Let us now turn back to the preceding chapter, and compare the
position of the people of the Shilluk tribe, and the subjects of the
Grail King, with that of the ancient Babylonians, as set forth in
their Lamentations for Tammuz.

There we find that the absence of the Life-giving deity was followed
by precisely the same disastrous consequences;

Vegetation fails--

"The wailing is for the plants; the first lament is they grow not.
The wailing is for the barley; the ears grow not."

The reproductive energies of the animal kingdom are suspended--

"For the habitation of flocks it is; they produce not.
For the perishing wedded ones, for perishing children it is; the
dark-headed people create not."

Nor can we evade the full force of the parallel by objecting that we
are here dealing with a god, not with a man; we possess the recorded
names of 'kings who played the role of Tammuz,' thus even for that
early period the commingling of the two conceptions, god and king, is
definitely established.

Now in face of this group of parallels, whose close
correspondence, if we consider their separation in point of time (3000
B.C.; 1200 A.D.; and the present day), is nothing short of
astonishing, is it not absolutely and utterly unreasonable to admit
(as scholars no longer hesitate to do) the relationship between the