heus, so
called, there is a hymn to Adonis, in which that personage is
identified with the sun alternately sinking to Tartarus and
soaring to heaven. It was customary with the ancients to speak of
the setting of a constellation as its death, its reascension in
the horizon being its return to life.14 The black abysm under the
earth was the realm of the dead. The bright expanse above the
earth was the realm of the living. While the daily sun rises
royally through the latter, all things rejoice in the warmth and
splendor of his smile. When he sinks nightly, shorn of his
ambrosial beams, into the former, sky and earth wrap themselves in
mourning for their departed monarch, the dead god of light muffled
in his bier and borne along the darkening heavens to his burial.
How naturally the phenomena of human fate would be symbolically
interwoven with all this! Especially alike are the exuberant joy
and activity of full life and of day, the melancholy stillness and
sad repose of midnight and of death.

The sun insists on gladness; but at night, When he is gone, poor
Nature loves to weep."

Through her yearly and her diurnal round alike, therefore, does
mother Nature sympathize with man, and picture forth his fate, in
type of autumnal decay, and wintry darkness, and night buried
seed, in sign of vernal bud, and summer light, and day bursting
fruit.

These facts and phenomena of nature and man, together with
explanatory theories to which they gave rise, were, by the
peculiar imaginative processes so powerfully operative among the
earliest nations, personified in mythic beings and set forth as
literal history. Their doctrine was inculcated as truth once
historically exemplified by some traditional personage. It was
dramatically impersonated and enacted in the process of initiation
into the Mysteries. A striking instance of this kind of theatrical
representation is afforded by the celebration, every eight years,
of the mythus of Apollo's fight with the Pythian dragon, his
flight and expiatory service to Admetus, the subterranean king of
the dead. In mimic order, a boy slew a monster at Delphi, ran
along the road to Tempe, represented on the way the bondage of the
god in Hades, and returned, purified, bringing a branch of laurel
from the sacred valley.15 The doctrine of a future life connected
with the legend of some hero who had died, descended into the
under world, and again risen to life, this doctrine, dramatically
represent