Adonis has been taken for the sun; but there
is nothing in the sun's annual course within the temperate and
tropical zones to suggest that he is dead for half or a third of the
year and alive for the other half or two-thirds. He might, indeed,
be conceived as weakened in winter, but dead he could not be thought
to be; his daily reappearance contradicts the supposition. Within
the Arctic Circle, where the sun annually disappears for a
continuous period which varies from twenty-four hours to six months
according to the latitude, his yearly death and resurrection would
certainly be an obvious idea; but no one except the unfortunate
astronomer Bailly has maintained that the Adonis worship came from
the Arctic regions. On the other hand, the annual death and revival
of vegetation is a conception which readily presents itself to men
in every stage of savagery and civilisation; and the vastness of the
scale on which this ever-recurring decay and regeneration takes
place, together with man's intimate dependence on it for
subsistence, combine to render it the most impressive annual
occurrence in nature, at least within the temperate zones.
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