvious. In
particular, apart from the somewhat doubtful date of its
celebration, the Alexandrian ceremony is almost identical with the
Indian. In both of them the marriage of two divine beings, whose
affinity with vegetation seems indicated by the fresh plants with
which they are surrounded, is celebrated in effigy, and the effigies
are afterwards mourned over and thrown into the water. From the
similarity of these customs to each other and to the spring and
midsummer customs of modern Europe we should naturally expect that
they all admit of a common explanation. Hence, if the explanation
which I have adopted of the latter is correct, the ceremony of the
death and resurrection of Adonis must also have been a dramatic
representation of the decay and revival of plant life. The inference
thus based on the resemblance of the customs is confirmed by the
following features in the legend and ritual of Adonis. His affinity
with vegetation comes out at once in the common story of his birth.
He was said to have been born from a myrrh-tree, the bark of which
bursting, after a ten months' gestation, allowed the lovely infant
to come forth. According to some, a boar rent the bark with his tusk
and so opened a passage for the babe. A faint rationalistic colour
was given to the legend by saying that his mother was a woman named
Myrrh, who had been turned into a myrrh-tree soon after she had
conceived the child. The use of myrrh as incense at the festival of
Adonis may have given rise to the fable. We have seen that incense
was burnt at the corresponding Babylonian rites, just as it was
burnt by the idolatrous Hebrews in honour of the Queen of Heaven,
who was no other than Astarte. Again, the story that Adonis spent
half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world
and the rest of it in the upper world, is explained most simply and
naturally by supposing that he represented vegetation, especially
the corn, which lies buried in the earth half the year and reappears
above ground the other half. Certainly of the annual phenomena of
nature there is none which suggests so obviously the idea of death
and resurrection as the disappearance and reappearance of vegetation
in autumn and spring. Adonis has been taken for the sun; but there
is nothing in the sun's annual course within the temperate and
tropical zones to suggest that he is dead for half or a third of the
year and alive for the other half or two-thirds. He might, indeed,
be conceived as weakened in winter, but dead he could not be thought
to be; his daily reappearance contradicts the supposition. Within
the Arctic Circle, where the sun annually disappears for a
continuous period which varies from twenty-four hours to six months
according to the latitude, his yearly death and resurrection would
certainly be an obvious idea; but no one except the unfortunate
astronomer Bailly has maintained that the Adonis worship came from
the Arctic regions. On the other hand, the annual death and revival
of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men
in every stage of savagery and civilisation; and the vastness of the
scale on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes
place, together with man's intimate dependence on it for
subsistence, combine to render it the most impressive annual
occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate zones. It is no
wonder that a phenomenon so important, so striking, and so universal
should, by suggesting similar ideas, have given rise to similar
rites in many lands. We may, therefore, accept as probable an
explanation of the Adonis worship which accords so well with the
facts of nature and with the analogy of similar rites in other
lands. Moreover, the explanation is countenanced by a considerable
body of opinion amongst the ancients themselves, who again and again
interpreted the dying and reviving god as the reaped and sprouting
grain.
The character of Tammuz or Adonis as a corn-spirit comes out plainly
in an account of his festival given by an Arabic writer of the tenth
century. In describing the rites and sacrifices observed at the
different seasons of the year by the heathen Syrians of Harran, he
says: "Tammuz (July). In the middle of this month is the festival of
el-Bgt, that is, of the weeping women, and this is the T-uz
festival, which is celebrated in honour of the god T-uz. The women
bewail him, because his lord slew him so cruelly, ground his bones
in a mill, and then scattered them to the wind. The women (during
this festival) eat nothing which has been ground in a mill, but
limit their diet to steeped wheat, sweet vetches, dates, raisins,
and the like." T-uz, who is no other than Tammuz, is here like
Burns's John Barleycorn:
"They wasted o'er a scorching flame
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all--
For he crush'd him between two stones."
This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the
cereal crops is characteristic of the stage of culture reached by
his worshippers in historical times. They had left the nomadic life
of the wandering hunter and herdsman far behind them; for ages they
had been settled on the land, and had depended for their subsistence
mainly on the products of tillage. The berries and roots of the
wilderness, the grass of the pastures, which had been matters of
vital importance to their ruder forefathers, were now of little
moment to them: more and more their thoughts and energies were
engrossed by the staple of their life, the corn; more and more
accordingly the propitiation of the deities of fertility in general
and of the corn-spirit in particular tended to become the central
feature of their religion. The aim they set before themselves in
celebrating the rites was thoroughly practical. It was no vague
poetical sentiment which prompted them to hail with joy the rebirth
of vegetation and to mourn its decline. Hunger, felt or feared, was
the mainspring of the worship of Adonis.
It has been suggested by Father Lagrange that the mourning for
Adonis was essentially a harvest rite designed to propitiate the
corngod, who was then either perishing under the sickles of the
reapers, or being trodden to death under the hoofs of the oxen on
the threshing-floor. While the men slew him, the women wept
crocodile tears at home to appease his natural indignation by a show
of grief for his death. The theory fits in well with the dates of
the festivals, which fell in spring or summer; for spring and
summer, not autumn, are the seasons of the barley and wheat harvests
in the lands which worshipped Adonis. Further, the hypothesis is
confirmed by the practice of the Egyptian reapers, who lamented,
calling upon Isis, when they cut the first corn; and it is
recommended by the analogous customs of many hunting tribes, who
testify great respect for the animals which they kill and eat.
Thus interpreted the death of Adonis is not the natural decay of
vegetation in general under the summer heat or the winter cold; it
is the violent destruction of the corn by man, who cuts it down on
the field, stamps it to pieces on the threshing-floor, and grinds it
to powder in the mill. That this was indeed the principal aspect in
which Adonis presented himself in later times to the agricultural
peoples of the Levant, may be admitted; but whether from the
beginning he had been the corn and nothing but the corn, may be
doubted. At an earlier period he may have been to the herdsman,
above all, the tender herbage which sprouts after rain, offering
rich pasture to the lean and hungry cattle. Earlier still he may
have embodied the spirit of the nuts and berries which the autumn
woods yield to the savage hunter and his squaw. And just as the
husband-man must propitiate the spirit of the corn which he
consumes, so the herdsman must appease the spirit of the grass and
leaves which his cattle munch, and the hunter must soothe the spirit
of the roots which he digs, and of the fruits which he gathers from
the bough. In all cases the propitiation of the injured and angry,
sprite would naturally comprise elaborate excuses and apologies,
accompanied by loud lamentations at his decease whenever, through
some deplorable accident or necessity, he happened to be murdered as
well as robbed. Only we must bear in mind that the savage hunter and
herdsman of those early days had probably not yet attained to the
abstract idea of vegetation in general; and that accordingly, so far
as Adonis existed for them at all, he must have been the _Adon_ or
lord of each individual tree and plant rather than a personification
of vegetable life as a whole. Thus there would be as many Adonises
as there were trees and shrubs, and each of them might expect to
receive satisfaction for any damage done to his person or property.
And year by year, when the trees were deciduous, every Adonis would
seem to bleed to death with the red leaves of autumn and to come to
life again with the fresh green of spring.
There is some reason to think that in early times Adonis was
sometimes personated by a living man who died a violent death in the
character of the god. Further, there is evidence which goes to show
that among the agricultural peoples of the Eastern Mediterranean,
the corn-spirit, by whatever name he was known, was often
represented, year by year, by human victims slain on the
harvest-field. If that was so, it seems likely that the propitiation
of the corn-spirit would tend to fuse to some extent with the
worship of the dead. For the spirits of these victims might be
thought to return to life in the ears which they had fattened with
their blood, and to die a second death at the reaping of the corn.
Now the ghosts of those who have perished by violence are surly and
apt to wreak their vengeance on their slayers whenever an
opportunity offers. Hence the attempt to appease the souls of the
slaughtered victims would naturally blend, at least in the popular
conception, with the attempt to pacify the slain corn-spirit. And as
the dead came back in the sprouting corn, so they might be thought
to return in the spring flowers, waked from their long sleep by the
soft vernal airs. They had been laid to their rest under the sod.
What more natural than to imagine that the violets and the
hyacinths, the roses and the anemones, sprang from their dust, were
empurpled or incarnadined by their blood, and contained some portion
of their spirit?
"I sometimes think that never blows so red
The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled;
That every Hyacinth the Garden wears
Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
"And this reviving Herb whose tender Green
Fledges the River-Lip on which we lean--
Ah, lean upon it lightly, for who knows
From what once lovely Lip it springs unseen?"
In the summer after the battle of Landen, the most sanguinary battle
of the seventeenth century in Europe, the earth, saturated with the
blood of twenty thousand slain, broke forth into millions of
poppies, and the traveller who passed that vast sheet of scarlet
might well fancy that the earth had indeed given up her dead. At
Athens the great Commemoration of the Dead fell in spring about the
middle of March, when the early flowers are in bloom. Then the dead
were believed to rise from their graves and go about the streets,
vainly endeavouring to enter the temples and dwellings, which were
barred against these perturbed spirits with ropes, buckthorn, and
pitch. The name of the festival, according to the most obvious and
natural interpretation, means the Festival of Flowers, and the title
would fit well with the substance of the ceremonies if at that
season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to creep from the narrow
house with the opening flowers. There may therefore be a measure of
truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis worship a dreamy
voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the King of Terrors, but
as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to himself and lulls
them into an eternal sleep. The infinite charm of nature in the
Lebanon, he thought, lends itself to religious emotions of this
sensuous, visionary sort, hovering vaguely between pain and
pleasure, between slumber and tears. It would doubtless be a mistake
to attribute to Syrian peasants the worship of a conception so
purely abstract as that of death in general. Yet it may be true that
in their simple minds the thought of the reviving spirit of
vegetation was blent with the very concrete notion of the ghosts of
the dead, who come to life again in spring days with the early
flowers, with the tender green of the corn and the many-tinted
blossoms of the trees. Thus their views of the death and
resurrection of nature would be coloured by their views of the death
and resurrection of man, by their personal sorrows and hopes and
fears. In like manner we cannot doubt that Renan's theory of Adonis
was itself deeply tinged by passionate memories, memories of the
slumber akin to death which sealed his own eyes on the slopes of the
Lebanon, memories of the sister who sleeps in the land of Adonis
never again to wake with the anemones and the roses.
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