Flower Myths: The Creation Of Adonis
Charming tales of lovely young people who, by dying in the springtime, were fittingly changed into spring flowers.
In Greece, there are the loveliest of wild flowers. They would be beautiful anywhere, but Greece is not a rich and fertile country of wide meadows and fruitful fields where flowers seem at home.
Of these deaths and flowery resurrections, the most famous was that of Adonis. Every year the Greek girls mourned for him and every year rejoiced when his flower, the blood-red anemone, the wind flower, was seen blooming again.
The god of vegetation and re-birth, who is known for his extraordinary beauty, Adonis had a life of complexities.
Even as a baby Adonis was the favourite of the goddess Aphrodite. She saw him when he was born and even then loved him and decided he should be hers. She carried him to Persephone to take charge of him for her, but Persephone loved him too and would not give him back to Aphrodite, not even when the goddess went down to the underworld to get him.
Neither goddess would yield, and finally Zeus himself had to judge between them. He decided that Adonis should spend half of the year with each, the autumn and winter the Queen of the Death: the spring and summer with the Goddess of love and Beauty.
All the time he was with Aphrodite she sought only to please him. But one sad day she happened not to be with him and he tracked down a mighty boar. He hurled his spear at it, but he only wounded it, and before he could spring away, the boar mad with pain and rushed at him and gored him with its great tusks.
He was softly breathing his life away, the dark blood flowing down his skin of snow and his eyes growing heavy and dim. Aphrodite kissed him, but Adonis knew not that she kissed as he died. Cruel as his wound was, the wound in her heart was deeper. She spoke to him, although she knew he could not hear her.
But down in the black underworld Adonis could not hear them, nor see the crimson flower that sprang up where each drop of his blood had stained the earth. Where his blood fell, there bloomed the red anemone.
The main idea of the myth is that of the death and resurrection of Adonis, which represents the decay of nature every winter and revival in every spring.