Adonis, the Beloved Lord

O Antiphon for December 18.

O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento.


English:

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm.

By the time his story reaches us in Roman and Greek tales, he has become a side character in a minor myth, pretty much bastardized so that Adonis is a good looking kid two goddesses squabble over, but if one looks even a little bit, the older story remains. God of love and beauty, he was conceived in darkness for nine  nights and born from the myrrh tree.

Ovid tells is strange story, a princess of the Levant named Myrrha fell into lust with her own father and found a way to, while all the women on the island were being celibate on a nine day celebration, climb into her fathers bed and have sex with him all nine nights, he not knowing who she was as she came to him in the dark. Ted Hughes translation says, "He crammed her with his seed." She repeated her dead the nine magical times.

Somehow she is found out. Her father comes after her. In some versions, Ceridwen and Taliesin like, he and she transform into different animals as he chases her, trying to kill her. At last she is transformed into a--or the first--myrrh tree.

Myrrh is mine; its bitter perfume
    Breathes a life of gathering gloom;—
               Sorrowing, sighing,
               Bleeding, dying,
    Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

The lyrics of the Christmas hymn reminds us myrrh is not only linked to royalty and worship like other incense, but to death and sacrifice.. Like the yew tree, the myrrh tree is a tree of life and death,  It is in desert climes and to get the myrrh one must wound the tree so that it bleeds sap. The coagulating blood is the myrrh. The myrrh branches, covered in sharp needles, resemble nothing so much as a crown of thorns. The myrrh tree is the Cross, is the Tree of Life, is the World tree, and born from it, the very myrrh, is Adonis..

To understand Adonis a little more we have to understand he is getting the same treatments as the two goddesses who are fighting over him. Even the term goddess doesn't quite fit. The goddesses are Theia, female Gods, not Mrs. Gods or lesser deities. The female gods are Gods. Let's get that out of the way, and their worship, while important and cultic, is problematic. It happens outside of the mainstream of male dominated society. What is more, it is not mythological, or rather its myths do not make stories cycles. And so often the Theia figure low in mythology. Demeter, Hestia, Rhea all share the same mythological--or rather legendary-- fate as Persephone, storywise, they are sidelined by male Gods and heroes.

Adonis suffers the Aphrodite treatment, which is worse than the other Theia because, unlike Demeter or Persephone, her origin is not Greek. She is imported, so to speak, from another pantheon which means that much of what her place ought to be can only be guessed at, is occupied by other Gods, male and female, and Adonis is part of her story. Both of these Gods come from Lebanon, and are imported to Cyprus and through Cyprus to Greece, and Cyprus and the Levant feature in their story. Aphrodite, bird headed, penis headed, nude and furious, called Foam Born, but earlier called Ashtoroth, Asherah, Ishtar and Inanna, one face of the dread Lady of Love and Battle is the lover of Adonis who is, and this still remains part of his story, love of the Lady of the Underworld, slain to be resurrected. When his story comes to Greece is is confusing. Greece tells us of a deceived girl Persephone, who was lured by the king of the dead. But this tells us of a Persephone already Queen who lures Adonis to be her lord--presumably of the dead. Persephone is life and death, and so is he. The two are one.

His symbol is his flower, the Adonis, quickly grown and quickly dying, resembling drops of blood. Properly some of his names are Tammuz and Damuzi. Adonis is the Greek form of his title, the Beloved Lord, which the Hebrews also used in the form  Adonai.

In the Occult, we are always having that Robert Graves moment where we threaten to start weaving so many strange and disparate things together we are nearly incomprehensible, but anyone with  passing knowledge of the Bible will know that the enemy of the Israelite God, or Israelite religion was Baal. Only a few times in scripture is it revealed that Baal is no proper name, but the Canaanite title of my'lord, given to a series of closely related male Gods or forms of the same male God. But the Hebrews, when calling their God anything, settle, in the end for another form or Lord, a more affectionate one, and the one used by their friends the Phoenicians, Adonai, Adonoy, Adonis. That nearly three thousand years of Jewish and Christian tradition have turned their version of Adonis into a sexless, distant and somewhat contrarian god does not change the fact that, essentially, this is whom they chose to pray to, that the Greeks and Romans turned him into a sex toy of two fickle goddesses just shows how hard it is for us to understand or revere God as love, and not love in the very proper and sterile Christian sense, but love in all its passion.

Oddly enough--well, not odd at all, because truth is truth, to see Adonis/Adonai in action again we must travel to the North and meet him in our Asatru friends. Krishna bears some comparisons too, but is distant from most witchly minds. In the North there is the lord Frey, of love, of the fuck aHnd the field, the twin (and lover?) of Freya. Frey the loving lord of the erect penis. the male model of the tree of life. We get so used to Frey as name that we forget it is no name, but a title, and that title means--yes--Beloved Lord.

This season, calling in Christmas or Yule or Montol or what have you, remember the antiphons, remember Adonis. Welcome Adonai. Be embraced by the Beloved Lord.

Adonai

Oh, Adonis, lover of the Lady above and the Lady Below

Who was born like sap from the tree of life and death,

Who burned is sweetness and longing and teaches the law of love

Come to me, save me with your outstretched arms

Oh my beloved lord, all the year I have held out my arms to you

The myrrh dripping on your hands you turned the latch of my door

I wasn’t ready, but I said come in, and you clutched me lightly

Behold

I am still dripping

They said, but it isn’t allowed, it isn’t allowed

 And with stone beads in chains hanging around their necks they sought the law on stone tables

But that business was chiseled out by moses and I need your fire

You are only fire, but they could barely see the cloud

It isn’t allowed, it isn’t allowed

The shell fish, and the selfish, the pig and hot and the cloven hoofed

It isn’t allowed, it isn’t allowed

But you put your hand over my mouth and whispered, don’t cry our loud

Not so loud

This child is conceived in secret

Nine nights, nine nights in the dark, the father and the daughter and the father’s son

What a trinity made from her

The woman who was a tree who was the mother of myrrh

Desire and death were the words she purred lying in the bed and clutching him

And then in the final flowering, red flowers like drops of blood on green, dowering the widowed earth

We learn that out of death is endless life and birth

And Adonai, means Adonis, means love.

I love you, Lord