The ceremonies connected with the cultus of the rice-spirit in the East Indies still perpetuate in living faith beliefs once vital { 118} in the peasantry of Europe, and surviving to this day (as Mannhardt and Frazer have shown) in many a usage of the harvest-field. Out of this group of ideas arise divine forms which express mysteries of life and time. What is it that guides the circle of the year? What power brings forth the blade out of the ground, and clothes the woods with verdure? As the months follow their constant course, are not the seasons the organs of some sacred force, lovely figures as Greek poets taught, born of Zeus and Themis (holy law); or angels of the Most High, ruling over heat and cold, summer and winter, spring and autumn, as the later Israel conceived the continuance of God's creative work? And when the fields are bare and the leaves fall, have not the energies of vegetation suffered an arrest, to come to life again when the great quickening of the spring returns? So while here and there dim speculations (as in India or Persia or the Orphic hymns of Greece) hover round Time, the generator of all things, and the recurring periodicity of the Year, more concrete imagination conceives the processes of the growth, decay, and revival of vegetation under the symbols of the life, the death, and resurrection of the deities of corn and tree.
To such a group belong different forms in Egypt, Syria and Greece, whose precise origin cannot always be traced amid the bewildering variety of functions which they came to fulfil. But they all illustrate the same general theme. { 119} In the ritual of their worship similar motives and symbols may be traced; and the incidents of their life-course were presented in a sort of sacred drama which reproduced the central mystery. Such were Osiris in Egypt, Adonis (as the Greeks called the Syrian form of the ancient Babylonian Tammuz), Attis of Phrygia in Asia Minor, and in Greece the Thracian Dionysus, and the divine pair Demeter and her daughter Persephonê blended with the figure of Korê "the Maid."
The worship of Osiris early spread throughout Egypt, and its various phases have given rise to many interpretations of his origin and nature. Recent studies have converged upon the view that he was primarily a vegetation deity. In the festival of sowing, small images of the god formed out of sand or vegetable earth and corn, with yellow faces and green cheek-bones, were solemnly buried, those of the preceding year being removed. On the temple wall of his chamber at Philæ stalks of corn were depicted springing from his dead body, while a priest poured water on them from a pitcher. This was the mystery of him "who springs from the returning waters." The annual inundation brought quickening to the seed, and in the silence and darkness of the earth it died to live.