Adonis

author: High Priest Hooded Cobra 666
co-authors: Karnonnos, Arcadia

The knowledge presented contains information for those who want to understand the great Daemon known as Adonis. Here are some of his other divine names:

The Adonis Prayer above provides a greater communion with this God, adored by Antiquity as the beautiful lover of Aphrodite.

ADONIS

His myth is comparable to the shepherd Dumuzid, whose characterization in Inanna’s Descent into the Underworld and Inanna Prefers the Farmer indicate his long standing association with Inanna and the subterranean realms. Dumuzid, who was transformed into an allalu bird, invariably had a similar fate to Adonis and like in Greece, the cult was associated with women and had a romantic tone throughout the Middle East. The cult of Adonis ultimately came from a being who achieved apotheosis.

However, although Adonis is often considered the local formulation of the Semitic deity named Adon, Tammuz or Dumuzid, the presence of his cult in Greece has been noted to exist rather early, making it worthy of questioning whether his cult was a native innovation after all, alongside the two ‘foreign Deities’ of Aphrodite and Dionysus. In contrast to the typical mythology, the rather ancient Hesiod² made of him the son of the Homeric hero Phenix and the unknown Alphesiboea. Sappho herself attested to the ritualized mourning of his life in her circle of women decades before the start of the Classical era:

Fragment of Sappho [Hephaestius, Book on Metres] ³

κατθνάσκει, Κυθέρη᾿, ἄβρος Ἄδωνις· τί κεθεῖμεν;καττύπτεσθε, κόραι, καὶ κατερείκεσθε κίθωνας.

‘Delicate Adonis is dying, Cytherea; what are we to do?’

‘Beat your breasts, girls, and tear your clothes.’

Life of Nicias, Plutarch⁷

Not a few also were somewhat disconcerted by the character of the days in the midst of which they dispatched their armament. The women were celebrating at that time the festival of Adonis, and in many places throughout the city little images of the god were laid out for burial, and funeral rites were held about them, with wailing cries of women, so that those who cared anything for such matters were distressed, and feared lest that powerful armament, with all the splendour and vigour which were so manifest in it, should speedily wither away and come to naught.

The Middle Eastern rites of Adonis had similar but distinct elements. In Byblos at least, the festival would culminate in people joyfully pointing at the sky and claiming the God had been resurrected in a miraculous fashion. In the Phoenician city states, the Adonia festivals were said by contemporaries like Lucian of Samosata to have the status of a sacred and consecrated holiday, particularly in Byblos, the most ancient polis of the area. Other ancient writers noted they always commenced there with the heliacal rising of Sirius.⁸

Historians ultimately trace the most dramatic development of his mysterious cult to the Hellenistic era after Alexander’s conquests, where they seemed to take on more magnificent attributes through patronage of states far outside the Greek mainland which hosted his festivals. The Hellenistic queen of Egypt and priestess Arsinoe II, who was one of the few wives of the Pharaoh to gain the title of King of Upper and Lower Lands herself⁹ (alongside Hatshepsut and Tausret), inaugurated the sacred cult of Adonis in the relatively new city of Alexandria¹⁰, where his yearly state-decreed worship reached a proportion that would envelop the entire city in revelry for hundreds of years.

As noted by the poet Theocritus, despite his origins in the Middle East and accompanying cult in mainland Greece, the bustling metropolis of Alexandria in many ways became the adopted home of the Daemon. Theocritus describes exactly how the entire city became involved: there was a magnificent display of Adonis’s images and cult tableaux, alongside an official contest of dirges and lamentations sung by competing women’s choruses sponsored by the royal court. The Temple of Osiris and even the later Serapeum had sectional rites assimilated to Adonis.

Adonis’ stature in poetry did not end with Sappho, for Greek and Roman poets and playwrights continued to reference the tragic myth of Adonis and Aphrodite in many contexts, a rather prevalent theme for Classicists to discover over the ages. Ovid stands as the most prominent elaborator of the myth, but it was markedly and dramatically recalled by many poets, such as this poignant example by Bion:

Lament for Adonis, Bion¹¹

I wail for Adonis; the Loves wail in answer. Fair Adonis lies on the hills, wounded in his thigh with a tusk, wounded in his white thigh with a white tusk, and he grieves Cypris as he breathes his last faint breath. His dark blood drips over his snow-white flesh, and under his brows his eyes grow dim; the rosy hue flees from his lip, and around it dies the kiss, too, which Cypris will never carry off again. Even when he is not alive his kiss pleases Cypris; but Adonis does not know that she kissed him when he was dead.

I wail for Adonis; the Loves wail in answer. Adonis has a cruel, cruel wound in his thigh; but greater is the wound Cytherea has in her heart. Around that boy his ownhounds howl and the mountain nymphs weep; but Aphrodite, her tresses loosed, roams grief-stricken among the thickets with her hair unbraided, barefoot;4 the brambles tear her as she goes and draw her sacred blood. Wailing loudly, she moves through the long glens, crying out for her Assyrian husband and calling him many times. But round his navel was floating the dark blood, and his chest grew red with blood from his thighs, and Adonis’ breasts, once snow-white, grew dark.

Symbolism

Adonis is archetypally represented as a beautiful young man. On vases, he is given similar imagery to Apollo and Dionysus, often depicted with a lyre. In later classical statues, he is represented as athletic and the archetype of male beauty at the peak of its youthful virility, arguably as the most beautiful of the male Gods other than Zeus Himself.

The youthful God was most often identified in Antiquity with crops as a symbol. Crops were be cut and scythed in order to bring new seeds, seen widely as a paradoxical situation of nature that evoked the strange nature of Adonis’ death. Lettuce and fennel plants were also some of his symbols; the Suda explains that these were considered superficial and shallow plants, evocative of the Gardens of Adonis with its transitory and evolving types of vegetation, suitable as symbols for the great dying and resurrecting Adonis. His blood-red flower, variably the anemone or wildflower, was associated with vulnerability to the winds and weather. The flower, like the Glory of God, can be witnessed only in brief passing.

Lettuce and fennel plants were also some of his symbols; the Suda¹² explains that these were considered superficial and shallow plants, evocative of the Gardens of Adonis with its transitory and evolving types of vegetation, suitable as symbols for the great dying and resurrecting Adonis. His blood-red flower, variably the anemone or windflower, was associated with vulnerability to the winds and weather. The flower, like the Glory of God, can be witnessed only in brief passing.

In Japan, the anemone often represents transience; the twilight hour of the day, and the autumn season. It is these liminal times which are representative of a thinned veil between the physical and spiritual worlds. Anemones will close their petals not only at night, but will even do so when conditions are overcast, like right before a rainstorm. As such, there are certain cultural connotations of the anemone is a flower of anticipation. ike the Glory of God, can be witnessed only in brief passing.

The most prominent symbolism remarked upon in Antiquity were the Gardens of Adonis. Women in Greece would create broken pieces of terracotta which had lettuce and fennel seeds sown in them. They would congregate from the rooftops of the city during the Adonia to hold up these tokens as a symbol of his resurrection. The deliberate failure of these plants to grow has been ascribed to a moral lesson concerning the inability of men to influence the fate of other humans, let alone plants.¹³

The two Tarot cards representing Adonis are unsurprisingly the transformative cards of Death and the upright Tower. Death represents much of his symbolism of an event that will transform the querent from one state to another. The Yorkist flower on the knight of death's banner and blood red tassle on his helm is evocative of Adonis himself. The card represents in an abstract sense the fragility of life, but also the ability to move on and incarnate anew for the initiate, perpetually.

Just as Adonis was cut down by the boar, so does the Tower come to show the querent being struck to their foundations, as well as the King and Queen falling from the building showing that even their hierarchical position cannot prevent the events of the Tower. This event can mean a more encompassing disaster than death, but hints at the ability to rebuild, the shedding of the philosophical vessel. There is an aspect of The Tower which involves the shattering of illusions. Oftentimes, beauty on its own can be mistaken for lasting strength, but even the youthful Adonis was shattered at the height of his virility.

Beyond Antiquity

The story of Adonis, believed to cohere with courtly love, served as an inspiration for many writers and poets during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The second half of the Romance of the Rose by Jean de Meun (1275) interprets the story as a moral command for men to heed the women beloved to them.¹⁷ Christine de Pizan’s moralist work Othea also contains references to Adonis.¹⁸

Reproductions across Europe of the 13th century Ovide moralisé made the story quite famous.¹⁹ Later on, the most popular poem of Shakespeare during his and the master’s lifetime was Venus and Adonis (1593)²⁰, while the tale is referenced in Edmund Spenser’s the Faerie Queene (1590)²¹. The popular poet Giambattista Marino created the most popular work of his time, L’Adone²². Some of the most beautiful examples of Neoclassical and restorative sculpture are of Adonis, such as this famous reconstruction of a Roman torso by François Duquesnoy:

The story of Tammuz began to attract attention in Renaissance England and France, however, darker examples continued to be tied to Tammuz who was considered a ‘demon’, such as in Book I of Paradise Lost by John Milton.²³

Theft in Christianity

The name of Adonai was stolen for its properties in Jewish religion. Ezekiel 8:14 mentions Tammuz by name and considers the worship by women an abomination.

Much like Apollonius and Asclepius, the theft of Adonis attributes to build up the concept of ‘Jesus Christ’ was marked. Bethlehem itself was a site of the God’s worship. Even the cave in which the Nazarene dwelled as a child is said to have been the local chamber of worship for Tammuz and Inanna. According to Lucian, the water was said to run red with blood in the Adonis river during his holiday, which is now rather deliberately named the Abraham river, similar to several events in the Bible.

Much like Apollonius and Asclepius, the theft of Adonis attributes to build up the concept of ‘Jesus Christ’ was marked. Bethlehem itself was a site of the God’s worship.²⁴ Even the cave in which the Nazarene dwelled as a child is said to have been the local chamber of worship for Tammuz and Inanna.²⁵ According to Lucian, the water was said to run red with blood in the Adonis river during his holiday, which is now rather deliberately named the Abraham river, similar to several events in the Bible.

The theft of Adonis in the Jesus mythology was often noted in comparative mythological literature as far back as the Renaissance but was formulated most strongly in the argument put forth by Sir James George Frazer’s the Golden Bough (1890)²⁶, which compared Adonis to numerous dying-and-resurrecting Gods of the area, including the so-called Nazarene.