When the weeping is ended, first of all, they make to Adonis the offerings usually made to a corpse; after which, on the next day, they feign that he has come to life again, and hold a procession [of his image] in the open air.

But previously they shave their heads, like the Egyptians when an Apis dies; and if any woman refuse to do so, she must sell her beauty during one day to all who like.

Only strangers, however, are permitted to make the purchase, and the money paid is expended on a sacrifice which is offered to the goddess." "In this way," as Dr.Doellinger goes on to say, "they went so far at last as to contemplate the abominations of unnatural lust as a homage rendered to the deity, and to exalt it into a regular cultus.

The worship of the goddess [Ashtoreth] at Aphaca in the Lebanon was specially notorious in this respect."[11131] Here, according to Eusebius, was, so late as the time of Constantine the Great, a temple in which the old Phoenician rites were still retained.
"This," he says, "was a grove and a sacred enclosure, not situated, as most temples are, in the midst of a city, and of market-places, and of broad streets, but far away from either road or path, on the rocky slopes of Libanus.

It was dedicated to a shameful goddess, the goddess Aphrodite.