Adonis in Wikipedia

Adonis (Greek aδωνις lord), is a figure with West Semitic antecedents, where he is a central cult figure in various mystery religions, who entered Greek mythology. He is closely related to the Cypriot Gauas[1] or Aos, Egyptian Osiris, the Semitic Tammuz and Baal Hadad, the Etruscan Atunis and the Phrygian Attis, all of whom are deities of rebirth and vegetation.[2] His cult belonged to women: the cult of dying Adonis was fully-developed in the circle of young girls around the poet Sappho from the island of Lesbos, about 600 BCE, as revealed in a fragment of Sappho's surviving poetry.[3] Adonis was the young lover of Aphrodite. He was gored by a wild boar in the hunt and died in her arms after she came to him when hearing his groans. Upon death, she sprinkled his blood with nectar and the short-lived flower anemone, which takes its name from the wind which so easily makes it fall, was produced. The city Berytos (Beirut) in Lebanon was named after their daughter, Beroe, whom both Dionysus and Poseidon fell in love with. It is said that the blood of Adonis is what turns the Adonis River (modern Nahr Ibrahim in Lebanon) red each spring. Afqa is the sacred source where the waters of the river emerge from a huge grotto in a cliff 200 meters high. It is there that the myth of Astarte (Venus) and Adonis was born. Adonis is one of the most complex cult figures in classical times. He has had multiple roles, and there has been much scholarship over the centuries concerning his meaning and purpose in Greek religious beliefs. He is an annually- renewed, ever-youthful vegetation god, a life-death-rebirth deity whose nature is tied to the calendar. His name is often applied in modern times to handsome youths...

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