ng was to primitive man a time of terrible
anxiety. His store of food was near its end. Would the dead world
revive, or would it not? The Old Year was dead; would the New Year, the
Young King, born afresh of Sky and Earth, come in the Old King's place
and bring with him the new growth and the hope of life?

I hardly realized, when writing the earlier editions of this book, how
central, how omnipresent, this complex of ideas was in ancient Greek
religion. Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Dionysus, and the rest of the "Year
Gods" were not eccentric divagations in a religion whose proper worship
was given to the immortal Olympians; they are different names given in
different circumstances to this one being who dies and is born again
each year, dies old and polluted with past deaths and sins, and is
reborn young and purified. I have tried to trace this line of tradition
in an article for the _Journal of Hellenic Studies_ for June 1951, and
to show, incidentally, how many of the elements in the Christian
tradition it has provided, especially those elements which are utterly
alien from Hebrew monotheism and must, indeed, have shocked every
orthodox Jew.

The best starting point is the conception of the series of Old Kings,
each, when the due time comes, dethroned and replaced by his son, the
Young King, with the help of the Queen Mother; for Gaia or Earth, the
eternal Wife and Mother of each in turn, is always ready to renew
herself. The new vegetation God each year is born from the union of the
Sky-God and the Earth-Mother; or, as in myth and legend the figures
become personified, he is the Son of a God and a mortal princess.

We all know the sequence of Kings in Hesiod: First Uranus (Sky), King of
the World, and his wife Gaia (Earth); Uranus reigns till he is dethroned
by his son Cronos with the help of Gaia; then Cronos and Rhea (Earth)
reign till Cronos is dethroned by his son Zeus, with the help of Rhea;
then Zeus reigns till . . . but here the series stops, since, according
to the orthodox Olympian system, Zeus is the eternal King. But there was
another system, underlying the Olympian, and it is to that other system
that the Year-Kings belong. The Olympians are definite persons. They are
immortal; they do not die and revive; they are not beings who come
and go, in succession to one another. In the other series are the
Attis-Adonis-Osiris type of gods, and especially Dionysus, whose name
has been shown by Kretschmer to be simply