According to a common opinion, Attis, Osiris, and Adonis are vegetation-gods; their dying and resuscitation represent, then, the annual withering and revival of vegetation. This hypothesis has attained general, though not universal, acceptance. Certainly the facts are very complex. At any rate, the celebration of the principle of fecundity in nature was not of a purely agrarian character, but found expression also in the gross symbols and immoral practices which appear in connection with the gods just mentioned at various points in the ancient world. The most important of the religions which have just been examined had their rise in Asia Minor and in Egypt. No less important, at least in the last period of pagan antiquity, was the religious influence of Syria. The Syrian gods, called "Baals" ("Lords"), were not, according to Cumont, distinguished from one another by any clearly defined characteristics. Every locality had its own Baal and a female divinity as the Baal's consort, but the attributes of these local gods were of the vaguest character. The female divinity Atargatis, whose temple at Hierapolis is described by Lucian, and the male divinity Hadad, of Heliopolis, are among the best-known of the Syrian gods. The Syrian worship was characterized by especially immoral and revolting features, but seems to have become ennobled by the introduction of the Babylonian worship of the heavenly bodies, and thus contributed to the formation of the solar monotheism which was the final form assumed by the pagan religion of the Empire before the triumph of Christianity.