ADONIS

                                                

 

 

Adonis was the mortal lover of goddess  Aphrodite in Greek mythology.  He was conceived after Aphrodite cursed his mother, Murha, to lust after his father, King Cinyrase of Cyprus.   Murha had sex with her father in complete darkness, for nine nights, but he discovered her identity and chased her with a sword.

 

The gods transformed her into a myrrh tree, and in the form of a tree, she gave birth to Adonis.   Aphrodite found the infant and gave him to be raised by Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld.

 

Adonis grew up to be an astonishingly handsome young man, causing Aphrodite and Persephone to feud over him, with Zeus eventually decreeing that Adonis would spend 1/3 of the year with Aphrodite, 1/3 of the year with Persephone, and the last third with whomever he chose.  Adonis chose to spend his final third with Aphrodite.

 

One day, Adonis was gored by a wild boar, during a hunting trip, and died in Aphrodite’s arms, as she wept.  His blood mingled with her tears and became anemone flowers.  Aphrodite introduced the Adonis Festival, commemorating his death, which was celebrated by women, every year, at midsummer.

 

During this festival, Greek women would plant “gardens of Adonis”, small pots containing fast-growing plants, which they would set on the top of their houses, in the hot sun.  The plants would sprout but soon wither and die.  Then the women would mourn the death of Adonis, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts, in a public display of their grief.

 

The Greeks considered Adonis’s cult to be of Oriental origin, Adonis’s name comes from a Canaanite word meaning “lord” and most modern scholars, reading the story of Aphrodite and Adonis said that the name derives from an earlier Mesopotamian name of Ianna (Ishtar) and Domud (Tommar).

 

The worship of Aphrodite and Adonis is probably a Greek continuation of the ancient Sumerian worship of Ianna and Domus.  The Greek name Adonis is derived from the Canaanite word “adon” which means “lord”, as mentioned above.  This word is related to Adonai (Hebrew) one of the titles used to refer to God in the Hebrew Bible and is still used in Judaism to the present day.

 

The earliest known Greek reference to Adonis is from a poem by the Lesbian poet Sappho (630-570 BC) This was poem was sung by young girls.

 

“Women sit by the gate weeping for Tamnur, or offering incense to Baal, on roof-tops and planting pleasant plants.  These are the very feature of the Adonis legend, which is celebrated on flat roof-tops on which seeds were sawn quickly germinating green, are placed in Adonis’s garden and the climax is a loud lamentation for the dead god.”      

     

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