#river adonis

“In the great Phoenician sanctuary of Astarte at Byblus the death of Adonis was annually mourned, to the shrill wailing notes of the flute, with weeping, lamentation, and beating of the breast; but the next day he was believed to come to life again and ascend up to heaven in the presence of his worshippers. The disconsolate believers, left behind on earth, shaved their heads as the Egyptians did on the death of the divine bull Apis; women who could not bring themselves to sacrifice their beautiful tresses had to give themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and to dedicate to Astarte the wages of their shame.

The Adonis (Abraham) River, in Lebanon.

(Source: OadrienvalentineG, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

“This Phoenician festival appears to have been a vernal one, for its date was determined by the discoloration of the river Adonis, and this has been observed by modern travellers to occur in spring. At that season the red earth washed down from the mountains by the rain tinges the water of the river, and even the sea, for a great way with a blood-red hue, and the crimson stain was believed to be the blood of Adonis, annually wounded to death by the boar on Mount Lebanon. Again, the scarlet anemone is said to have sprung from the blood of Adonis, or to have been stained by it; and as the anemone blooms in Syria about Easter, this may be thought to show that the festival of Adonis, or at least one of his festivals, was held in spring. The name of the flower is probably derived from Naaman (‘darling’), which seems to have been an epithet of Adonis. The Arabs still [c. 1878] call the anemone ‘wounds of the Naaman.’” [1]

—J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, part 1 (The Golden Bough, vol. V, 1914, pp. 225-226)

[1] Frazer's footnote: W. Robertson Smith**, "Ctesias and the Semiramis Legend," English Historical Review, ii. (1887) p. 307, following Lagarde. Compare W.W. Graf Baudissin, Adonis und Esmun, p. 88 sq.