Bound Adonis, the Tammuz of old Assyria, there had played for long ages a more tender devotion. For the Syrians his name meant "the Lord" (=the Adonai of the Hebrew Bible); and over the tale of his untimely slaughter by the boar on Mount Lebanon the Eastern women had yearly wept for a hundred generations. The "women weeping for Tammuz" in the temple of Jerusalem before the exile were his worshippers; and in the Athens of the days of the Peloponnesian war he received the same litany of mourning. For his sacred city of Byblos he was as it were the soul and symbol of the yearly course of Nature; the annual reddening of the Adonis river by the spring floods being for his devotees a mystery of his shed blood. Then came the ritual of grief, in which his wooden and painted effigy, lying with that of Aphroditê, the Goddess who loved him, took the place of the victim in the older rite in which he too was doubtless slain "for the people." The "gardens of Adonis," shallow trays in which various green plants grew quickly and as quickly died, had been originally charms to hasten the fertility of the spring, like the sacrifice itself; but long custom made them mere symbols of untimely death, and the cult was one of pathos and compassion, passing in the usual way to exultation and gaiety when, after his effigies had been thrown as corpses into the sea or the springs, the God rose from the dead on the third day, and in the presence of his worshippers, by some mummery of make-believe or mechanical device, was represented as ascending to heaven. As in the cult of Attis, it was women who "found" the risen Lord, whose death they had mourned.
In such worships, it will be seen, much depended on the spirit of sex, which was evoked by the pairing of God and Goddess, a common principle of the ancient Semitic pantheon, here subtilized by romance. Such myths as those of Attis and Adonis, indeed, lent themselves to contrary emotions, the amorous and the ascetic passions figuring in the devotees by turns. Thus the very eunuch priests who represented the extremity of anti-sexualism were credited with a mania of licentiousness; and on the other hand the Great Mother, who in the primitive myth was enamoured of Attis, and yet in one version mutilated him, was by her graver devotees regarded in a holier light. So even Aphroditê, the lover of Adonis, had her supernal aspect as Urania; and the legend of the indifference of Adonis, like that of the self-mutilation of Attis, conveyed a precept and pattern of chastity. Everywhere, as the world grew sophisticated, and the primitive simplicity of appetite was overborne by pessimism and asceticism, the cruder cults tended to become refined and the Goddess-worships grew in dignity. At the sacred city of Hierapolis, in Syria, there was long worshipped a Goddess of immemorial fame, round whose history there floated myths like those of Cybelê and Aphroditê, Attis and Adonis, but whose prestige was apparently maintained rather by minimising than by retailing them. In her cult all the worshippers were wont to puncture their hands or necks, probably in mystic imitation of a slain Demigod such as Attis, connected with her legend; and in her service ascetic priests or hermits ascended phallic pillars to win sanctity by vigils of a week long. Thus was set up for the Goddess a religious renown comparable to that of Yahweh of Jerusalem, bringing multitudes of strangers to her every festival, and filling the treasuries of her priests with gifts.