Similar to these were the Mysteries of Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, whose name, say Cicero and Plutarch, it was not permitted to any man to know, celebrated at Rome from the earliest times of that city. It was these Mysteries, practised by women alone, the secrecy of which was impiously violated by Clodius. They were held at the Kalends of May; and, according to Plutarch, much of the ceremonial greatly resembled that of the Mysteries of Bakchos.
The Mysteries of Venus and Adonis belonged principally to Syria and Phœnicia, whence they passed into Greece and Sicily. Venus or Astarte was the Great Female Deity of the Phœnicians, as Hercules, Melkarth or Adoni was their Chief God. Adoni, called by the Greeks Adonis, was the lover of Venus. Slain by a
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wound in the thigh inflicted by a wild boar in the chase, the flower called anemone sprang from his blood. Venus received the corpse and obtained from Jupiter the boon that her lover should thereafter pass six months of each year with her, and the other six in the Shades with Proserpine; an allegorical description of the alternate residence of the Sun in the two hemispheres. In these Mysteries his death was represented and mourned, and after this maceration and mourning were concluded, his resurrection and ascent to Heaven were announced.
Ezekiel speaks of the festivals of Adonis under the name of those of Thammuz, an Assyrian Deity, whom every year the women mourned, seated at the doors of their dwellings. These Mysteries, like the others, were celebrated in the Spring, at the Vernal Equinox, when he was restored to life; at which time, when they were instituted, the Sun (ADON, Lord, or Master) was in the Sign Taurus, the domicile of Venus. He was represented with horns, and the hymn of Orpheus in his honor styles him “the two-horned God;” as in Argos Bakchos was represented with the feet of a bull.
Plutarch says that Adonis and Bakchos were regarded as one and the same Deity; and that this opinion was founded on the great similarity in very many respects between the Mysteries of these two Gods.
The Mysteries of Bakchos were known as the Sabazian, Orphic, and Dionysiac Festivals. They went back to the remotest antiquity among the Greeks, and were attributed by some to Bakchos himself, and by others to Orpheus. The resemblance in ceremonial between the observances established in honor of Osiris in Egypt, and those in honor of Bakchos in Greece, the mythological traditions of the two Gods, and the symbols used in the festivals of each, amply prove their identity. Neither the name of Bakchos, nor the word orgies applied to his feasts, nor the sacred words used in his Mysteries, are Greek, but of foreign origin. Bakchos was an Oriental Deity, worshipped in the East, and his orgies celebrated there, long before the Greeks adopted them. In the earliest times he was worshipped in India, Arabia, and Bactria.
He was honored in Greece with public festivals, and in simple or complicated Mysteries, varying in ceremonial in various places, as was natural, because his worship had come thither from different countries and at different periods. The people who celebrated
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the complicated Mysteries were ignorant of the meaning of many words which they used, and of many emblems which they revered. In the Sabazian Feasts, for example [from Saba-Zeus, an oriental name of this Deity], the words EVOI, SABOT, were used, which are in nowise Greek; and a serpent of gold was thrown into the bosom of the Initiate, in allusion to the fable that Jupiter had, in the form of a serpent, had connection with Proserpina, and begotten Bakchos, the bull; whence the enigmatical saying, repeated to the Initiates, that a bull engendered a dragon or serpent, and the serpent in turn engendered the bull, who became Bakchos: the meaning of which was, that the bull [Taurus, which then opened the Vernal Equinox, and the Sun in which Sign, figuratively represented by the Sign itself, was Bakchos, Dionusos, Saba-Zeus, Osiris, etc.], and the Serpent, another constellation, occupied such relative positions in the Heavens, that when one rose the other set, and vice versa.
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