The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12)Frazer, James George
Religion
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (Third Edition, Vol. 05 of 12)
Frazer, James George
Magic; Mythology; Religion; Superstition
(M92) The situation of this remarkable monument resembles that of Aphaca
on the Lebanon;(389) for in both places we see a noble river issuing
abruptly from the rock to spread fertility through the rich vale below.
Nowhere, perhaps, could man more appropriately revere those great powers
of nature to whose favour he ascribes the fruitfulness of the earth, and
through it the life of animate creation. With its cool bracing air, its
mass of verdure, its magnificent stream of pure ice-cold water—so grateful
in the burning heat of summer—and its wide stretch of fertile land, the
valley may well have been the residence of an ancient prince or
high-priest, who desired to testify by this monument his devotion and
gratitude to the god. The seat of this royal or priestly potentate may
have been at Cybistra,(390) the modern Eregli, now a decayed and miserable
place straggling amid orchards and gardens full of luxuriant groves of
walnut, poplar, willow, mulberry, and oak. The place is a paradise of
birds. Here the thrush and the nightingale sing full-throated, the hoopoe
waves his crested top-knot, the bright-hued woodpeckers flit from bough to
bough, and the swifts dart screaming by hundreds through the air. Yet a
little way off, beyond the beneficent influence of the springs and
streams, all is desolation—in summer an arid waste broken by great marshes
and wide patches of salt, in winter a broad sheet of stagnant water, which
as it dries up with the growing heat of the sun exhales a poisonous
malaria. To the west, as far as the eye can see, stretches the endless
expanse of the dreary Lycaonian plain, barren, treeless, and solitary,
till it fades into the blue distance, or is bounded afar off by abrupt
ranges of jagged volcanic mountains, on which in sunshiny weather the
shadows of the clouds rest, purple and soft as velvet.(391) No wonder that
the smiling luxuriance of the one landscape, sharply contrasting with the
bleak sterility of the other, should have rendered it in the eyes of
primitive man a veritable garden of God.
(M93) Among the attributes which mark out the deity of Ibreez as a power
of fertility the horns on his high cap should not be overlooked. They are
probably the horns of a bull; for to primitive cattle-breeders the bull is
the most natural emblem of generative force. At Carchemish, the great
Hittite capital on the Euphrates, a relief has been discovered which
represents a god or a priest clad in a rich robe, and wearing on his head
a tall horned cap surmounted by a disc.(392) Sculptures found at the
palace of Euyuk in North-Western Cappadocia prove that the Hittites
worshipped the bull and sacrificed rams to it.(393) Similarly the Greeks
conceived the vine-god Dionysus in the form of a bull.(394)
§ 3. Sandan of Tarsus.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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