The more closely one studies pre-Christian Theology, the
more strongly one is impressed with the deeply, and daringly,
spiritual character of its speculations, and the more doubtful it
appears that such teaching can depend upon the unaided processes of
human thought, or can have been evolved from such germs as we find
among the supposedly 'primitive' peoples, such as e.g. the Australian
tribes. Are they really primitive? Or are we dealing, not with the
primary elements of religion, but with the disjecta membra of a
vanished civilization? Certain it is that so far as historical
evidence goes our earliest records point to the recognition of
a spiritual, not of a material, origin of the human race; the Sumerian
and Babylonian Psalms were not composed by men who believed themselves
the descendants of 'witchetty grubs.' The Folk practices and
ceremonies studied in these pages, the Dances, the rough Dramas, the
local and seasonal celebrations, do not represent the material out of
which the Attis-Adonis cult was formed, but surviving fragments of a
worship from which the higher significance has vanished.
Sir W. Ridgeway is confident that Osiris, Attis, Adonis, were all at
one time human beings, whose tragic fate gripped hold of popular
imagination, and led to their ultimate deification.
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