spent half, or according to others a third, of the year in the lower world and the rest of it in the upper world,[1] 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 a yearly 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,[2] 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 of from twenty-four hours to six months, according to the latitude, his annual death and resurrection would certainly be an obvious idea; but no one has suggested that the Adonis worship came from those 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 yearly decay and regeneration
- ↑ Schol. on Theocritus, iii. 48; Hyginus, Astronom. ii. 7; Lucian, Dialog. deor. xi. 1; Cornutus, De natura deorum, 28, p. 163 sq. ed. Osannus; Apollodorus, iii. 14, 4.
- ↑ Thus, after the autumnal equinox the Egyptians celebrated the “nativity of the sun’s walking-sticks,” because, as the sun declined daily in the sky, and his heat and light diminished, he was supposed to need a staff with which to support his steps. Plutach, Isis et Osiris, 52.
Fulgentius, iii. 8. The word Myrrha or Smyrna is borrowed from the Phoenician (Liddell and Scott, Greek Lexicon, s.v. σμύρνα). Hence the mother’s name, as well as the son’s, was taken directly from the Semites.
