A Book of Myths
him death, the boy laughed mockingly and with scorn.
There came at last a day when she asked him what he did on the morrow,
and Adonis told her with sparkling eyes that had no heed for her
beauty, that he had word of a wild boar, larger, older, more fierce
than any he had ever slain, and which, before the chariot of Diana
next passed over the land of Cyprus, would be lying dead with a
spear-wound through it.
With terrible foreboding, Aphrodite tried to dissuade him from his
venture.
"O, be advised: thou know'st not what it is
With javelin's point a churlish swine to gore,
Whose tushes never sheathed he whetteth still,
Like to a mortal butcher, bent to kill.
* * * * *
Alas, he naught esteems that face of thine,
To which love's eyes pay tributary gazes;
Nor thy soft hands, sweet lips, and crystal eyne,
Whose full perfection all the world amazes;
But having thee at vantage--wondrous dread!--
Would root these beauties as he roots the mead."
Shakespeare.
To all her warnings, Adonis would but give smiles. Ill would it become
him to slink abashed away before the fierceness of an old monster of
the woods, and, laughing in the pride of a whole-hearted boy at a
woman's idle fears, he sped homewards with his hounds.
With the gnawing dread of a mortal woman in her soul, Aphrodite spent
the next hours. Early she sought the forest that she might again plead
with Adonis, and maybe persuade him, for love of her, to give up the
perilous chase because she loved him so.
But even as the rosy gates of the Dawn were opening, Adonis had begun
his hunt, and from afar off the goddess could hear the baying of his
hounds. Yet surely their clamour was not that of hounds in full cry,
nor was it the triumphant noise that they so fiercely make as they
pull down their vanquished quarry, but rather was it baying, mournful
as that of the hounds of Hecate. Swift as a great bird, Aphrodite
reached the spot from whence came the sound that made her tremble.
Amidst the trampled brake, where many a hound lay stiff and dead,
while others, disembowelled by the tusks of the boar, howled aloud in
mortal agony, lay Adonis. As he lay, he "knew the strange, slow chill
which, stealing, tells the young that it is death."
And as, _in extremis_, he thought of past things, manhood came to
Adonis and he knew something of the meaning of the love of
Aphrodite--a love stronger than life, than time, than death itself.
His hounds and his spear seemed but playthings now. Only the
eternities remained--bright Life, and black-robed Death.
Very still he lay, as though he slept; marble-white, and beautiful as
a statue wrought by the hand of a god. But from the cruel wound in the
white thigh, ripped open by the boar's profaning tusk, the red blood
dripped, in rhythmic flow, crimsoning the green moss under him. With a
moan of unutterable anguish, Aphrodite threw herself beside him, and
pillowed his dear head in her tender arms. Then, for a little while,
life's embers flickered up, his cold lips tried to form themselves
into a smile of understanding and held themselves up to hers. And,
while they kissed, the soul of Adonis passed away.
"A cruel, cruel wound on his thigh hath Adonis, but a
deeper wound in her heart doth Cytherea[6] bear. About
him his dear hounds are loudly baying, and the nymphs of
the wild woods wail him; but Aphrodite with unbound
locks through the glades goes wandering--wretched, with
hair unbraided, with feet unsandalled, and the thorns as
she passes wound her and pluck the blossom of her sacred
blood. Shrill she wails as down the woodland she is
borne.... And the rivers bewail the sorrows of
Aphrodite, and the wells are weeping Adonis on the
mountains. The flowers flush red for anguish, and
Cytherea through all the mountain-knees, through every
dell doth utter piteous dirge:
"'_Woe, woe for Cytherea, he hath perished, the lovely
Adonis!_'"
Bion.
Passionately the god besought Zeus to give her back her lost love, and
when there was no answer to her prayers, she cried in bitterness: "Yet
shall I keep a memorial of Adonis that shall be to all everlasting!"
And, as she spoke, her tears and his blood, mingling together, were
turned into flowers.
"A tear the Paphian sheds for each blood-drop of Adonis, and tears and
blood on the earth are turned to flowers. The blood brings forth the
roses, the tears, the wind-flower."
Yet, even then, the grief of Aphrodite knew no abatement. And when
Zeus, wearied with her crying, heard her, to his amazement, beg to be
allowed to go down to the Shades that she might there endure eternal
twilight with the one of her heart, his soul was softened.
"Never can it be that the Queen of Love and of Beauty leaves Olympus
and the pleasant earth to tread for evermore the dark Cocytus valley,"
he said. "Nay, rather shall I permit the beauteous youth of thy love
to return for half of each year from the Underworld that thou and he
may together know the joy of a love that hath reached fruition."
Thus did it come to pass that when dark winter's gloom was past,
Adonis returned to the earth and to the arms of her who loved him.
"But even in death, so strong is love,
I could not wholly die; and year by year,
When the bright springtime comes, and the earth lives,
Love opens these dread gates, and calls me forth
Across the gulf. Not here, indeed, she comes,
Being a goddess and in heaven, but smooths
My path to the old earth, where still I know
Once more the sweet lost days, and once again
Blossom on that soft breast, and am again
A youth, and rapt in love; and yet not all
As careless as of yore; but seem to know
The early spring of passion, tamed by time
And suffering, to a calmer, fuller flow,
Less fitful, but more strong."
Lewis Morris.
And when the time of the singing of birds has come, and the flowers
have thrown off their white snow pall, and the brown earth grows
radiant in its adornments of green blade and of fragrant blossom, we
know that Adonis has returned from his exile, and trace his footprints
by the fragile flower that is his very own, the white flower with the
golden heart, that trembles in the wind as once the white hands of a
grief-stricken goddess shook for sorrow.
"The flower of Death" is the name that the Chinese give to the
wind-flower--the wood-anemone. Yet surely the flower that was born of
tears and of blood tells us of a life that is beyond the grave--of a
love which is unending.
The cruel tusk of a rough, remorseless winter still yearly slays the
"lovely Adonis" and drives him down to the Shades. Yet we know that
Spring, with its _Sursum Corda_, will return as long as the earth
shall endure; even as the sun must rise each day so long as time shall
last, to make
"Le ciel tout en fleur semble une immense rose
Qu'un Adonis celeste a teinte de son sang."
De Heredia.
FOOTNOTE:
[6] Aphrodite.
PAN
"What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river.
He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep cool bed of the river:
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,
Ere he brought it out of the river.
* * * * *
'This is the way,' laughed the great god Pan
(Laughed while he sat by the river),
'The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed.'
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.
Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river."
E. B. Browning.
Were we to take the whole of that immense construction of fable that
was once the religion of Greece, and treat it as a vast play in which
there were many thousands of actors, we should find that one of these
actors appeared again and again. In one scene, then in another, in
connection with one character, then with another, unexpectedly
slipping out from the shadows of the trees from the first act even to
the last, we should see Pan--so young and yet so old, so heedlessly
gay, yet so infinitely sad.
If, rather, we were to regard the mythology of Greece as a colossal
and wonderful piece of music, where the thunders of Jupiter and the
harsh hoof-beats of the fierce black steeds of Pluto, the king whose
coming none can stay, made way for the limpid melodies of Orpheus and
the rustling whisper of the footfall of nymphs and of fauns on the
leaves, through it all we should have an ever-recurring _motif_--the
clear, magical fluting of the pipes of Pan.
We have the stories of Pan and of Echo, of Pan and of Midas, of Pan
and Syrinx, of Pan and Selene, of Pan and Pitys, of Pan and Pomona.
Pan it was who taught Apollo how to make music. It was Pan who spoke
what he deemed to be comfort to the distraught Psyche; Pan who gave
Diana her hounds. The other gods had their own special parts in the
great play that at one time would have Olympus for stage, at another
the earth. Pan was Nature incarnate. He was the Earth itself.
Many are the stories of his genealogy, but the one that is given in
one of the Homeric hymns is that Hermes, the swift-footed young god,
wedded Dryope, the beautiful daughter of a shepherd in Arcadia, and
to them was born, under the greenwood tree, the infant, Pan. When
Dryope first looked on her child, she was smitten with horror, and
fled away from him. The deserted baby roared lustily, and when his
father, Hermes, examined him he found a rosy-cheeked thing with prick
ears and tiny horns that grew amongst his thick curls, and with the
dappled furry chest of a faun, while instead of dimpled baby legs he
had the strong, hairy hind legs of a goat. He was a fearless creature,
and merry withal, and when Hermes had wrapped him up in a hare skin,
he sped to Olympus and showed his fellow-gods the son that had been
born to him and the beautiful nymph of the forest. Baby though he was,
Pan made the Olympians laugh. He had only made a woman, his own
mother, cry; all others rejoiced at the new creature that had come to
increase their merriment. And Bacchus, who loved him most of all, and
felt that here was a babe after his own heart, bestowed on him the
name by which he was forever known--Pan, meaning _All_.
Thus Pan grew up, the earthly equal of the Olympians, and, as he grew,
he took to himself the lordship of woods and of solitary places. He
was king of huntsmen and of fishermen, lord of flocks and herds and of
all the wild creatures of the forest. All living, soulless things
owned him their master; even the wild bees claimed him as their
overlord. He was ever merry, and when a riot of music and of laughter
slew the stillness of the shadowy woods, it was Pan who led the
dancing throng of white-limbed nymphs and gambolling satyrs, for whom
he made melody from the pipes for whose creation a maid had perished.
Round his horns and thick curls he presently came to wear a crown of