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Osiris was then slain by Typhon, and He is pictured on the circle of the horizon, with outstretched arms, as if crucified a posture originally of benediction, not of suffering. The death of Tammuz was annually bewailed at the spring equinox in Babylonia and Syria, as were Adonis in Syria and Greece, and Attis in Phrygia, pictured "as a man fastened with a lamb at the foot."
The great spring festival of Cybele and Attis is best known to us in the form in which it was celebrated at Rome; but as we are informed that the Roman ceremonies were also Phrygian, we may assume that they differed hardly, if at all, from their Asiatic original. The order of the festival seems to have been as follows.
WE can now perhaps understand why the ancients identified Hippolytus, the consort of Artemis, with Virbius, who, according to Servius, stood to Diana as Adonis to Venus, or Attis to the Mother of the Gods. For Diana, like Artemis, was a goddess of fertility in general, and of childbirth in particular. As such she, like her Greek counterpart, needed a male partner.
Their Redeemer is descended by a fairly clear genealogy from the 'Tritos Sôtêr' of early Greece, contaminated with similar figures, like Attis and Adonis from Asia Minor, Osiris from Egypt, and the special Jewish conception of the Messiah of the Chosen people. He has various names, which the name of Jesus or 'Christos', 'the Anointed', tends gradually to supersede.
In this Phrygian satyr, shepherd, or herdsman who enjoyed the friendship of Cybele, practised the music so characteristic of her rites, and died a violent death on her sacred tree, the pine, may we not detect a close resemblance to Attis, the favourite shepherd or herdsman of the goddess, who is himself described as a piper, is said to have perished under a pine-tree, and was annually represented by an effigy hung, like Marsyas, upon a pine?
IN ANCIENT EGYPT the god whose death and resurrection were annually celebrated with alternate sorrow and joy was Osiris, the most popular of all Egyptian deities; and there are good grounds for classing him in one of his aspects with Adonis and Attis as a personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature, especially of the corn.
A further step was taken by the Emperor Claudius when he incorporated the Phrygian worship of the sacred tree, and with it probably the orgiastic rites of Attis, in the established religion of Rome.
H.J. Byrne, "All Hallows Eve and other Festivals in Connaught," Folk-lore, xviii. pp. 437 sq. J. Harland and T.T. Wilkinson, op. cit. p. 140. County Folk-lore vol. iv. Baron Dupin, in Mémoires publiées par la Société Royale des Antiquaires de France, iv. p. 108. The evidence for the solar origin of Christmas is given in Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Second Edition, pp. 254-256. "Yule."
A reminiscence of the manner in which these old representatives of the deity were put to death is perhaps preserved in the famous story of Marsyas. He was said to be a Phrygian satyr or Silenus, according to others a shepherd or herdsman, who played sweetly on the flute. A friend of Cybele, he roamed the country with the disconsolate goddess to soothe her grief for the death of Attis.
It does not appear as an element in the worship of any deity, neither in that of such gods as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Attis, nor in that of any other. It is not represented in ancient records as a devotion of one's self or an assimilation of one's self or of a child to the tribal or national god.
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