Indeed they commonly believed that the
tie between the animal and the vegetable world was even closer than
it really is; hence they often combined the dramatic representation
of reviving plants with a real or a dramatic union of the sexes for
the purpose of furthering at the same time and by the same act the
multiplication of fruits, of animals, and of men. To them the
principle of life and fertility, whether animal or vegetable, was
one and indivisible. To live and to cause to live, to eat food and
to beget children, these were the primary wants of men in the past,
and they will be the primary wants of men in the future so long as
the world lasts. Other things may be added to enrich and beautify
human life, but unless these wants are first satisfied, humanity
itself must cease to exist. These two things, therefore, food and
children, were what men chiefly sought to procure by the performance
of magical rites for the regulation of the seasons.
Nowhere, apparently, have these rites been more widely and solemnly
celebrated than in the lands which border the Eastern Mediterranean.
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