The cult of Aphrodite’s paramour Adonis held a special appeal for Greek women, combining the erotic adoration of a beautiful youth with the emotional catharsis of lamentation for his death. The Adonis cult was an early import from the Levant, probably via Cyprus, but while many of the outward forms remained the same, its cultural context and significance changed. Adonis was modeled upon Tammuz, the consort of Ishtar whose death was annually lamented by women, and his name is a direct borrowing of the West Semitic adon, Lord. At Phoenician Byblos there was a sanctuary of “Aphrodite and Adonis,” that is, the city goddess Astarte and a consort who corresponded to Tammuz. Whereas the cult of Tammuz (Sumerian Dumuzi) enjoyed near-universal recognition in Mesopotamia and his festival was so important that a Babylonian month was named after him, the worship of Adonis was tolerated by many Greek city-states but rarely gained the status of a state-sponsored cult. Adonis was viewed with some ambivalence, probably because his main adherents were women, and in spite of his popularity in certain areas, he retained a fundamentally “foreign” aura. At the core of the cult lay a ritual with no connection to acknowledged sacred space; in Greek contexts before the Hellenistic period, Adonis only rarely possessed a sanctuary, temple or even an altar, making his rites anomalous.
To perform the Adonia, which took place in late summer, women ascended to the roof, where they sang dirges, cried out in grief, and beat their breasts. Sappho (fr. 140a LF) mentions that the women tore their garments, a standard sign of mourning. Other features of Adonis’ ritual belong to the cult in Classical Athens. A few days before the Adonia, garden herbs and cereals were sown in broken pots. These tender young plants were brought to the rooftops during the festival, to be withered in the hot sun as emblems of the youthful Adonis’ death. Another custom involved the laying out of Adonis dolls as for burial. While the traditional Frazerian concept of Adonis and similar figures as dying “fertility gods” has been increasingly criticized, Detienne’s analysis of Adonis as the paradigm of illicit sexuality and sterility, to be set against the fruitful union of husband and wife, has not achieved full acceptance, perhaps because it neglects the Adonis cult’s Near Eastern background.31
World History
