Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 28, 1917.djvu/316

284 method in it, and the chief saints are, as in other Incarnationist systems, seven in number. Is Khidr regarded, like Visnu in India, as a spiritual being who incarnates himself for the good of mankind when faith and virtue decay, and has thus assumed flesh some seven times in the various ages of history? It is at least certain from other sources that this is the final form taken by the primitive Syrian religion.

6. We have just mentioned Melchizedek as one of this series of philanthropic avatars, 'without beginning or end of days.' Some Jews believed him to be a survivor from the Deluge—perhaps Shem, others to be the Messiah; others thought he was an angel—Jerome believed that Origen and Didymus held this view. The Church after Constantine had to fight against some very strange theories: the Melchizedekians maintained that the priest-king was the Power or Virtue of God. Hieracas even identifies him with the Holy Ghost; Epiphanius says that some Christians held him to be the Son. Now one of his titles is 'lofty-exalted' elyon—a name also given to Jehovah (cf. Genesis xiv. 18). Philo of Byblus tells us that it was in use among the Phoenicians (Eusebius Prœp. Ev. i. 36, Dindorf, p. 44): = and this chief god with a female consort, clearly the eponym of Berytus, settled near Byblus. But Philo also makes it clear that Eliun was a title of Adonis, the spring verdure which is killed by the summer's heat. He is the Canaanitic variant of that subordinate male deity which appears in Sumer as Dumuzi, in Babylonia as Tammuz, in Anatolia as Ate or Attis, in Egypt (according to some students of syncretism) as Osiris. The cult of Adonis is fully described in the Golden Bough (part iv., London, 1907); the image of the defunct deity was raised upon a bier and bewailed, then placed in a tomb for six months, when his rising again to new life was joyfully celebrated. The shallow 'gardens of the Lord' were allowed to wither at the same time, and then carried to the