of generative light falling from the moon”.  When the bull of Attis was sacrificed his worshippers were drenched with its blood, and were afterwards ceremonially fed with milk, as they were supposed to have “renewed their youth” and become children.  The ancient Greek god Eros (Cupid) was represented as a wanton boy or handsome youth.  Another god of fertility, the Irish Angus, who resembles Eros, is called “the ever young”; he slumbers like Tammuz and awakes in the Spring.

Apparently it was believed that the child god, Tammuz, returned from the earlier Sumerian Paradise of the Deep, and grew into full manhood in a comparatively brief period, like Vyasa and other super-men of Indian mythology.  A couplet from a Tammuz hymn says tersely: 

    In his infancy in a sunken boat he lay. 
    In his manhood in the submerged grain he lay.[115]

The “boat” may be the “chest” in which Adonis was concealed by Aphrodite when she confided him to the care of Persephone, queen of Hades, who desired to retain the young god, but was compelled by Zeus to send him back to the goddess of love and vegetation.  The fact that Ishtar descended to Hades in quest of Tammuz may perhaps explain the symbolic references in hymns to mother goddesses being in sunken boats also when their powers were in abeyance, as were those of the god for part of each year.  It is possible, too, that the boat had a lunar and a solar significance.  Khonsu, the Egyptian moon god, for instance, was associated with the Spring sun, being a deity of fertility and therefore a corn spirit; he was a form of Osiris, the Patriarch, who sojourned on earth to teach mankind how to grow corn and cultivate fruit trees.  In the Egyptian legend Osiris received the corn seeds from Isis, which suggests that among Great-Mother-worshipping peoples, it was believed that agricultural civilization had a female origin.  The same myths may have been attached to corn gods and corn goddesses, associated with water, sun, moon, and stars.

That there existed in Babylonia at an extremely remote period an agricultural myth regarding a Patriarch of divine origin who was rescued from a boat in his childhood, is suggested by the legend which was attached to the memory of the usurper King Sargon of Akkad.  It runs as follows: 

    “I am Sargon, the mighty King of Akkad.  My mother was a
    vestal (priestess), my father an alien, whose brother inhabited
        the
    mountain....  When my mother had conceived me, she bare
    me in a hidden place.  She laid me in a vessel of rushes, stopped
    the door thereof with pitch, and cast me adrift on the river.... 
    The river floated me to Akki, the water drawer, who, in drawing
    water, drew me forth.  Akki, the water drawer, educated me as
    his son, and made me his gardener.  As a gardener, I was beloved
    by the goddess Ishtar.”