primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a
vanished civilization? Certain it is that so far as historical
evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of
a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race; the Sumerian
and Babylonian Psalms were not composed by men who believed themselves
the descendants of 'witchetty grubs.' The Folk practices and
ceremonies studied in these pages, the Dances, the rough Dramas, the
local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the material out of
which the Attis-Adonis cult was formed, but surviving fragments of a
worship from which the higher significance has vanished.

Sir W. Ridgeway is confident that Osiris, Attis, Adonis, were all at
one time human beings, whose tragic fate gripped hold of popular
imagination, and led to their ultimate deification. The first-named
cult stands on a somewhat different basis from the others, the
beneficent activities of Osiris being more widely diffused, more
universal in their operation. I should be inclined to regard the
Egyptian deity primarily as a Culture Hero, rather than a Vegetation
God.

With regard to Attis and Adonis, whatever their original character
(and it seems to me highly improbable that there should have been two
youths each beloved by a goddess, each victim of a similar untimely
fate), long before we have any trace of them both have become so
intimately identified with the processes of Nature that they have
ceased to be men and become gods, and as such alone can we deal with
them. It is also permissible to point out that in the case of Tammuz,
Esmun, and Adonis, the title is not a proper name, but a vague
appellative, denoting an abstract rather than a concrete origin.
Proof of this will be found later. Sir W. Ridgeway overlooks the fact