Page:Durga Puja - With Notes and Illustrations.djvu/12

 scholars have elevated comparative religion or mythology like comparative philology to a science, and in investigating the origin of the religious festivals and ceremonies of the ancients nothing perhaps strikes the student more forcibly than the reproduction of the same principles, the same thoughts, the same sentiments, and even the same forms in different climes and among different families of man. Thus Durgotsava, the chief religious festival of the Hindus, has its parallel among the Egyptians, the Chaldæans, the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, the Greeks, and the ancient Arabs.

In Lower Egypt and Phœnicia the ceremony or festival to Osiris or Isis (Adonis and Astarte) used to be observed for eight days at the commencement of Autumn when the sun entered the sign of Cancer. Theocritus describes the ladies of Syracuse embarking for Alexandria to celebrate the festival in honour of Adonis. Arisnoe the sister and wife of Ptolemy Philadelphus bore the statue of Adonis herself. She was accompanied with women of the highest station in the city holding in their hands basketsful of cakes, boxes of perfumes, flowers, branches of trees and all sorts of fruits. The solemnity was closed by other ladies bearing carpets &c. The procession marched in this manner along the sea-coasts to the sound of trumpets and other instruments accompanying the voices of musicians. They