"[16] And in spite of the strong opposition to this cult
manifested in Indian literature, beginning with the Rig-Veda, and
ripening to fruition in the Upanishads, in spite of the rise of Buddhism,
with its opposing dictum of renunciation, the 'Life-Cult' asserted its
essential vitality against all opposition, and under modified forms
represents the 'popular' religion of India to this day.
Each and all of the ritual dramas, reconstructed in the pages of
Mysterium und Mimus bear, more or less distinctly, the stamp of their
'Fertility' origin,[17] while outside India the pages of Frazer and
Mannhardt, and numerous other writers on Folk-lore and Ethnology,
record the widespread, and persistent, survival of these rites, and
their successful defiance of the spread of civilization.
It is to this special group of belief and practice that the Adonis
(and more especially its Phrygian counterpart the Attis) worship
belong, and even when transplanted to the more restrained and cultured
environment of the Greek mainland, they still retained their primitive
character. Farnell, in his Cults of the Greek States, refers to the
worship of Adonis as "a ritual that the more austere State religion of
Greece probably failed to purify, the saner minds, bred in a religious
atmosphere that was, on the whole, genial, and temperate, revolted
from the din of cymbals and drums, the meaningless ecstasies of sorrow
and joy, that marked the new religion.
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