"[144] The early spring festival of March, the festival of
Ostara, the goddess of spring, has become identified with the Christian
festival of Resurrection (just as the summer solstice festival has been
placed beneath the patronage of St. John the Baptist); but there has been
only an amalgamation of closely-allied rites, for the Christian festival
also may be traced back to a similar origin. Among the early Arabians the
great _ragab_ feast, identified by Ewald and Robertson Smith with the
Jewish _paschal_ feast, fell in the spring or early summer, when the
camels and other domestic animals brought forth their young and the
shepherds offered their sacrifices.[145] Babylonia, the supreme early
centre of religious and cosmological culture, presents a more decisive
example of the sex festival. The festival of Tammuz is precisely analogous
to the European festival of St. John's Day. Tammuz was the solar god of
spring vegetation, and closely associated with Ishtar, also an
agricultural deity of fertility. The Tammuz festival was, in the earliest
times, held toward the summer solstice, at the time of the first wheat and
barley harvest. In Babylonia, as in primitive Europe, there were only two
seasons; the festival of Tammuz, coming at the end of winter and the
beginning of summer, was a fast followed by a feast, a time of mourning
for winter, of rejoicing for summer. It is part of the primitive function
of sacred ritual to be symbolical of natural processes, a mysterious
representation of natural processes with the object of bringing them
about.
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