The women (during
this festival) eat nothing which has been ground in a mill, but
limit their diet to steeped wheat, sweet vetches, dates, raisins,
and the like." T?-uz, who is no other than Tammuz, is here like
Burns's John Barleycorn:
"They wasted o'er a scorching flame
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all--
For he crush'd him between two stones."
This concentration, so to say, of the nature of Adonis upon the
cereal crops is characteristic of the stage of culture reached by
his worshippers in historical times. They had left the nomadic life
of the wandering hunter and herdsman far behind them; for ages they
had been settled on the land, and had depended for their subsistence
mainly on the products of tillage. The berries and roots of the
wilderness, the grass of the pastures, which had been matters of
vital importance to their ruder forefathers, were now of little
moment to them: more and more their thoughts and energies were
engrossed by the staple of their life, the corn; more and more
accordingly the propitiation of the deities of fertility in general
and of the corn-spirit in particular tended to become the central
feature of their religion.
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