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To primitive man, as we have seen, beast and bird and plant and himself were not sharply divided, and the periodicity of the seasons was for all.  It will depend on man’s social and geographical conditions whether he notices periodicity most in plants or animals.  If he is nomadic he will note the recurrent births of other animals and of human children, and will connect them with the lunar year.  But it is at once evident that, at least in Mediterranean lands, and probably everywhere, it is the periodicity of plants and vegetation generally which depends on moisture, that is most striking.  Plants die down in the heat of summer, trees shed their leaves in autumn, all Nature sleeps or dies in winter, and awakes in spring.

Sometimes it is the dying down that attracts most attention.  This is very clear in the rites of Adonis, which are, though he rises again, essentially rites of lamentation.  The details of the ritual show this clearly, and specially as already seen in the cult of Osiris.  For the “gardens” of Adonis the women took baskets or pots filled with earth, and in them, as children sow cress now-a-days, they planted wheat, fennel, lettuce, and various kinds of flowers, which they watered and tended for eight days.  In hot countries the seeds sprang up rapidly, but as the plants had no roots they withered quickly away.  At the end of the eight days they were carried out with the images of the dead Adonis and thrown with them into the sea or into springs.  The “gardens” of Adonis became the type of transient loveliness and swift decay.

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“What waste would it be,” says Plutarch,[9] “what inconceivable waste, for God to create man, had he not an immortal soul.  He would be like the women who make little gardens, not less pleasant than the gardens of Adonis in earthen pots and pans; so would our souls blossom and flourish but for a day in a soft and tender body of flesh without any firm and solid root of life, and then be blasted and put out in a moment.”

Celebrated at midsummer as they were, and as the “gardens” were thrown into water, it is probable that the rites of Adonis may have been, at least in part, a rain-charm.  In the long summer droughts of Palestine and Babylonia the longing for rain must often have been intense enough to provoke expression, and we remember (p. 19) that the Sumerian Tammuz was originally Dumuzi-absu, “True Son of the Waters.”  Water is the first need for vegetation.  Gardens of Adonis are still in use in the Madras Presidency.[10] At the marriage of a Brahman “seeds of five or nine sorts are mixed and sown in earthen pots which are made specially for the purpose, and are filled with earth.  Bride and bridegroom water the seeds both morning and evening for four days; and on the fifth day the seedlings are thrown, like the real gardens of Adonis, into a tank or river.”