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.”[1] Thammuz (of which Tâ-uz is only another form of pronunciation) 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.”[2]
But perhaps the best proof that Adonis was a deity of vegetation 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 withered as rapidly away, and at the end of eight days were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis, and flung with them into the sea or into springs.[3] At Athens these ceremonies were observed at midsummer. For we know that 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
- ↑ D. Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier und der Ssabismus, ii. 27; id., Ueber Tammûz und die Menschenverehrung bei den alien Babyloniern, p. 38.
- ↑ The comparison is due to Felix Liebrecht (Zur Volkskunde, p. 259).
- ↑ For the authorities see W. Mannhardt, Antike Wald- und Feldkulte, p. 279, note 2, and p. 280, note 2 ; to which add Diogenianus, i. 14; Plutarch, De sera num. vind. 17. Women only are mentioned as planting the gardens of Adonis by Plutarch, l.c.; Julian, Convivium, p. 329 ed. Spanheim (p. 423 ed. Hertlein); Eustathius on Homer, Od. xi. 590. On the other hand Diogenianus, l.c. says φυτεύοντες ἢ φυτεύουσαι.
