Haunted by Adonis
A visitation from the Goddexx of Climate Grief
CW: NSFW image midway through the post, as well as discussion of all things death-related.
Timeline of Adonis-related posts: Today is the essay and hymn, next week (aiming for August 13th, 2023) will be the commentary.
Dreambae
So I thought I was going to spend Venus retrograde writing a personal meditation on grief as I have experienced it over the last year, since the death of my beloved at age 59 last August. The essay was going to be entitled “Grief as a Face of Aphrodite” and I had All Sorts of Thoughts™️ to share. (Some of them were even pretty good, lol.)
I’ll write about the Venusian qualities of that grief another time, perhaps. It deserves its own post.
But posting on my personal experience with untimely death is not what Spirit had in store for me. Instead, I struggled with multiple incomplete drafts of that essay, and an absolute inability to finish any of them.
👻 Enter the haunting. 👻
It began about a week ago with a dream that was little more than a single image…of an androgynous young person seated on a club-style red velvet banquette, with Their enormous c*ck and equally cavernous vag on full display. They gestured towards Their genitals, and looked me directly in the eyes as if to say, “What now?”
The funny thing was, despite Their exhibitionist tendencies, not to mention Their, shall we say, very visible excitement, the dream figure didn’t give off a super sexual vibe. Or at least, not primarily sexual. It was mostly a feeling of being wasted…in all senses of the word.
They appeared to be in a drug-addled haze, with glazed eyes and clammy skin. But a closer look revealed that what at first appeared to be sweat was more like wax, or slight decomposition. This person was dead. Or maybe undead. But definitely not alive.
Beautiful, ringleted, with a body that couldn’t have been more than 19-20 years old, They were already gone. And in the weird sight that comes in dreams, I could see all the way inside their vagina and notice that the hymen was still intact. They were (at least half) a virgin.
“What a waste,” I thought, with a surge of love for this poor, doomed soul. And then I woke up.
I knew immediately that I’d been looking at Adonis.
And I sat down to paint Them.
Stunted
Since then, I haven’t been able to do anything to satisfaction. Sure, I’ve written a bunch of stuff, translated some lines of Greek, made some dinners and such…but it’s all felt, well, fruitless.
Which is what one might expect when one is visited by the child whose extreme beauty led to a goddess smackdown (between Persephone and Aphrodite), Their own violent death by wild boar, and then a sort of undead resurrection that kept them a stunted youth shuttled between worlds for eternity. (I’ll write more on each facet of the Adonis myth in the Hymn commentary I’ll release on or about August 13th.)
Speaking of fruitless and stunted: I need to say a word here on perhaps the biggest common misconception about Adonis. It’s often said that Adonis is a “vegetation and fertility god” from the Near East. As someone who is not a true expert on Mesopotamia or Phoenicia, I won’t make a call on Adonis’ forerunners Dumezi and Tammuz…from what I can tell in a brief skim of the literature, the jury is out on how fertility-related they really were.
However, it has been definitively shown by multiple scholars that in the Greek context, Adonis was not a “vegetation/fertility god” of the sort originally imagined by the 19th century writer James Frazer (which is where the popular understanding of Adonis gets its inspiration). In the Greek context at least, Adonis is NOT associated with abundant fruits and vegetation. That’s the whole point. He’s dead. In fact, the vegetation he was associated with was withered plants—specifically wilted lettuce and fennel, both of which sprout quickly, but if left untended, die just as fast.
Of course, we know (as did the Greeks) that dead things eventually create life, but that seasonal “circle of life” cornucopia bounty wasn’t the focus of the Adonia celebration—which was really the only Greek context in which Adonis was ever celebrated. (There is not a single example of Greek temple-based Adonis worship that’s ever been found, even in Aphrodite’s temple precincts.)
Rather, the Adonia festival was a rite celebrated exclusively by Athenian women (both slave and free) on their household rooftops at night during mid-summer (more or less our July). During the Adonia, women made compostable Adonis dolls from plant matter and laid these little poppets on funeral biers of wilted lettuce and fennel. They then both wailed loudly, as was customary during funerals, and got raucously drunk and feasted. In fact, there are several references to instances in which women’s Adonia celebrations got so boisterous they disrupted the public (men’s) debates that were happening downtown.
Wilted vegetation and funeral biers (even funerals accompanied by drinking) definitely don’t neatly fit a “fertility rite” in the way we usually imagine it. Moreover, the Adonia didn’t happen during planting season; nor was it really harvest season yet either. At mid-summer, any lettuce or fennel sprouted fast, then died…So much so, that there was an ancient Greek expression, “as fruitless as the Gardens of Adonis.”
So what are we to make of this sprouting/withered, dead/undead, sad/delirious, FRUITLESS divinity?
The Wasteland
The Hymn gives us some hints. There’s a connection to Orion, the star Sirius, and the late-summer season the Greeks called Opōra. There are also clear references to Adonis’ association with Dionysius, who is likewise associated with the Opōra season. I’ll write more about each of these associations in the forthcoming commentary. For now, let’s just note that in a Mediterranean context, that time of year (then, as now) is associated with wildfire and high winds that spread fire and make sea travel unpredictable. In other words: dangerous climate conditions.
Which brings me (finally!) to the message my my undead dream bae clearly wants me to get out into the world.
It’s as though the Adonis in my dream was saying to me, “Look, I get it girl. You’re grieving your love. And that certainly is part of my story. My tale will resonate with anyone who’s ever lost a loved one, especially to untimely or accidental deaths. But that’s not what I’m here for this time. Take a closer look. Lean in. Touch my decomposing flesh and taste its beauty. And did you notice my giant d*ck? My deep, but untouched p*ssy? There’s another message here I’m trying to bring.”
And so I did lean in. And this is what Adonis told me: They are the patron goddexx of the wasteland, especially as we experience it in the grief and horror of climate change. AND They are here to teach us that even (especially?) in the withered and weary arms of the apocaplyse, we can experience intense beauty, and even deep rest.
For Adonis lays down in the midst of it all, and is beautiful in Their brokenness. Or rather, it is far better to say that in laying down and letting us witness and mourn Them, Adonis shows us how broken our own frames of reference are, thus freeing us to see the beauty present in bodies, moments, beings, encounters the world has told us are dangerous or repulsive.
Adonis’s uncanny undead eyes stare down the dualities that keep us locked in predictable narrative. They’re a fertility god whose symbol is wilted plants. A boy who has a cavernous vagina. A dead youth who lives forever with two goddesses, one in heaven (Aphrodite) and one in hell (Persephone). The wasteland Adonis inhabits—neither verdant life nor ashen death, but that weird waxy place in between—is the one we’re living in right now. They are us.
We see Adonis’ Divinity, feel Their presence in the face of the polar bear cast out at sea on a severed ice-ledge, the buzz and flash of a million locusts descending on a field, the cry of a baby orangutan whose mother was lost to poachers, the cold bodies of a family drowned in their basement apartment by flash floods.
We see them, too, in the fleeting beauty of the invasive lantern bug before we squash it under our feet in an effort to protect the peach trees. They are the gorgeous sunsets produced half a world away by haze from Canadian wildfires. The emerging baby mammoth corpses released from sagging permafrost in Siberia. The skulls of orcas smashing into boats off the coast of Portugal. The gorgeous, but terrifying ripple of the cougar’s muscles as it stalks through a suburban neighborhood looking for tiny dogs to kill.
Theirs the beauty of the wasteland, of the world in flux, of the moment between the life we thought we were going to have and the one we actually are going to get. And the beauty and terror and, yes, *undead* feeling of that moment.
The Terrifying Promise of Both/And
Adonis forces us to ask:
What if climate change is inevitable, horrible, AND beautiful at the same time?
What if “the invasive” is also part of an emergent ecosystem?
If “the enemy” is found to be our kin?
If we are both hopelessly doomed AND birthing something brand new?
If that brand new thing is also unspeakably ancient, and has always already been right at our fingertips?
Theirs is not a denial of the gravity of the situation or some sort of pollyanna wishful thinking that change doesn’t involve excruciating pain, death, and absence.
Adonis brings the deadass clarity of, what the Tibetan buddhists call, “no hope, no fear.” That is, both hope and fear are in their own ways, attempts to escape the present moment, the uncertainty of the now.
Adonis teaches us to fully feel this “apocalyptic now”—in all its absence and loss and pain AND its incredible fecundity and even beauty.
Adonis calls us to inhabit both horror and elation. To give space to the grief that characterizes this particular moment in time, and allow IT to speak. And to keep our ears open for what it tells us—which may or may not align with what we think we already know. As my brother Bayo Akomolafe often says, “The times are urgent! Let us slow down.”
A Blessing for the Weary, the Stunted, the Doubled Down, the Half-Born
Maybe slowing down is why Adonis appeared to me on the red velvet banquette of a dingy club… maybe They’d been boisterously carousing all night like an Athenian woman celebrating the Adonia, and were tired as hell. Or maybe the opposite—They were all cried out and were about to beckon me to stand back up again and revel in the delirious, decadent beauty of a world on fire. Or maybe, just maybe, it was both of the above.
Wherever you are reading this, whatever grief you may carry: May Adonis’ appearance in your life bring you the blessing of releasing your tears, the recognition of their beauty (that’s the connection to Aphrodite right there), and the courage to rest in the unknown of a cosmos that is always and ever in flow.
✨Yours in Earth and Starry Sky,
✨✨Kristin
A Quick Note on Gender
In many more traditional tellings of Greek myth, Adonis is depicted as a male. This, historians have noted, is because his myth is descended from more ancient Mesopotamian and Phoenician myths of Dumezid (Inanna’s lover) and Tammuz (the beloved of Ishtar/Astarte). You can read more on that history and its relation to the landscape and ecological devastation of Lebanon in this amazing essay by Rami Zurayk.
However, the Orphic tradition of Adonis reworks this Near Eastern myth in interesting, cosmologically significant ways. (I’ll be talking more about that cosmology in the Hymn commentary.) One sign of this reworking is that though the Greek of the Orphic Hymn does use male pronouns for Adonis, it also makes clear that like the Moon, there is a fundamentally androgynous nature to his being. Certainly that was on full display in my dream, lol. So I’ve chosen to refer to Adonis as “They” when talking about my own interactions with Them, but I retain the “He” in the translation of the Orphic Hymn, because, as always, I’m trying to be as faithful as possible to the original content.
The Orphic Hymn to Adonis
Incense: Aromatics
Hear me praying,
Many-named, Best Daimon:
You are dainty-maned,
luxuriantly foliated,