196 i Flora Unveiled
The festival focused on the carnal aspects of Aphrodite’s obsession with Adonis. Plants
played a key role in the festivities in the form of “Adonis Gardens.” The women planted
seeds of wheat, barley, lettuce, and fennel in pots, baskets, and pottery shards, providing
them with just enough water to allow germination. After growing for about eight days on
the root- tops of the houses, the seedlings were allowed to wither under the hot summer
sun. The women then carried them to the shore and cast them into the sea, wailing over the
death of Adonis. The withered seedlings symbolized the youthful god, who dies without
“flowering”— a virgin, but an erotically charged virgin. In Frazer’s view, Adonis’s death is
necessary for the natural cycle because his virility and eroticism help to make the earth
more fertile and the cereal crop more productive, just as Kore’s female sexuality is brought
underground each year to replenish the earth. According to Frazer, the fact that Adonis
becomes Kore’s lover for part of the year reinforces the connection between the two myths.
Marcel Detienne disputes Frazer’s assertion of a link between the Adonis gardens and
the grain harvest.^30 Having been born from a myrrh tree, Adonis is strongly associated
with aromatic spices. Spices in Greek mythology are associated with seduction, and Adonis
was the ultimate seducer. Aphrodite and Persephone became infatuated with him when he
was only an infant, hence their love can hardly be sexual. According to Detienne, Adonis
represents the antithesis of the virile lover. Greeks regarded him as an effeminate god, and
although men participated in the Adonia festival, the cult of Adonis was practiced almost
exclusively by women. Even his manner of death— being gored by a boar— was by Greek
standards an unmanly and unheroic death. As he lay on the ground bleeding to death,
his blood gave rise to anenomes, delicate flowers whose petals fall off at a single touch.
In a warrior culture in which men were trained to be ruthless in battle and domineering
at home, it would not be surprising if women found the idea of the beautiful and com-
pletely nonthreatening lover, Adonis, irresistibly attractive and erotic, like the aromatic
perfume from which he was born. Contrary to Frazier, Detienne argues it was not the
infant Adonis’s virility that made him so attractive to Aphrodite and Kore, but his very
lack of virility. Seen in this light, the “Adonis gardens” withering in the sun before they
reach sexual maturity are not symbols of agricultural fertility, as Kore’s marriage to Hades
seems to have been, but of the lack of sexual fulfillment resulting from the tragic death of
the youthful lover. The gender qualities that made Adonis irresistible to Greek women—
innocence and delicacy— were the opposite of those manly qualities held in highest esteem
by a warrior society. In Detienne’s interpretation, Adonis’s gender identification tilts
toward the feminine.
Two other male vegetation deities, Narcissus and Hyacinthus, exhibit a similar type of
gender ambiguity. Like Adonis, both Narcissus and Hyacinthus were exceptionally beau-
tiful youths. Narcissus was the son of a river god and a forest nymph, connecting him to
vegetation. Although the forest nymph Echo was attracted to him, Narcissus rejected her
and, instead, fell in love with himself, spending his days admiring his own reflection in
pools formed by the river. As punishment for his vanity, the gods caused him to fall into
the river and drown. Narcissus’s rejection of Echo underscores his lack of sexuality, and his
self- love carries with it no sexual connotations. From the perspective of a warrior society, his
obsessive vanity points to a feminine rather than a masculine character. His transformation
into a sweet- smelling flower, usually associated with women, is consistent with his gender
ambig uit y.