ART. VI. ADONIS, BAAL, AND ASTARTE.

I. A Text-Book of North Semitic Inscriptions. By G. A. COOKE, M.A., late Fellow of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford. (Oxford: At the University Press, 1903.) 2. Adoniskult und Christentum auf Malta: eine Beleuchtung moderner Geschichtsbaumeisterei. Von Dr. K. Lübeck. (Fulda, 1904.)

3. Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. By J. G. FRAZER, Litt.D. (London: Macmillan & Co., 1907.)

4. The Golden Bough: a Study in Magic and Religion. Third Edition. Part IV. Adonis, Attis, Osiris: Studies in the History of Oriental Religion. Second Edition, revised and enlarged. By J. G. FRAZER, D.C.L., LL.D., Litt.D. (London: Macmillan and Co., 1907.) And other works.

I.

Of extinct religions which have left their mark on the religious observances of the present day there is probably none so little understood as the religion of the Phoenicians. The inhabitants of the great cities on the strip of coast from Arvad to Dor were in such constant communication with the Jews, that one might have hoped to find in Hebrew literature more detailed information as to their cults and beliefs. But proximorum inimicitiae acerbissimae. The Hebrews as a rule, when they referred to the subject, were content with denunciations of the iniquities of their neighbours, and withal general denunciations, such as to the student of the history of religion are of small antiquarian value. Yet everyone who is interested in the history of Hebrew religion should make some attempt to realize the sort of atmosphere in which that wonderful system was developed. Apart from the importance of such knowledge for the understanding of the Old Testament, we must remember that the cults of Phoenicia, as of other Eastern lands, were for a long time rivals to the religion which

eventually conquered them. They have vanished, and it is difficult for us now to imagine a state of things in which the ordinary cultivated man looked upon Christianity and, let us say, the worship of Mithras as two systems appealing to the vulgar or emotional person, with equally small claim on his consideration. Now that the struggle of Christianity for its existence against such rivals has become a matter of ancient history, a larger vision is able to recognize that in these systems, gross or distorted as they may seem, there was an attempt to express some of the eternal verities. We may not be ready to say with Novalis, 'Es gibt keine Religion die nicht Christenthum wäre '; but we can well believe that what was good and useful in the older religions, what was so deeply rooted in popular usage that to tear it up would have caused a convulsion likely to shake the foundations of the new system-such elements Christianity, by a wise tolerance, assimilated and converted to its own use. This was sometimes, perhaps in the majority of cases, done but half-consciously; yet not infrequently it seems to have been part of a settled policy. Writing to Ethelbert, King of the English, Gregory I. exhorted him to expel idol-worship and destroy the temples of the false gods; but his instructions to the Abbot Mellitus, the leader of the second mission, were different.

'Tell our brother the Bishop Augustine that the temples of the idols should by no means be destroyed; but the idols themselves therein should be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the temple, altars built and relics placed there. For, if these temples are well built, it is necessary that they be converted from the worship of evil spirits to the service of the true God; so that the people, when they see that their own temples are left standing, may put away error out of their hearts, and knowing and adoring God may come together with less sense of strangeness to the places to which they have grown accustomed. And since they are wont in sacrificing to their evil spirits to slay many oxen, it is desirable that in this matter also some ceremony be established, with a certain difference. On the day of the dedication, or on the festivals of the holy martyrs whose relics are in the church, let them make booths for themselves around the churches which were once temples, and cele.

brate the solemn festival with religious feasting; nor let them any more sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but slay them to the praise of God for their own eating, and give thanks to the Giver of all because they are filled. . . . For there is no doubt that it is impossible to cut off everything at once from hearts that are hard.'

This principle, then, was officially recognized; and although certain writers on the subject have cast their net rather too widely, and sought to leave nothing in Christian usage without its foundation in paganism, there are many cases, such as those of St. John Baptist's Day and the Feast of All Souls, in which probably few now care to deny the transference. These two festivals (the one representing the Adonis festival, the other a festival of the dead) are discussed at considerable length by Dr. Frazer, and are of extreme interest, even if we do not accept his argument in every detail.

Konrad Lübeck, in his vigorous onslaught upon Wünsch's theory of the Maltese Spring Festival,' gives a list of some of what he considers to be the wilder extravagances in this direction. Here is a selection: The worship of the Virgin Mary is derived from the cult of Venus and Astarte; the service of the Roman Catholic Church is identical with the cult of Nimrod and Semiramis; Jesus is an Israelitish Gilgamish; the history of the Birth of Jesus and the Adoration of the Magi is derived from the Mithraic religion, which also provided the Sacraments of Baptism, Penitence, and the Eucharist; the doctrine of Guardian Angels is derived from the Græco-Roman cult of the Genius; the heathen practice of incubation in temples was taken over and continued by the Church, and so on.

Now some of these theories are worthy of the scorn with which Lübeck treats them. But scorn is not the right way to treat them: they cannot be disproved by contempt, and the impartial reader cf the 137 pages in which

1 Dr. Frazer makes very little use of Wünsch's theory (Das Frühlingsfest der Insel Malta), which, if accepted, would offer considerable support to his own arguments; nor does he mention Lübeck's pamphlet,

Lübeck discusses every minutest detail of Wünsch's theory will probably come to the conclusion that he has weakened his case by over-meticulous criticism of the other side. It is useless, at this time of day, to deny the principle sanctioned by Gregory and founded on a natural tendency towards continuity in human development.

Any research which tends to throw light upon the character of the rivals of the early Hebrew and Christian systems can only be welcomed. This is the age in which above all we are seeking to penetrate to the origins of systems of culture-often with no more hope of success than of learning 'what song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women.' But nothing will stay men from such inquiries, and if the inquirer more often than not wanders from the right track, his error soon becomes patent, if not to himself, yet to his fellow-explorers. The shocks which orthodoxy sometimes suffers in the process do it less harm than the good which it receives in the way of stimulus. Neither the cause of truth nor of religion will suffer ultimately from these inquiries, even if we are occasionally shocked or irritated by over bold speculations. There is always a stimulus to truth in error, provided it be honest. Without saying more therefore about some of Dr. Frazer's speculations we shall attempt the study of this work in a scientific spirit.

II.

Untiring industry, a wide range of reading, a good style, a faculty for digesting and marshalling evidence in favour of a theory, a determination to follow whither that evidence seems to lead, a surprising ingenuity in explanation, and above all an activity of imagination which illuminates and vivifies the details of a long and complex argument-this is a combination of qualities which all who are acquainted with the earlier work of Dr. Frazer in the domain of comparative religion will expect to find in his new study of Adonis, Attis, and Osiris. Nor will they be disappointed. The ingenuity and the imagination which

were displayed to such an astonishing degree in the second edition of the Golden Bough are still here; but they shine, on the whole, with a comparatively subdued and more healthy glow. There is also the same tendency to drive the one, all-explaining theory too hard; but that is characteristic of everyone who has a whole-hearted belief that he has found the key to a mystery. On the whole it produces more results than the attitude of suspense which has no theory to support it. It provides the base on which the acid of criticism acts to produce the salt of true knowledge. Dr. Frazer's new book is in its genesis a canter preliminary to the third edition of the Golden Bough, and its own second edition which has been considerably enlarged now appears formally as Part IV. of that work. Its length gives us some idea of the portentous size and weight to which this bough will eventually attain. But it may be regarded as a work in itself.

Dr. Frazer deals with three separate cults, but his method and the object at which his analysis is aimed are in all three cases the same. He finds in Adonis, Attis, and Osiris vegetation deities, whose worship arose out of the desire to promote the fertility of the crops by means of sympathetic magic, and whose ritual symbolizes the annual seeming death and revival of the corn or other cereal on which man depends for his sustenance. This symbolism was doubtless often as dark to the majority of those who carried out the ritual as it has been to us until modern investigation has found a key to its elucidation. To this person one key seems to be all-satisfactory, to that another. In any case it is the privilege of the modern investigator, armed in the panoply of comparative anthropology, and wielding with equal assurance weapons forged in Sardinia and the South Sea Islands, to pierce the defensive veil in which, thanks to the inherent obscurities of symbolism and the growths of time, the meaning of ancient religion is involved.

The Adonis-worship, the first of the three discussed by Dr. Frazer, is apparently the most important element in his argument, and in any case may be taken as typical of his