IDENTIFIED IN THE MYTH 0^ ADONIS. 51 



Moses divinely instructed said, "There shall be a great cry throughout 

 all the land of Egypt, such as there was never like it nor shall be like 

 it any more,"^^^ was a greater calamity still. Universal mourning must 

 have accompanied that awful event which Scripture so simply records, 

 " There was not a house where there was not one dead.^'^^^ Such 

 universal mourning I find connected with Adonis and with no other 

 character in ancient mythology. The story of his death is well known. 

 Ardently attached to the chase, he insisted, in spite of the entreaties 

 of Venus, in going in pursuit of wild beasts, and was killed by a boar 

 (which some ancient writers state is only a figurative way of saying 

 that he fell in battle against a fierce enemy)^'" against an encounter 

 with which he had been specially warned. The people of Byblus in 

 Phosnicia, of many places in Cyprus, and of most Grecian cities, held 

 an annual festival in his honour, or in commemoration of his death. 

 " On the first day all the citizens put themselves in mourning ; coffins 

 laere exposed at every door; the statues of Venus and Adonis were 

 borne in procession with certain vessels full of earth, in which the 

 worshippers had raised corn, herbs and lettuce, and these vessels were 

 called the gardens of Adonis. After the ceremony was over, they 

 were thrown into the sea or some river, where they soon perished, and 

 thus became emblems of the premature death of Adonis, who had 

 fallen, like a young plant, in the flower of his age." ^^^ 



The extract just given leads to a connection of Adonis with water, 

 such as we should expect to find in the case of one representing the 

 Pharaoh who met his death in the E,ed Sea. The Adonis river, below 

 Byblus and not very far from the NahrelKelb, on the face of whose 

 rocky cliff the great Rameses Thothmosis left three inscriptions, at 

 certain seasons of the year was fabled to flow red with the blood of the 

 favourite of Venus. Cocytus also, personified as a physician, is said to 

 have washed the incurable wound of Adonis.^^* Another remarkable 



125 Exodus, xi, 6. 127 Bauier, i, 550. 



126 Exodus, xii, 30. 128 Anthon's Classical Dictionary, Art. Adonia. 

 120 Bauier, i, 559. la eonnection witli this, I would refer to the 111th chapter of the second 



book of Herodotus, which, with much that bears upon the story of the Pliaraoh of the Exodiis 

 and upon that of Adonis, is unfit for transcription. The following is the Rev. W. B. Galloway's 

 eloquent comment upon the passage: — ''This was the king (Pheron or Sesoois II.) to whom 

 Moses was commissioned, and whose hardened heart and infatuated blindness to the irresistible 

 will of God admitted of but one remedy. That blindness is said to have been judicially inflicted 

 upon the king for his impiety towards God in smiting the river by hurling his spear into the 

 inidst of its swollen and angry waters. The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and his infatuated 

 blindness lasted, according to the allegory, as many years as there are counted plagues of Eg^i^pt. 

 The dreadful corruption of mannei's is scoffingly depicted in the allegory. The king, and indeed 



