Page:Durga Puja - With Notes and Illustrations.djvu/13

 carried corn in earthen vessels which they sowed there together with flowers, springing grass, fruits, and young trees and Lettices, Suidas Hesychins &c.

Theophrastus informs us that at the end of the ceremony they used to throw those portable gardens either into a fountain or into the sea. This statement is corroborated by Eustatthius and the Scholiast on Theocritus. In the Hebrew scriptures these worshippers were called Dendrophori or tree-bearers, for they painted a tree on their body as Astarte, Ashtaroth, Aser meaning a tree or a grove. Macrobius says that this ceremony was diffused throughout Assyria. Lucian quoted by the Abbe Banier speaking of the temple of Hieropolis in Syria says that "in this sanctuary are two golden statues, one of Jupiter supported by oxen, and other of Juno by lions. The last is a kind of Pantheon that bears the symbols of several other goddesses. (Minerva, Venus, the Moon, Rhea, Diana, Nemesis and the Destinies). The animals sacrificed were the ox, the sheep and the goat." It should be remembered that Lucian was a Greek writer, and that he naturally saw Jupiter and Juno in the Osiris and Isis or Astarte, in the same way that Sanchoniathon and Porphyry call Baltis the Mistress or Queen of the heavens, the Isis of the Egyptians and the Allahat of the Arabs. The latter observed the festival of Allahat in autumn and that of Lat in spring. Kaushiki is a name of Durga, for she is said to be flower-formed, and Ovid elegantly describes the transformation of Adonis into a flower. In Hindusthan a similar procession of ladies bearing twigs of trees, flowers, fruits and dishes and baskets and singing accompanied with the beat of musical instruments may still be seen on the