Again, in the legend of Busiris, and the glosses or comments upon it, we get important evidence, the value of which has not fully been noted, I believe, by Mr. Frazer. The story comes to us in a Greek form; but we can see through it that it represents the myth which accounted for the Osiris sacrifice. The name Busiris means the city of Osiris, which was so called because the grave of an ancient Osiris (either a mummy, or a local chief identified with the great god of Abydos) was situated there. Human sacrifices were said to have been offered at his tomb; just as the Potraj sacrifice is offered at the shrine of the village goddess, and just as the annual victim elsewhere was sacrificed at the Terminus stone or the sacred stone of the foundation-god or goddess. The victims were redhaired men, and strangers. Their ashes were scattered abroad with winnowing fans. They were slain on the harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers (like Adonis and Attis) in the song which through a Greek mistake is known to us as the Maneros. The reapers prayed at the same time that Osiris might revive and return with renewed vigour in the following year. The most interesting point in this account, pieced together from Apollodorus, Diodorus, and Plutarch, is the fact that it shows us how the annual Osiris was identified with the old divine king who lay in his grave hard by; and so brings the case into line with others we have already considered and must still consider. As for the hunting after the pieces of Osiris’s body, that is just like the hunting after the mangled pieces of Dionysus by Demeter. I interpret both the resurrection of Osiris, and the story of the fragments being pieced together and growing young again, told of Dionysus, as meaning that the scattered pieces, buried like those of the Khond Meriah, grow up again next year into the living corn for the harvest.
Furthermore, there exists to this day in Egypt an apparent survival of the ancient Osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the mock mayors in England), which distinctly suggests the identification I am here attempting. In Upper Egypt, Klunzinger tells us, on the first day of the (Egyptian) solar year, when the Nile has usually reached its highest point, the regular government is suspended for three days in each district, and every town chooses its own temporary ruler. This temporary king (a local Osiris, as I believe) wears a conical cap, and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange mantle. I say unhesitatingly, the dress of an Osiris, wearing the old royal cap of Upper Egypt. With a wand of office in his hands—like the crook which Osiris carries on the monuments—and attended by men disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the governor’s house. The governor allows himself to be deposed; the mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to whose decisions even the governor himself must bow. In short, like other temporary kings, he really enjoys royal authority for the moment. After three days, however, the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in which he is encased is committed to the flames; and from its ashes creeps forth the Fellah who impersonated him. I do not doubt that the case here represents the antique coffer or mummy-case of Osiris.
In this graphic ceremonial, then, I see a survival, with the customary mitigations, of the annual Osiris sacrifice, once actually performed on a human victim. I do not doubt that in Egypt as elsewhere a mock king was formerly chosen in place of the real king to personate the descendant of Osiris, an Osiris himself; and that this substitute was put to death, and torn to pieces or burnt, while his ashes were winnowed and scattered over the land. It may also be worth while to enquire whether the scourge which Osiris holds in the bas-reliefs is not the equivalent of the divine whip of the Potraj, and the other whips which Mr. Gomme has so ingeniously correlated with that very venerable and mystic attribute.
I would suggest, then, that Osiris in his later embodiment was annually renewed as a corn and vine victim. Originally a king of Upper Egypt, or part of it, he was envisaged in later myth as a general culture-god. Isis, his sister and wife, discovered wheat and barley growing wild; and Osiris introduced these grains among his people, who thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and took to grain-growing. An annual victim, most often a stranger, identified with the racial god, was torn to pieces in his place; and Osiris himself was finally merged with the abstract spirit of vegetation, and supposed to be the parent of all trees. Just as the Corinthians, when ordered by an oracle to worship a certain pine tree “equally with the god,” cut it down and made two images of Dionysus out of it, with gilt bodies and red-stained faces; so the Egyptians cut down a pine-tree, took out the heart, made an image of Osiris, and then buried it in the hollow of the tree from which it had been taken. Similar rites obtained in Attis-worship and all alike bear witness to that late and abstract stage of thought where the primitive cultivation-victim has been sublimated and elevated into a generalised god of vegetation in the abstract. But this, which for Mr. Frazer is the starting-point, is for me the goal of the evolution of Osiris.
Let us next look very briefly at the case of Adonis.
The Adon or Lord commonly known as Thammuz was one of the chief elements in Syrian religion. He was closely connected with the namesake river Adonis, which rose by his grave at the sacred spring of Aphaca. We do not actually know, I believe, of a human Adonis-victim; but his death was annually lamented with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women. Images of him were dressed like corpses, and carried out as if for burial, and then thrown into the sea or into springs. This was evidently a rain charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry country like Syria. And I will add incidentally that I attribute to similar circumstances also some portion at least of the sanctity of rivers. In certain places, the resurrection of the Adonis was celebrated on the succeeding day. At Byblos, he also ascended into heaven before the eyes of his worshippers—a point worth notice from its Christian analogies. The blood-red hue of the river Adonis in spring—really due to the discoloration of the tributary torrents by red earth from the mountains—was set down to the blood of the god Adonis; the scarlet anemone sprang from his wounds. But the scholiast on Theocritus expressly explains the Adonis as “the sown corn;” and that he was “seed,” like the common corn-victims in India and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt from the repeated stories of his death and resurrection. The so-called “gardens of Adonis,” which were mimic representations of a tumulus planted with corn, formed a most noticeable part of the god’s ritual. They consisted of baskets or pots, filled with earth, in which wheat, barley, flowers, and so forth were sown and tended by women; and at the end of eight days they were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis, and flung into the sea or into springs. This was no doubt another case of a rain-charm. Mr. Frazer has collected several interesting examples of similar rites the whole world over.
A few other embodiments of the corn-god may be more hastily treated.
What Adonis was to Syria, Attis was to Phrygia. Originally he seems, according to Professor Ramsay, to have been represented by an annual priest-victim, who slew himself for the people to ensure fertility. This priest-victim himself bore the name of Attis, and was identified with the god whose worship he performed. In later days, instead of killing himself, he merely drew his own blood; and there is reason to think that a pig was also substituted as duplicate victim, and that this pig was itself regarded as an Attis. Analogies exist with the Paschal lamb; while the self-mutilation of Attis-worship has also features in common with Jewish circumcision. Moreover, the ceremonies were closely connected, at Pessinus at least, with the ancient sacred stone which bore the name of Cybele, and which was described as the Mother of the Gods; this connexion exactly recalls that of the Potraj-god in India with the cult of the local village goddess. As I believe the village goddess to be the permanent form of the foundation human sacrifice, I also believe Cybele (gross Euhemerism as it may seem) to be the sacred stone of the original virgin who was sacrificed at the first foundation of Pessinus.
When the sacred stone of Cybele and the cult of Attis were removed to Rome (under circumstances to which I shall refer in a later chapter) the festival consisted of a five days’ rite, like that of the Potraj. It took place at the spring equinox, as does our own equivalent festival of Easter. On the first day, a pine-tree was cut down in the woods, and the effigy of a young man was tied to it. This effigy no doubt represented the primitive human sacrifice, and its crucifixion answers exactly to the slaughter of the sacred buffalo in India. The second day yields nothing of importance; on the third day, the Attis-priest drew blood from his own arms and presented it as an offering; I would conjecture that this was a substitute for self-immolation, and that the self-immolation was originally performed by mutilation of the genitals. It was perhaps on this night that a mourning took place over the body of Attis, represented by an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried. On the fourth day came the Festival of Joy, on which, as Mr. Frazer believes, the resurrection of the god was celebrated. The fifth day closed with a procession to the brook Almo, in which the sacred stone of the goddess and her bullock-cart were bathed as a rain-charm. On the return, the cart was strewn with flowers. I think the close parallelism to the Indian usage is here fairly evident. Indeed, out of consideration for brevity, I have suppressed several other most curious resemblances.
Attis was thus essentially a corn-god. His death and resurrection were annually celebrated at Rome and at Pessinus. An Attis of some sort died yearly. The Attis of Pessinus was both priest and king; it was perhaps at one time his duty to die at the end of his yearly reign as a corn-god for his people. One epithet of Attis was “very fruitful”; he was addressed as “the reaped yellow ear of corn”; and when an effigy took the place of the annual slain priest-king, this effigy itself was kept for a year, and then burnt as the priest-king himself would have been at an earlier period. It seems to me impossible to resist the cumulative weight of this singular evidence.