Note 262.1 — Chapter XIII · Babylonian, Anatolian, and Aegean Ritual.

But when we descend from the higher religion to the old Hellenic agrarian cults associated with the heroes or daimones of the soil and field, we find evidence of sorrowful rites, ceremonies of bewailing, which belong to the same type as that of Tammuz; and in the Greek, as in the Babylonian, the personage to whom they are attached is a youthful hero or heroine of vegetation: such are Linos, perhaps the earliest theme of a melancholy harvest-song of pre-Homeric days; Hyakinthos, the “youth” of the Laconian land who may or may not have been Hellenic, to whom the greater part of the Hyakinthia were consecrated; Eunostos of Tanagra; Erigone, “the early-born,” of Ikaria. The life of all these passes away as the verdure passes, or as the crops are gathered in; and to one of them at least, Hyakinthos, and perhaps to the others, the idea of an annual resurrection was attached. But none of these came like Tammuz to play a world-part; they remain the naïve, half-realised forms of poetic folk-religion. Like to them is Bormos of Bithynia,262.1 whose death was bewailed at the harvest-time with melancholy songs, accompanied by sad flute-music, and Lityerses of Phrygia, whom the reapers lamented around the threshing-floor.