We know Tammuz, “the true son,” best by one of his titles, Adonis, the Lord or King.  The Rites of Adonis were celebrated at midsummer.  That is certain and memorable; for, just as the Athenian fleet was setting sail on its ill-omened voyage to Syracuse, the streets of Athens were thronged with funeral processions, everywhere was seen the image of the dead god, and the air was full of the lamentations of weeping women.  Thucydides does not so much as mention the coincidence, but Plutarch[2] tells us those who took account of omens were full of concern for the fate of their countrymen.  To start an expedition on the day of the funeral rites of Adonis, the Canaanitish “Lord,” was no luckier than to set sail on a Friday, the death-day of the “Lord” of Christendom.

The rites of Tammuz and of Adonis, celebrated in the summer, were rites of death rather than of resurrection.  The emphasis is on the fading and dying down of vegetation rather than on its upspringing.  The reason of this is simple and will soon become manifest.  For the moment we have only to note that while in Egypt the rites of Osiris are represented as much by art as by ritual, in Babylon and Palestine in the feasts of Tammuz and Adonis it is ritual rather than art that obtains.

* * * * *

We have now to pass to another enquiry.  We have seen that art and ritual, not only in Greece but in Egypt and Palestine, are closely linked.  So closely, indeed, are they linked that we even begin to suspect they may have a common origin.  We have now to ask, what is it that links art and ritual so closely together, what have they in common?  Do they start from the same impulse, and if so why do they, as they develop, fall so widely asunder?

It will clear the air if we consider for a moment what we mean by art, and also in somewhat greater detail what we mean by ritual.

* * * * *

Art, Plato[3] tells us in a famous passage of the Republic, is imitation; the artist imitates natural objects, which are themselves in his philosophy but copies of higher realities.  All the artist can do is to make a copy of a copy, to hold up a mirror to Nature in which, as he turns it whither he will, “are reflected sun and heavens and earth and man,” anything and everything.  Never did a statement so false, so wrong-headed, contain so much suggestion of truth—­truth which, by the help of analysing ritual, we may perhaps be able to disentangle.  But first its falsehood must be grasped, and this is the more important as Plato’s misconception in modified form lives on to-day.  A painter not long ago thus defined his own art:  “The art of painting is the art of imitating solid objects upon a flat surface by means of pigments.”  A sorry life-work!  Few people to-day, perhaps, regard art as the close and realistic copy of Nature; photography has at least scotched, if not slain, that error; but many people still regard art as a sort of improvement on or an “idealization” of Nature.  It is the part of the artist, they think, to take suggestions and materials from Nature, and from these to build up, as it were, a revised version.  It is, perhaps, only by studying those rudimentary forms of art that are closely akin to ritual that we come to see how utterly wrong-headed is this conception.