Page:Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion volume 2.djvu/97

 at in the other aspect it is to be taken symbolically as a moment of God, as descriptive of the Absolute in fact

The myth of Adonis is associated even with Greek mythology. According to the latter, Aphrodite was the mother of Adonis. She kept him as a child of tender years concealed in a little chest, and took this to Ais. Persephone, however, would not give back the child out of the chest when the mother demanded it. Zeus decided the dispute by ordering that each of the goddesses was to keep Adonis for a third part of the year. The last third was to be left to his own choice; he preferred to spend that time also with the universal mother and his own, namely, Aphrodite. As regards its direct interpretation, this myth, it is true, has reference to the seed lying under the ground, and then springing up out of it. The myth of Castor and Pollux, whose abode is alternately in the nether world and upon the earth, has also reference to this. Its true meaning, however, is not merely the alternation of Nature, but the transition generally from life, from affirmative Being, to death, to negation, and then again the rising up out of this negation—the absolute mediation which essentially belongs to the notion or conception of Spirit.

Here therefore this moment of Spirit has become religion.

3. The Religion of Mystery.

The form which is peculiar to the religions of anterior Asia is that of the mediation of Spirit with itself, in which the natural element is still predominant; the form of transition where we start from the Other as representing what Nature in general is, and where the transition does not yet appear as the coming of Spirit to itself. The further stage at which we have now arrived is where this transition shows itself as a coming of Spirit to itself, yet not in such a way that this return is a reconciliation,