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The last king of Byblus bore the ancient name of Cinyras, and was beheaded by Pompey the Great for his tyrannous excesses. His legendary namesake Cinyras is said to have founded a sanctuary of Aphrodite, that is, of Astarte, at a place on Mount Lebanon, distant a day's journey from the capital.
At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been instituted by King Cinyras, and to have been practised by his daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who, having incurred the wrath of Aphrodite, mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt.
The Cypriotes no longer knew whether Cinyras were god, or man, or myth; whether he were the son of Apollo, or of Pygmalion and the bewitching ivory image of the sculptor's dead wife; or, in very truth, that splendid prince of Agamemnon's time, as sung by Homer in the Iliad, winning laurels at the siege of Troy.
One narrow way led across all three; its gate was kept by Timon of Athens. Nauplius secured us admission, however, and then we saw the chastisement of many kings, and many common men; some were known to us; indeed there hung Cinyras, swinging in eddies of smoke.
As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to have been founded by king Cinyras and observed by his daughters, we may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the form of marriage with a statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each of them had to mate with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who played Astarte to his Adonis.
In the popular theology, Adonis was the son of Cinyras, king of Cyrus, whose untimely death was wept by Venus and her attendant nymphs: in the physical theology of the philosophers, he was a symbol of the sun, alternately present to and absent from the earth; but in the initiation into the Mysteries of his worship, his resurrection and return from Hades were adopted as a type of the immortality of the soul.
Thus it would appear, as scholars have already observed, that Cinyras was in a sense a duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable goddess also lost her heart.
Hence if the king desired to reign after his wife's death, the only way in which he could legitimately continue to do so was by marrying his daughter, and thus prolonging through her the title which had formerly been his through her mother. Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty and to have been wooed by Aphrodite herself.
At all events the story indicates that the princesses of Paphos had to conform to the custom as well as women of humble birth. Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of the priestly kings of Paphos and the father of Adonis, there are some that deserve our attention.
In their spirit and their mystical design, these Mysteries bore a very great resemblance to the third degree of Masonry, and they are quoted to show the striking analogy between the ancient and the modern initiations. ADONIS. In mythology, the son of Cinyras and Myrrha, who was greatly beloved by Venus, or Aphrodite.
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