Beliefs

Adonis

adon, the lord who dies every summer
His name is not a name; it is a title, Semitic adon, lord, the same word the Hebrew Bible uses for God. The beautiful boy of Greek myth is a Levantine god on loan, and his death ritual was once performed at the gate of the Jerusalem temple itself.
Documented

The texts are explicit

Ezekiel 8:14, dated to 591 BC: at the north gate of the Temple in Jerusalem, women sat weeping for Tammuz, the Babylonian Dumuzi, dead shepherd-lover of Inanna. Six centuries later, Lucian's De Dea Syria 6 describes the festival at Byblos: on the first day the people mourn Adonis as dead, sacrifice to him as to a corpse, and on the next day they proclaim that he lives and send him into the air. Ovid's Metamorphoses 10 gives the Greek romance, Venus, the boar, the blood-red anemone. Theocritus' Idyll 15 stages the lush royal Adonia at Alexandria.

Assessment: The paper trail runs unbroken from the Jerusalem gate to Byblos to Athens to Alexandria. Whatever Adonis was, he was never only a Greek love story; the cult was a documented, cross-border ritual industry for eight hundred years.
Stories

Frazer's dying god

The Golden Bough (Adonis Attis Osiris, 1906) made Adonis the exhibit of the century: the dying-and-rising vegetation god, killed with the harvest, resurrected with the rains, the universal template behind every myth of return. The Gardens of Adonis were the proof, seeds sown in broken pots, forced into brief green life, then carried out with the corpse. Even Plato knew them: Phaedrus 276b mocks the man who plants seed in a garden of Adonis for the festival, eight days of show, when a serious gardener plants in season and waits eight months.

Assessment: The archetype was irresistible and it sold a worldview: all religion is one religion, all saviors are one savior. That is a story about stories, and it ran unopposed for eighty years.
Interesting claims

The resurrection dispute

Jonathan Z. Smith's 1987 Encyclopedia of Religion entry demolished the category: dying-and-rising gods, he argued, are a modern fabrication, a Protestant-era projection. Tryggve Mettinger's The Riddle of Resurrection (2001) went case by case and found for Athens the Adonia was funerary, the gardens symbolize sterility, and there are no obvious traces of any belief in a resurrection of Adonis before the Christian era. The counter-case rests on Lucian's next day proclamation and on the mourners' evident hope, with Richard Carrier and others arguing the late evidence reflects older belief. The fight is really about rules of evidence: how late can a source be and still count?

Assessment: Adonis now sits at the center of the bitterest proxy war in religious studies, because he is the test case for whether anything in paganism prefigures the resurrection. The evidence for his return is real, late, and contested, exactly the kind of file this archive was built to keep open.
Sources and further reading
  1. Ezekiel 8:14, the women weeping for Tammuz at the temple gate
  2. Lucian, De Dea Syria 6, mourned on the first day, proclaimed alive on the second
  3. Ovid, Metamorphoses 10.503-739, Venus, the boar, the anemone
  4. Theocritus, Idyll 15, the Adonia at the court of Arsinoe
  5. Plato, Phaedrus 276b, the eight-day garden against the eight-month one
  6. Frazer, Adonis Attis Osiris (1906), the dying god thesis
  7. Smith, Dying and Rising Gods, Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), the category demolished
  8. Mettinger, The Riddle of Resurrection (2001), the funeral without a resurrection
Worth asking

Lucian says the mourners at Byblos proclaimed him alive the next day. The scholars cannot agree whether anyone believed that before Christianity existed. Who gets to decide when a god started rising?

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GR8YFILES · competing origin stories, labeled by the strength of their evidence · readers 14+