Life / Death / Rebirth: Myths and Rituals in the Changing Seasons
According to the theories supported by James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, the spectacle of the great changes that annually alternate in nature has always strongly impressed the minds of men, pushing them to meditate on the causes of such great and marvelous transformations and explaining the growth and decay of vegetation, the birth and death of all living things, as effects of the growing and waning force of divine beings who were born, died and resurrected.
Men have therefore imagined that they could reinvigorate divinity, the principle of life in conflict with the opposite principle of death, and that they could promote its resurrection with celebrations and rites that, although varying from place to place, were all very similar in substance. The myth is therefore produced by man as an inadequate explanation of nature and the ritual follows the myth. In the ancient Western Mediterranean, the divinities most closely linked to these phenomena of natural alternation were Aphrodite and Demeter.
Venus-Aphrodite, the most beautiful and smiling of the beautiful goddesses, primitive personification of the light of day that rises from the sea and of the life force that emanates from the waters, was worshiped throughout the Greco-Roman world as the goddess of love.
On a chariot drawn by swans and doves, crowned with myrtle and roses, symbol of the spring fertility of nature, she happily traveled the lands and the skies followed by her dense retinue. To seduce, she only had to untie the golden belt that held her dress, because from her person emanated a sweet fragrance of ambrosia that infallibly enchanted men and gods.
Among her many lovers the most adored was Adonis, symbol of youth and male beauty, but also of death and the renewal of nature in the alternation of the seasons.
Son of Cinyras, king of Cyprus, and his daughter Myrrha, he was born from the body of his mother transformed into a myrrh tree after incest. Famous for his great beauty, Adonis was loved by Venus but during a hunting trip he was killed by a wild boar sent by the jealous Apollo or by Mars, lover of the goddess. From the blood of the dying young man grew anemones; the blood of the goddess, wounded by the brambles while running to help him, stained the roses born from the drops of water that slipped to the ground from her skin as she emerged dripping from the sea of Cythera. From white they became red, eternal testimony of amorous passion. Jupiter was moved by Venus’s desperation: Persephone, queen of Hades, did not want to bring the young man back to life. Elected as arbiter between the two lovers, the father of the gods established that Adonis should live four months in the kingdom of the Underworld, four on Earth and four in a place of his choice: Adonis chose Earth, in the company of his divine lover Venus.
This is one of the myths par excellence on the alternation of the seasons in which ‘Adon’, the ‘Lord’ of the Middle Eastern world (‘Adonî’, ‘my Lord’, is the epithet – attribute used as an invocation for the ancient Sumerian god Tammuz) is killed by a dark force, the bristly boar symbol of winter, whose cold breath extinguishes the life of nature that regains strength in the periodic return of spring, awakened by Aphrodite, the personified vegetative force.
Therefore an archaic myth, spread from Western Asia to the entire Mediterranean basin, extremely persistent over time and even partially incorporated into Christian rituals. In fact, between June and July in Greece the Adonie were celebrated, non-public and all-female festivals, celebrated especially by courtesans in licentious banquets in the privacy of their homes.
In reality, more or less discreetly, the entire female world honoured the beautiful ‘Lord’ by growing grasses that were put to germinate in pots and baskets, the ‘Gardens of Adonis’, placed on terraces where the heat of the sun accelerated their germination, but soon burned the tender shoots.
The vases, carried in procession together with a stone sarcophagus in which a simulacrum of Adonis was buried, were then thrown into the sea as a tribute to the energy-giving element from which Aphrodite had emerged to life.
In many areas of Southern Italy, the pre-Christian symbolic ritual has survived in the rites of Easter week, in which the passage from spring to winter was manifested by the death/rebirth of the divinity. The ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are still explicitly present in the ‘Sepulchres’ of some areas of Sicily, where, next to the triumphs of flowers, the slender and fragile seedlings born from cereal seeds left to germinate in the dark are displayed. On the other hand, even the anemone, born from the blood shed by Adonis, will be associated in the Christian era with the drops of blood of the crucified Christ.
In contrast to the Adoniae were the Thesmophoria, the public festivals in honor of Demeter, dedicated to the female world institutionalized in the family.
From Demeter, the mother earth, was born Persephone – Kore, archetype of the ‘maiden’ with a smiling blossoming face, who one day was kidnapped by Hades, god of the Underworld, to make her his bride.
The mother tore off her ornaments and colorful clothes to cover herself with dark veils that darkened the sky and, grabbing torches to illuminate her desperate search, for nine days she traveled across the lands that became deserted and flew over the seas that swelled stormily. Men, who could no longer gather the fruits of the earth and raise animals, fell into famine and neglected to honor the gods for whom they no longer had offerings and sacrifices.
All the immortals tried to bring the inconsolable Demeter to reason, but she would not relent unless they promised that her daughter would be returned to her.
Faced with such upheaval and Persephone’s languishing, Hades resigned himself to returning her, but only in appearance.
He treacherously made her swallow a pomegranate seed, so the bride, having broken her fast in the Underworld, was condemned to return there anyway.
From now on she would forever spend a third of the year in the afterlife, when the earth becomes barren in the dark sleep of winter, to return to the earth with her mother in the spring, bringing back to the fields the colour and joy of summer flowers and fruits.
Because of this myth of death, rebirth and fertility of nature, the two goddesses, Demeter-Ceres and Persephone-Kore, were often venerated together in mysteries and institutionalized festivities such as the Thesmophoria. 
These festivals celebrated Demeter both as Thesmophora, the Legislator, founder of marriage and the laws of civil life; and as the goddess who established agriculture, who, in mourning for her daughter, had refused to fulfill her role as protector of plant growth and crops.
The Thesmophoria took place in summer or autumn and had a variable duration depending on the city in which they were held. In Athens they were held before sowing, lasted three days, were forbidden to men and open only to free women married to Athenian citizens.
On the first day the women went to pray in the sanctuary, the Thesmophorion, on the second day they fasted to purify themselves, on the third day they offered Demeter cereals, wine, cheese, oil, cooked the meat of sacrificed animals, feasted, exchanged lascivious mottos and flagellated themselves. The ritual also called for the carcasses of the sacrificed animals to be thrown into caves or ravines at night, to symbolize Persephone’s descent into the underworld.
But even more linked to myth and participated in by the faithful were the Eleusinian mysteries, the small and large Eleusinia, celebrated in the sanctuary of the town of Eleusis, linked to Athens by the long Sacred Way.
The small Eleusinia lasted three days, took place between February and March and alluded to the return of Kore to earth, to the spring awakening of vegetation, while the large Eleusinia took place at the end of September and signified the descent of Kore to the Underworld, or to the return of vegetation to winter hibernation. These lasted nine days and consisted of a series of rites and public representations of the facts linked to the two goddesses. The most evocative moment of the festival was, on the fifth day, the great procession of faithful crowned with ivy and myrtle that at dusk moved from Athens along the Sacred Way to enter Eleusis in the mystical silence of the night among the splendor of thousands of torches.
From the union of Venus and Mars was born Love, the Eros of the Greeks, who had as his attributes the purple-strung bow and the infallible arrows that none of the men and gods could escape, because love is the vital principle, the strongest but also the most fearsome power of nature. Fearsome and destabilizing in fact because, carried by the light wings, the god capriciously turned his attentions towards anyone, with very little consideration for parental ties, for the integrity of the bonds already established, for the differences between the sexes. But the day came when even the young god pricked himself with one of his infallible arrows and fell in love with the delicate butterfly-winged Psyche, who for her indescribable grace had aroused the jealousy of Venus. The god, with the help of Zephyr, hid her from her mother’s wrath in his enchanted palace where he went every night to meet the girl, imposing only one condition in his golden prison, that their meetings always take place in the dark. But Psyche wanted to know the face of her divine lover and while she was watching him enchanted, a drop of burning oil fell from the lamp on the sleeping god, awakening him. 
Love fled indignantly and began the cruel atonement for the disobedient but repentant Psyche: she wandered all over the earth looking for the lost good, tried to tame Venus with the most humble services, begged the gods, descended to the Underworld, until, moved by compassion, Love obtained from Jupiter that the girl be welcomed among the immortals. Mercury, messenger of the gods and archaic male alter ego of Venus, transported her in flight to Olympus, where the two young people married, generated Voluptuousness and lived happily ever after. The allegorical meaning hidden in this tender fable, which with variations is present in numerous cultures, is that Psyche (the soul) uniting with Love and sublimating human impulses through trials and purifications is able to achieve salvation and immortality. But it is also a myth of rebirth and therefore of spring: the secret castle of Eros is in a lush forest overflowing with flowers, an earthly paradise from which Psyche moves away to descend to the cold, bare and dark Hades and from which she rises again to ascend to the luminous Olympus, led by Mercury and driven by warm spring Zephyrs.
In addition to her lovely son and the playful group of Cupids, Venus’s retinue included a series of other deities: the Hours, who preside over the passing of the seasons; the Graces, who give everything that embellishes and makes life pleasant; Hebe, the blooming youth who pours ambrosia into the cup of the gods; and Mercury, the immortal messenger, who with the goddess had generated Hermaphroditus, the inseparable union of male and female.
The ancients have always seen close ties between Venus, Ceres – Demeter, goddess of abundance and harvests, and Bacchus, god of wine, in the wise awareness that the pleasures of love acquire warmth if accompanied by the taste of good food and happy libations – Sine Cerere et Baccho friget Venus – but also that love and therefore fertility cannot but be linked to the blossoming and fruiting of nature.
The nymph Chloris, wife of Zephyr, also took part in Venus’s procession. She was identified by her attributes and linguistic assonance with Flora, the ancient Italic divinity who presided over flowering, a phenomenon of splendid beauty but also fundamental for its natural effects, since a luxuriant flowering is the essential condition for an abundant harvest. The goddess was therefore a symbol of spring and protector, as well as of agriculture and beekeeping, of youth and of women who desired a child.
With the epithet of ‘minister of Ceres’, to indicate the very close bond with the goddess of the harvest, very solemn festivals, the Floralia, were celebrated in her honor in Rome from April 28 to May 3. People crowned themselves with flowers, the doors of their houses were crowned, and they indulged in licentious games.
As the personification of spring, Flora has always been much loved by all the arts, from painting to poetry to music, and one of the most famous representations is that of the French Nicolas Poussin (Les Andelys 1594 – Rome 1665), who depicts her triumph at the center of characters whose myth is linked to the transformation into a flower. The painting, painted around 1630 and now at the Gemaldegalerie in Dresden, is inspired by L’Adone by Giambattista Marino (Naples 1569 – 1625), a poet to whom the painter was deeply attached. In fact, he translated into images the most famous mythological fables derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and inserted into the poem. The painting was in turn translated into the engraving by Gérard Audran (Lyon 1640 – Paris 1703) owned by Casanatense.
Following the inscription and observing Audran’s engraving from right to left, the first metamorphosis represented is that of Ajax changed into a hyacinth, a flower that the hero, committing suicide with Hector’s sword, stained with blood with signs that repeat on the petals the initials of his name ‘AI’ ‘AI’.
A less widespread version of the myth is here received, while in addition to the image of Flora, Hyacinth is also represented, who, as the most famous version tells, was a young man loved by both Apollo and Zephyr. The latter, devoured by jealousy, while the two lovers were competing in throwing the discus, deviated its trajectory, killing the young man. Apollo, as an everlasting memory, transformed his beloved into the flower that would forever bear his cry of despair imprinted on its petals. Apollo is again the protagonist of the myth of Clytia transformed into a sunflower. The girl, in love but not reciprocated by the god, lost herself in the desperate contemplation of her beloved to the point of dying of hunger. Apollo, finally moved, transformed her into a sunflower, the flower that always turns towards the sun, so that Clytia would never stop looking for and finding her beloved (Apollo = Sun) with her gaze. After Giacinto, Adonis is depicted, but the inscription contains an inaccuracy that indicates his metamorphosis into a passion flower instead of an anemone, an error probably induced by Marino’s baroque masterpiece, which in canto VII has a famous eulogy of the plant recently imported from the Americas.
Strangely enough, this error also brings Adone back to a connection with Christian Easter; in fact, the passion flower is also called the flower of the Passion, since Father Giacomo Boiso in Treatise on the Crucifixion of Our Lord of 1610 described it in detail, identifying in it the instruments of the Passion of Christ: the three stigmas represent the nails, the five anthers indicate the wounds, the radial filaments recall the crown of thorns, the stylus in the centre the column of the flagellation, the swollen stamens the sponge soaked in vinegar, the ten petals the Apostles – with the exception of Judas and Peter – the leaf the spear, the tendrils the whip.
After the myth of Adonis, the inscription mentions the fable of Narcissus, depicted here while looking at himself in a basin. The beautiful young man, proud of his beauty that everyone was infatuated with, however despised love, preferring instead to spend his days hunting. Among his admirers was the nymph Echo – condemned by Juno to always repeat the last words she heard, because with her chatter she had tried to distract the goddess to prevent her from discovering Jupiter’s infidelities. Rejected by Narcissus, she hid in the woods until she disappeared, consumed by love, and remained only a distant echo. Faced with such cruel insensitivity, all the lovers despised by Narcissus invoked the vengeance of Venus and he was condemned to be seduced by his image reflected in the water.
Desperate, Narcissus stretched out his arms towards the river and wasted away in useless laments, until, realizing the impossibility of his love, he let himself die and when the nymphs searched for his body they found the flower of the same name near the body of water. The last myth cited in Audran’s engraving is that of Crocus, who, following his unhappy love for the nymph Smilax, since love between a mortal and an immortal was forbidden, was transformed by the gods, out of pity, into the flower of the same name, while the nymph was transformed into sarsaparilla (Smilax aspera).
This last character also had a double nature of death and regeneration, so much so that in ancient rituals the crocus was the flower that was scattered on the bed of the newlyweds, but also the chthonic flower, linked to the funerary sphere and thrown into the funeral pyres.