I cannot consider all the cases which are given with sufficient fullness in the work that I have cited by De Visser.77.3But the instance cited above—the Samian worship of the sheep [πρόβατον]—shows us how little we have to build our theories on. It is quite possible that such a story arose from some ritual in which the sheep was offered reverentially, treated as a theanthropicanimal, half-human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of Tenedos in the cult of Dionysos,78.1an interesting form of sacrifice to which I shall have occasion to refer again. Clear records of actual sacrifice to animals in Greece are exceedingly rare. We have the quaint example of the so-called “Sacrifice” to the flies before the feast of Apollo on the promontory of Leukas; this I have discussed elsewhere,78.2pointing out that it seems only a ritual trick to persuade the flies to leave the worshippers alone, and certainly does not suggest the “worship” of flies.78.2There is also a dim ritual-legend attaching to the temple of Apollo the wolf-god in Sikyon, which appears to point to some sacrifice to wolves in or near the temple at some early period.78.3The third case is more important: the “sacrifice to the pig,” which Athenaeus, quoting from Agathokles of Kyzikos, attests was an important service at Praisos in Crete, performed as a προτελὴς θυσία, that is, as a preliminary act in the liturgies of the higher religion.78.4The ritual-legend explained the act as prompted by the service that a sow had rendered to the infant Zeus; but it remains mysterious, and we would like to have had more clear information as to the actual rite. Finally, we have the most important type of zoolatric ritual in Greece, the worship of certain sacred snakes: various records attest this in the cult of Trophonios at Lebadeia and in the temple of Athena Polias at Athens; in the cult of Zeus-Meilichios in the Piraeus, in the sacred grove of Apollo in Epeiros, probably in the shrines of Asklepios at Epidauros and Kos, and elsewhere.
Now it is important to note that these ritual records nowhere suggest that whole species of animals were worshipped, but that only certain individuals of that species, haunting certain places to which a sense of religious mystery attached, such as a cave or a lonely grove, or else found in or near some holy shrine, were thus marked out as divine. Also, we observe that in all the examples just quoted, the cult of the animal is linked to the cult of some personal god or goddess or hero: the snake, for instance, is the natural incarnation of the underworld divinity or hero. The only exception to this latter rule that may be reasonably urged is the prehistoric worship of Python at Delphi, which, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out, is curiously like the ritual and cult of a fetich-snake in Dahomey.79.1Yet, for all we know, Python, who in the earliest version of the story is of female sex, may at a very early time have been regarded not as a mere snake, but as an incarnation of the earth-goddess Gaia, who ruled at Delphi before Apollo came. The question whether the ancestors of the Hellenes or the pre-Hellenic peoples with whom they mixed were ever on the lowest plane of theriolatry does not concern us here. What is important is, that the records, both Mycenaean and Hellenic, justify us in believing that the dominant religion in Greece of the second millennium B.C. was the worship of personal divinities humanly conceived who could occasionally incarnate themselves in animal form, and that where animal worship survived it was always linked in this way to the cults of personal polytheism. From the Homeric period onward, the higher Hellenic spirit shows itself averse to the theriomorphic fashion of religion; yet this never disappeared wholly fromthe lower circles. Arcadia, the most backward and conservative of the Greek communities, never accepted the rigid anthropomorphic canon. This is shown by the record of the Phigaleian Demeter with the horse’s head; the mysterious goddess Eurynome of Phigaleia, half-woman, half-fish; the Arcadian Pan, the daimon of the herds, imagined as with goat legs and sometimes with goat’s head; and, finally, by the Arcadian idols of the Roman period found at Lykosoura in 1898, representing the female form with the head of a cow.80.1
This résumé of the facts, so far as it has gone, appears to justify the theorem with which it started, that the “Mycenaean” peoples and proto-Hellenes in the second millennium were on the whole, in respect of the morphology of their religion, on the same plane as those of the Euphrates valley; only it appears that theriomorphism played slightly more part in the cults and legends of the West than in those of the Sumerian-Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of comparative religion that such general similarity which we have here observed, and which we might observe if we compared early Greece with Vedic India, neither proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And so far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a theory, unless the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia be considered a reason for supposing Semitic influences here at work and for tracing her ancestry to Derketo of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might have to invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive on the scene too late to help us in the present quest, and who are not likely to have been attracted into the interior of Arcadia.
Thenext clue that I propose to follow in our general comparison is the relative prominence of the goddess-cult in the areas that we are surveying. The subject is of importance and interest, partly because it may throw some light on the question of the interdependence of the adjacent religions, partly because it brings into view certain striking facts of religious psychology. A religion without a goddess is liable to differ markedly in tone and colour, and probably in ritual, from those that possess one. Wherever anthropomorphism is allowed free play, the same instinct which evolves the father-god will evolve the mother-goddess; and when the religion is one of the type which Tiele calls “Nature-religions,” one, that is, where ideas reflecting the forces of the natural world lie on the surface of the conception of the divine personality, some of these forces are so naturally regarded as feminine that the evolution of a goddess appears inevitable; and the only world-religions that have rejected this idea are the Judaic, the Islamic, and Protestant Christianity. Now goddess-cult is often found to exercise a powerful influence on the religious emotion; and the religious psychology of a people devoted to it will probably differ from those who eschew it; often it will be likely to engender a peculiar sentiment of tenderness, of sentimentality inan otherwise austere and repellent religious system; and the clinging entreaty of the child is heard in the prayers or reflected in the ritual; and just as the mother frequently stands between the children and the father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world; such at times was Athena for the Athenians; such is the Virgin for Mediterranean Christendom.
Or the goddess may be more merciless than any god, more delighting in bloodshed, more savage in resisting progress: such often was Artemis for the Greeks, such is Kala at this moment in India, a dangerous and living force that threatens our rule. Again, the goddess may encourage purity in the sexual relations; this was the potential value of the ideal of Artemis in Greece, and perhaps the actual value of Mariolatry in the Middle Ages. Or the goddess-cult may be the source of what to us appears gross licentiousness, as was the case in Babylon and some parts of Asia Minor. This discordance in the character of goddess-cults may reflect the diversity of the masculine feeling towards women, and also to some extent the position of women at different stages of culture in the family and in the State. The whole subject has many fascinating aspects, which relevance prevents me presenting in detail. I have considered elsewhere the sociologic questions involved in goddess-cult;82.1and I must limit my attention here to its value as ethnic evidence.
In Mesopotamia the phenomenon presents itself at the very earliest period of which we have record. Themonument already described83.1on which the goddess Nini is presenting captives to the King Annabanini, attests the prevalence of goddess-cult in the third millennium; and Tiele supposes—without, I think, sufficient evidence—that it was stronger in the Sumerian than in the Semitic period. At all events, the conquering Semites may have found the cult of goddesses well developed in the land; and in all probability they brought at least one of their own with them, namely, Ishtar, whose name has its phonetic equivalents in Semitic Anatolia. Also at least by the second millennium B.C., the Babylonian pantheon was organised after the type of the human family to this extent, that each male divinity has his female consort; and it would not help us now to consider the theorem put out by Jeremias and others that the various Babylonian goddesses are all emanations and varieties of one original All-mother. Only the mighty Ishtar remains for the most part aloof from the marriage system, and her power transcends that of the other goddesses. Originally the chief goddess of the Sumerian Erech, she was raised by the Assyrians to the highest position next to their national god Asshur;83.2and for them she is the great divinity of war, who, armed with bow, quiver, and sword, orders the battle-ranks. In a famous hymn,83.3perhaps the most fervent and moving of all the Babylonian collection, she seems exalted to a supreme place above all other divinities; another83.4displays the same ecstasy in adoration of the goddess Belit, imputing omnipotence to her, as one to whom the very gods offer prayers. The same idea may be expressed in a difficultphrase in a hymn to Nebo84.1which contains his dialogue with Assurbanipal: “Nebo, who has grasped the feet of the divine goddess, Queen of Nineveh,” the goddess who came to be regarded as Ishtar.
From such isolated indications we might conclude that the Babylonian-Assyrian religion was more devoted to the goddess than to the god. We should certainly be wrong, as a more critical and wider survey of the facts, so far as they are at present accessible, would convince us. These hymns imputing supreme omnipotence to the goddess, whether Ishtar or another, may be merely examples of that tendency very marked in the Babylonian liturgies, to exalt the particular divinity to whom worship is at that moment being paid above all others. The ecstatic poet is always contradicting himself. To the omnipotent Belit, in the last-mentioned hymn, a phrase is attached which Zimmern interprets as “she who carries out the commands of Bel,” as if after all she were only a vicegerent. In the beautiful prayer to Ishtar proffered by the Assyrian King Asurnasirabal (18th cent. B.C.) he implores her to intercede for him, “the Priest-King, thy favourite… with Thy beloved the Father of the gods.”84.2The beloved wife naturally plays the Madonna part of the intercessor; thus Sanherib prays that Ninlil “the consort of Ashur, the mother of the great gods, may daily speak a favourable word for Sanherib, the king of Assyria, before Ashur.”84.3But the intercessor is not supreme; and in spite of the great power of Ishtar and the ferventdevotion she aroused, the state-pantheon is predominantly masculine.
Nor can we, looking at the ancient records of the other Semitic peoples, which are often too scanty to dogmatise about, safely speak of the supremacy of the goddess in any Semitic community, except in Sidon. All that we find everywhere, except among the Israelites, is a goddess by the side of a god. According to Weber, in his treatise, “Arabien vor dem Islam,”85.1the aboriginal god of all the Semites when they were in the nomadic condition was the moon-god; and the male divinity is nowhere found to be displaced. He is prominent among the polytheistic Arabs under the name Athtar.85.2Some of the Arab deities in North Arabia are revealed to us in an inscription dating probably from the fifth century B.C., which mentions the gods Salm, Sangala, Asira, and of these Salm was evidently a war-god, as he is represented on a relief with a spear.85.3
The Aramaic inscriptions only reveal the goddess Ishtar by the side of many powerful gods such as Ramman, Adad the god of storms, Shamash the sun-god, Reshef the god of lightning and war, Baal-charran the Lord of Harran.85.4An eighth-century Aramaic inscription found at Sinjerli in North Syria, written in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III., mentions no goddess, but regards the kings as under the protection of Hadad, Elreshef, and Shamash.85.5Even in Canaan and Phoenicia we have no reason to say that Astarte rose above Baal; such an epithet as “the Face of Baal” appears to maintain the supremacy of the God. In Moab we havethe evidence of the Mesha stone, which mentions the divine pair Ashtor-Chemosh, and in Numbers86.1the Moabites are called the people of Chemosh. But we have Phoenician inscriptions of the period of Persian supremacy in which the king of Byblos, Jachumelek, speaks of himself as raised to the kingdom by the Baalat, the queen-goddess of that state; and he prays to her that the queen may give him favour in the eyes of the gods and in the eyes of the people of his land.86.2Astarte waspar excellencethe city-goddess of Sidon, and on the later Imperial coinage we see her image drawn in a car. Two representations of her have been found, in one of which she is seated in front of the king,86.3the other shows her embracing him.86.4King Tabnit of Sidon, whose sarcophagus is in the Museum of Constantinople, styles himself “priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians.”86.5But in the other Phoenician settlements, such as Tyre, Cyprus, and Carthage, the memorials of the male divinity, whether Baal, Baal Samin, Baal Ammon, Reshef Mikal, Esmun-Melqart, are at least as conspicuous. It is likely that at certain places in the Mediterranean the Semites were touched by the influences of the aboriginal Aegean goddess’s cult; this may well have been the case at Sidon, and still more probably at Askalon, and it may have penetrated as far as Bambyke.
Speaking generally, however, we may conclude that among the early Semites the male divinity was dominant. And if we could believe that this is a reflection in their theology of the patriarchal system in society, let us observe that the earliest Babylonianevidence proves that the patriarchal type of family was dominant in Babylonia in the third millennium.
Passing over to the non-Semitic group of Anatolian cults, and considering first the Hittite, we have ample evidence in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui of the importance of the goddess; and it may well be, as Dr. Frazer has conjectured, that that monument, on which we see the great god borne on the shoulders of his worshippers to meet the goddess on the lion, gives us the scene of a Holy marriage.87.1We find the male and female divinity united in a common worship on a relief found near Caesarea in the middle of Cappadocia, on the left side of which is depicted a warrior-god standing before a pillar-shaped altar, while a man in the guise of a warrior is pouring a libation before him; on the right is a similar scene, making libation before a seated goddess, on whose altar a bird is seated.87.2Besides this, we have another type of goddess shown us on a Hittite votive-relief, on which is carved a large seated female figure with a child on her knees; we may surely interpret this as a θεὰ κουροτρόφος.87.3Again, on two of the reliefs at Euzuk we find a seated goddess holding a goblet and approached with prayers, libations, and other offerings by priest and priestess,87.4and we may venture to add to this list of Hittite types the mysterious veiled goddess found by Von Oppenheim at Tel-Halaf in Mesopotamia on the Chabur, a branch of Euphrates, with an inscription containing the name Asshur, a work which, on the evidence of other cuneiform inscriptions found on the site, he would date near to900 B.C.88.1But this evidence in no way amounts to any proof or affords any suggestion of the predominance of the goddess—and the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence of the Hittite kings implies that the male and female divinity were linked in an equal union in the Hittite religion. The text of the treaty between Rameses II. and the Kheta (circ.1290 B.C.) includes various sun-gods, Sutekh, the Egyptian name for the Hittite war-god, and Antheret (possibly a form of the name Astoret), and other goddesses called “the Queen of Heaven, the Mistress of the Soil, the Mistress of Mountains.”88.2Can we draw any conclusions from that extraordinary monument from Fassirlir88.3on the borders of Lycaonia and Pisidia, representing a young god in a high cap that suggests Hittite fashion, standing on the neck of a stooping goddess at whose side are two lions? This might seem a naïve indication of male supremacy; but the sex of the supporting figure does not seem clear.88.4
Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the first millennium B.C. the Hellenic colonisation and culture flourished, we find the traces of a great goddess-cult discoverable on every important site; though recorded only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, more rarely Athena, we can still discern clearly that she belongs to a pre-Hellenic stock. The evidence of this can be gathered from many sources, and it is unnecessaryto detail it here. What is more important, and not so easy, is to detect clear proof of the predominance of the goddess over the god, a phenomenon that has not yet presented itself clearly in the Semitic communities, except at Sidon and perhaps Byblos. We find goddess-cult in Cilicia, where “Artemis Sarpedonia” is a name that trails with it Minoan associations;89.1but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out,89.2at least at Tarsos and Olba it appears that the male deity was the dominant power. At the former city a long series of coins attests the supremacy of Baal-Tars and Sandon-Herakles. At Olba the ruling priesthood were called the Τευκρίδαι, and claim descent from Teukros and Aias, but Greek inscriptions giving such names as “Teukros” the priest, son of Tarkuaris, support the view that Teukros is a Hellenisation of the divine Hittite name Tarku. It is in Lycia where we ought, in accordance with a popular theory, to find the clearest proof of goddess-supremacy; for we know that the Lycians had the matrilinear family system, and this was supposed by Robertson Smith to lead logically to that religious product.89.3And recently we have heard Professor Wilamowitz89.4brilliantly expound the theory that Leto was the aboriginal mother-goddess of Lycia, called there in the Lycian tongue “Lada,” and worshipped as supreme with her son Apollo, both of whom the Hellenes found there, and while they transformed Lada “the Lady-goddess” into Leto, surnamed Apollo Λητοίδης, in obedience to the Lycian rule of calling a son after his mother. And where a son is worshipped merely as the son of hismother, we may regard the mother-goddess as supreme. The theory about Apollo’s Lycian origin, which, I think, contradicts all the important facts, does not concern us here. It is his view that Leto is the aboriginal and paramount divinity of Lycia which we would wish to test. So far as it rests on the equation between Leto and Lada, its philology is bad; for, as Dr. Cowley has pointed out on the evidence of Lycian-Greek transcribed names, the Greeks would not have transcribed Lada as Leto. Furthermore, the geography of the Leto-cult gives novraisemblanceto the theory of its Lycian origin; neither have we any proof at all of the cult of any goddess in Lycia at an early period, though no doubt it existed; the coin of Myra, showing a goddess emerging from the split trunk of a tree,90.1is of the Imperial period, but preserves an ancient legend and an archaic idol-type. But the earliest fact of Lycian religion recorded is the predominance of Apollo, and the Lycians maintained him as their chief divinity throughout their history and long after the very early influences of Hellenic colonisation had waned. The inscriptions of Lycia that mention Leto are all of the later period; her temple near Xanthos and her two holy groves on the coast that Strabo mentions90.2are just on the track along which the earliest Hellenic influence travelled: and the most tenable view is that the Hellenes introduced her. In Caria, at Labranda, and again in the vicinity of Stratonikeia, we have proof of the early supremacy of a great god whom the Hellenes called Zeus, attaching to him in the latter centre of cult the Carian name of Panamaros, and associating him with a native goddess called Hera orHekate, who did not claim to be the predominant partner.91.1
It is not till we come to the neighbourhood of Ephesos that we can speak positively of goddess-supremacy. Artemis, as the Greeks called her here, is admittedly πρωτοθρονία, the first in power and in place. Her brother Apollo himself served as the στεφανηφόρος of the Artemis of Magnesia, that is, as her officiating magistrate,91.2and Artemis of Magnesia we may take to be the same aboriginal goddess as the Ephesian. Certain features of her worship will be considered later in a comparative survey of ritual and cult-ideas. I will only indicate here the absence of any proof of the Semitic origins of the Ephesian Artemis,91.3and the associations that link her with the great mother-goddess of Phrygia. When we reach the area within which this latter cult and its cognate forms prevailed, we can posit the predominance of the goddess as a salient fact of the popular religion imprinting indelible traits upon the religious physiognomy of the people. The god Attis was dear to the aboriginal Phrygian as to the later generations, but he was only the boy-lover, the young son who died and rose again. The great goddess was supreme and eternal; and her power spread into Lydia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Galatia, and far and wide in the later period across the sea.Her counterpart in Cappadocia was Mā, the great goddess of Comana, in whose worship we hear nothing of the male divinity. In this wide area, governed by the religion of the Great Mother, we can trace a similar ritual and something of the same religious psychology in the various peoples: orgiastic liturgy and ecstatic passion, a craving for complete identification with the goddess that led to acts of sexual madness such as emasculation; also a marked tone of sorrow and tenderness in the legends and religious service. In following back to its fountain-head the origins of this cult, we are led inevitably to Minoan Crete.
There are many links revealed both by legend and cult that associate Crete with the country adjacent to the Troad, with Lydia and Caria. And we may tentatively hold to the dogma that Kybele-Rhea, Hipta of Lydia, who appears now as a virgin, now as a mother-goddess, Mā who appears in Caria, but whose chief historic centre was Comana of Cappadocia, were all descended from or specialised forms of an aboriginal Aegean or Anatolian goddess whose cult was also maintained by the Hittites. Of her nature and ritual I may speak later. I am only concerned here with the correctness of the view put forward by Sir Arthur Evans.92.1“It is probable that in the Mycenaean religion as in the later Phrygian, the female aspect of divinity predominated, fitting on, as it seems to have, down to the matriarchal system. The male divinity is not so much the consort as the son or the youthful favourite.” If we put aside the suggestion of a matriarchal theory here, the main idea in this judgment accords generally with the evidence that the author of it has himself done most to accumulate and to present to us. It isnot insignificant that the earliest type of Aegean idol in existence is that of a goddess, not a god; and in the more developed Minoan period the representations of the goddess are more frequent and more imposing than those of the god; while in the few scenes of cult where the male deity appears in her company, he appears in a subordinate position, either in a corner of the field or standing before her throne.93.1And a strong current of early Greek legend induces us to believe that when the earliest Hellenes reached Crete they found a powerful goddess-cult overshadowing the island, associated with the figure of a young or infant god: hence spread the Cretan worship of Rhea and the Μήτηρ τῶν θεῶν, and hence there came to a few places on the Hellenic mainland, where Minoan influence was strong, the cult and the cult-legend of the infant Zeus.93.2Yet we must not strain the evidence too far; besides the youthful or infant Cretan god, there may have been the powerful cult of a father-god as well. On three monuments we catch a glimpse of the armed deity of the sky.93.3What is more important is the prominence of the double-headed axe in the service of the Minoan palace; and this must be a fetichistic emblem mystically associated with the thunder-god, though occasionally the goddess might borrow it. The prominence and great vogue of this religious emblem detracts somewhat from the weight of the evidence as pointing to the supremacy of the female divine partner. It is Zeus, not Rhea, that inspired Minos, as Jahwé inspired Moses, and Shamash Hammurabbi. Yet the view is probably right on the whole that the mother-goddess was a more frequent figure inthe Minoan service, and was nearer and dearer to the people.
May we also regard her as the prototype of all the leading Hellenic goddesses? The consideration of this question will bring this particular line of inquiry to a close.
If we find goddess-supremacy among the early Hellenes, shall we interpret it as an Aryan-Hellenic tradition, or as an alien and borrowed trait in their composite religion? If borrowed, are they more likely to have derived it from the East or from their immediate predecessors in the regions of Aegean culture? The latter question, if it arises, we ought to be able to answer at last.
We might guard ourselves at the outset against the uncritical dogma which has been proclaimed at times that the goddesses in the various Aryan polytheisms were all alien, and borrowed from the pre-Aryan peoples in whose lands they settled. Any careful study of the Vedic and old-Germanic, Phrygo-Thracian religions can refute this wild statement: the wide prevalence in Europe of the worship of “Mother Earth,” which Professor Dieterich’s treatise establishes,94.1is sufficient evidence in itself. Nor could we believe that the early Aryans were unmoved by an anthropomorphic law of the religious imagination that is almost universally operative. The Hellenic Aryans, then, must be supposed to have brought certain of their own goddesses into Greece, and perhaps philology will be able one day to tell us who exactly they were. On linguistic and other grounds, Dione and Demeter may be accepted as provedly old Hellenic: on the same grounds, probably, Hera; also the name and cult of Hestia is certainly “Aryan,”94.2only wedare not call her in the earliest, and scarcely at any period, a true personal goddess. Now, there is a further important induction that we may confidently make: at the period when the Aryan conquerors were pushing their way into Aegean lands and the Indo-Iranians into the Punjaub and Mesopotamia, they had a religious bias making for the supremacy of the Father-God and against the supremacy of the goddess. We can detect the same instinct also in the old Germanic pantheon.95.1Its operation is most visible when the Thrako-Phrygian stock, and their cousins the Bithynian, broke into the north of Asia Minor, and the regions on the south of the Black Sea. The god-cult they bring with them clashes with the aboriginal and—as it proved—invincible supremacy of the goddess linked to her divine boy: we hear of such strange cult-products as Attis-Παπαῖος, Father Attis, and one of the old Aryan titles of the High God appears in the Phrygian Zeus Βαγαῖος, Bagha in old Persian and Bog in Slavonic meaning deity. The Aryan hero-ancestor of the Phrygian stock, Manes, whom Sir William Ramsay believes to be identical with the god Men, becomes the father of Atys;95.2also we have later proof of the powerful cult of Zeus the Thunderer, Zeus the Leader of Hosts, in this region of the southern shore of the Black Sea. Another induction that I venture, perhaps incautiously, to make, is that in no Aryan polytheism is there to be found the worship of an isolated or virgin-goddess, keeping apart from relations with the maledeity: the goddesses in India, Germany, Ireland, Gaul,96.1Thrace, and Phrygia are usually associated temporarily or permanently with the male divinity, and are popularly regarded as maternal, if not as wedded. Trusting to the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this important conclusion concerning the earliest religious history of Hellas: namely, that where we find the powerful cult of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic population. The axiom applies at once and most forcibly to Artemis and Athena; the one dominant in certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. Their virginal character was probably a later idea arising from their isolation, their aversion to cult-partnership with the male deity.96.2The Aryan Hellenes were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people. As regards Hera, the question is more difficult: the excavations at the Heraeum have been supposed by Dr. Waldstein to prove the worship of a great goddess on that site, going back in time to the third millennium B.C.,96.3a period anterior to the advent of the god-worshipping Aryan Hellenes. And this goddess remaineddominant through all history at Argos and Samos. But we have no reason for supposing that her name was Hera in that earliest period. Phonetically, the word is best explained as “Aryan”: if it was originally the name brought by the Hellenes and designating the wife-goddess of the sky-god—and in spite of recent theories that contradict it I still incline to this view—the Hellenes could apply it to the great goddess of the Argolid, unless her aversion to matrimony was a dogma, or her religious isolation a privilege, too strong to infringe. This does not seem to have been the case. The goddess of Samian cult, a twin-institution with the Argive, was no virgin, but united with the sky-god in an old ἱερὸς γάμος. Nevertheless, throughout all history the goddess in Argos, and probably in Samos, is a more powerful cult-figure than the god.
As regards Aphrodite, few students of Greek religion would now assign her to the original Aryan-Hellenic polytheism. Most still regard her as coming to the Greek people from the Semitic area of the Astarte cult. And this was the view that I formerly developed in the second volume of myCults. But at that time we were all ignorant of the facts of Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and some of us were deceived concerning the antiquity of the Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and Hellas. The recently discovered evidence points, I think, inevitably to the theory that Sir Arthur Evans supports; that the goddess of Cyprus, the island where the old Minoan culture lived longest, is one form of the great goddess of that gifted Aegean people, who had developed her into various manifestations through long centuries of undisturbed religious life. Let us finally observe that it is just these names, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, that have hitherto defied linguisticexplanation on either Aryan or Semitic phonetic principles. We do not yet know the language of King Minos.
A cursory and dogmatic answer may now be given to the two questions posed above. The Aryan Hellenes did not bring with them the supremacy of the goddess, for the idea was not natural to them: they did not borrow it from any Semitic people in the second millennium, for at that time it was not natural to the Semites: they found it on the soil of the Aegean lands, as a native growth of an old Mediterranean religion, a strong plant that may be buried under the deposits of alien creeds, but is always forcing its head up to the light again.
Therefore in tracing goddess-cult from the Euphrates valley to the western Aegean shores, as a test of the influence of the East on the West, we are brought up sharply at this point. The Western world is divided from the Eastern by this very phenomenon that the older scholars used to regard as proving a connection. And it may well have been the Western cult that influenced the western Semites.
Sofar as we have gone our main question must be still regarded as an open one. We may now compare the particular conceptions concerning divinity that prevailed at the period to which our search is limited, in the valley of the Euphrates, and in the other communities that are in our route of comparison. Many striking points of general similarity will present themselves, upon which we must not lay too much weight for our argument, since all polytheisms possess a certain family likeness: of more importance will be certain strikingly dissimilar features, if we find any.
First, in regard to the general concepts or characters of the divinities, the same formula seems mainly applicable to the Mesopotamian as to the Hellenic facts: the leading divinities have usually some distinct association with the world of nature; but the natural phenomenon or elemental fact that may be there in the background of their personality, becomes overlaid and obscured by the complex ethical and mental traits that are evolved. Therefore the mere nature-fact rarely explains the fully-developed god, either of Babylon or of Hellas. A few salient examples will make this clear. It is only perhaps Shamash the sun-god of Sippar, and Sin the moon-god of Ur, that retain their nature-significance rarely obscured. The hymn to Sin in Dr. Langdon’scollection reveals an intelligible lunar imagery throughout; but in another published by Zimmern,100.1his personality becomes more spiritual and mystical; he is at once “the mother-body who bears all life, and the pitiful gracious father,” the divinity who has created the land and founded temples; under the Assyrian régime he seems to have become a god of war.100.2Shamash even surpasses him in grandeur and religious value, so far as we can judge from the documents; but his whole ethical and spiritual character, clearly articulated as it is, can be logically evolved from his solar. But in studying the characters of Marduk and Nergal, for instance, we feel that the physical theories of their origin help us but little, and are at times self-contradictory; and it might be well for Assyriologists to take note of the confusion and darkness that similar theories have spread in this domain of Hellenic study. Thus we are told that the Sun in the old Sumerian-Babylonian system gave birth to various special personalities, representing various aspects of him: Marduk is the spring-sun, rejoicing in his strength, although his connection with Shamash does not seem specially close; yet Jeremias, who expresses this opinion,100.3believes also that Marduk is a storm-god, because “his word can shake the sea.” Shall we say, then, that Jahwé is a storm-god “because the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees”? The phrase is quite innocent if we only mean by it that any and every personal God could send a storm; it becomes of doubtful value if it signifies here that Marduk is an impersonation of the storm. The texts seem sometimes to contradict each other; Ninib, for instance,is regarded by Jeremias101.1as the rising sun, on the ground of certain phrases in his hymn of praise; but the concept of him as a storm-god is more salient in the oldest texts, and thus he is pre-eminently a deity of destruction and death, and becomes specially an Assyrian war-god. Does it help us if we imagine him originally as the Storm-Sun, as Jensen would have us? or is it not allowable to suspect that solar terms of religious description became a later Babylonian convention, and that any deity might attract them? Nergal, again, the god of Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar origin, as the god of the midday and destructive sun;101.2yet his special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side of the goddess Allatu, and his name is doubtfully interpreted as the Lord of the Great Habitation, and thus he is regarded as a god of disease and death. This did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase, nor a pious Babylonian poet from exalting him as “God of the little ones, he of the benevolent visage.”101.3In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he is designated by an ideogram, that almost certainly means “the god of iron.”101.4This last fact, if correct, is an illustration of that which a general survey of the Babylonian texts at last impresses upon us: the physical origin of the deity, if he had one, does not often shape and control his whole career; the high god grows into manifold forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, progresses with the life of his people, reflects new aspects of life, altogether independently of any physical idea of him that may have originally prevailed. Adad, thegod of storms, becomes a god of prophecy, and is addressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn.102.1Ea the god of waters becomespar excellencethe god of wisdom, not because waters are wise, but probably because Eridu, the seat of his cult, was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic. As for the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias,102.2who is otherwise devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks on the absence of any sign of his nature-origin: his ideogram designates “the prophet,” in his earliest character he is the writer, his symbol is the “stilus” of the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing: he is interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn as “he who openeth the springs and causeth the corn to sprout, he without whom the dykes and canals would run dry.” Surely this interest comes to him, not from the planet Mercury,102.3but from his wisdom and his concern with Babylonian civilisation, which depended upon dykes and canals. We are presented here with a progressive polytheism, that is, one of which the divinities show the power of self-development parallel with the self-development of the people.
The question we have just been considering, the physical character of the Babylonian deities in relation to their whole personality, suggests two last reflections. Their gods have a certain relation to the planets, which is preserved even in our modern astronomy. That the early Sumerians worshipped stars is probable,102.4as the Sumerian sign for divinity is a star; but that the Sumerian-Babylonian high gods were personal forms of the planets, is denied by leading modern Assyriologists,103.1except in the case of the sun and the moon, Shamash and Sin. It was only the Chaldaean astronomic theory that came to regard the various planets in their varying positions as special manifestations of the powers of the different personal gods; and the same planet might be a manifestation, according to its different positions, of different gods: the “star Jupiter at one point is Marduk, at another point Nebo”; this dogma is found on a seventh-century tablet, which declares at the same time that “Mercury” is Nebo.103.2This planetary association of the deities is well illustrated by the memorial relief of Asarhaddon found at Sinjerli, and the relief of Maltaija, showing stars crowning their heads;103.3but both these are later than the period with which we are here immediately concerned.
Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the old Babylonian religion which may be called nature-worship, any clear worship of the earth regarded as a personal and living being, as the Hellenes regarded Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at once warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste, terrible and merciful, the bright virgin of the sky, Bau, the wife of Ninib, the “amorous lady of heaven,” are certainly not of this character. Still less is Allatu, the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast the lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians conceived the earth as a personal divinity at all, they imagined it as a male divinity. For in the inscriptions of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a Lord of the underworld,meaning our earth as distinct from the heavens: he is hymned as the “lord of the harvest-lands, lord of the grain-fields”104.1—he is the “husbandman who tends the fields”; when Enlil is angry, “he sends hunger everywhere.” In another hymn he is thus described: “The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the mountain-storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose foundation is the bright abyss”;104.2and again, “Lord, who makest to abound pure oil and nourishing milk;… in the earth Lord of life art thou”; “to give life to the ground thou dost exist.”104.3It is evident that Enlil is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid substance; he is rather the god of all the forces and life that move on and in the earth, hence he is “the lord of winds.”104.4He is more, then, than the mere equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected to find a Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit, the wife and female double of Enlil or Bel: but in an inscription that is dated as early as 4000 B.C. she is styled “The Queen of Heaven and Earth,”104.5and though in a hymn of lamentation addressed to her104.6she is described as the goddess “who causeth plants to come forth,” yet the ecstatic and mysticising Babylonian imagination has veiled and clouded her nature-aspect.
This strange religious poetry which had been fermenting for thousands of years, was likely enough to transform past recognition the simple aboriginal fact. It is only the lesser deities, the “Sondergötter” of the Sumerian pantheon, whose nature-functions might remain clear and unchanged: for instance, such a corn-deity as we see on a cylinder, with corn-ears inhis hand and corn-stalks springing from his shoulders.105.1Even the simple form of Tammuz, the darling of the Sumerian people, has been somewhat blurred by the poetry of passion that for long ages was woven about him. As Zimmern has shown in a recent treatise,105.2he was never the chief deity of any Babylonian or Assyrian state, but nevertheless one of great antiquity and power with the Sumerian people, and his cult and story were doubtless spreading westward in the second millennium. In spite of all accretions and the obscurity of his name, which is interpreted to mean “real son of the water-deep,”105.3we can still recognise the form of the young god of vegetation who dies in the heat of the summer solstice and descends to the world below, leaving the earth barren till he returns. This idea is expressed by some of his names, “the Lord of the land’s fruitfulness, the Lord of the shepherd’s dwelling, the Lord of the cattle-stall, the God of grain,”105.4and by many an allusion to his legend in the hymns, which are the most beautiful and pathetic in the old Sumerian psalmody: “in his manhood in the submerged grain he lay”; “how long still shall the verdure be imprisoned, how long shall the green things be held in bondage?”105.5An interesting title found in some of the incantation liturgies is that of “the shepherd,” and like some other vegetation-powers he is at times regarded as the Healer. Though he was not admittedas the compeer of the high gods into the Babylonian or Assyrian pantheon, he may be said to have survived them all, and his name and myth became the inspiration of a great popular religion. No other of that vast fraternity of corn-spirits or vegetation-spirits into which Dr. Frazer has initiated us, has ever had such a career as Tammuz. In one of his hymns he is invoked as “Lord of the world of Death,” because for a time he descended into Hell.106.1If this idea had been allowed to germinate and to develop its full potentiality, it might have changed the aspect of Babylonian eschatology. But, as we shall see, the ideas naturally attaching to vegetation, to the kindly and fair life of seeds and plants, were never in Babylonia properly harmonised with those that dominated belief concerning the lower world of the dead. The study of the Tammuz-rites I shall reserve for a later occasion.
We have now to consider the other Anatolian cults from the point of view of nature-worship. The survey need not detain us long as our evidence is less copious. As regards the western Semites, our trustworthy records are in no way so ancient as those that enlighten us concerning Mesopotamia. Philo of Byblos, the interpreter of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, presents us only with a late picture of the Canaanite religion, that may be marred by their own symbolic interpretations. Because we are told106.2that “the Phoenicians and Egyptians were the first to worship the sun and the moon and the stars,”106.2or “the first to deify the growths of the earth,”106.3we cannot conclude that in the second millennium the religion of the Phoenicians was purely solar or astral, or merely the cult of vegetation-gods.“Baalshamin” means the lord of the heavens, an Aramaic and Phoenician god, and Sanchuniathon explained him as the sun;107.1but Robertson Smith gives good reason for the view that the earliest conception of the local Baal was of a deity of the fertilising spring, a local divine owner of a well-watered plot, hence the giver of all life to fruits and cattle.107.2Nor are we sure what was the leading “nature-aspect” of the cult of Astarte. The title “Meleket Ashamaim,” “the Queen of the Heavens,” which Ezekiel attaches to her, does not inform us precisely concerning her earliest and original character. From her close association with the Minoan goddess of Cyprus, she was no doubt worshipped as the source of the life of plants and animals and men. Also, it is of some value to bear in mind the later records concerning the worship of Helios at Tyre in the Roman Imperial period, and of Helios and the thunder-god at Palmyra, where Adad-Rimmon, the storm-god who was in power among the western Semites in the earliest period, may have survived till the beginning of Christianity. We may conclude from all this that in the oldest period of the western Semite societies the cult of special nature-deities was a prominent feature of the religion. But even these may already in the second millennium have acquired a complex of personal attributes ethical and spiritual. In the later Carthaginian religion, the personal deities are clearly distinguished from the mere nature-powers, such as the sun, earth, and moon; and this important distinction may have arisen long before the date of the document that proves it.107.3
Of the Hittite gods we may say this much at least, that the monuments enable us to recognise the thunder-god with the hammer or axe, and in the striking relief at Ibreez we discern the form of the god of vegetation and crops, holding corn and grapes. The winged disk, carved with other doubtful fetich-emblems above the head of the god who is clasping the priest or king on the Boghaz-Keui relief, is a solar emblem, borrowed probably from Egyptian religious art. And the Hittite sun-god was invoked in the Hittite treaty with Rameses II.108.1Whether the mother-goddess was conceived as the personal form of Gaia is doubtful; her clear affinity with Kybele would suggest this, and in the Hittite treaty with Rameses II. mentioned above, the goddess Tesker is called the Mistress of the Mountains, the express title of the Phrygian Mother, and another “the Mistress of the Soil.”108.2Yet evidently the Hittite religion is too complex to be regarded as mere nature-worship: the great relief of Boghaz-Keui shows a solemn and elaborate ritual to which doubtless some spiritual concepts were attached.
As regards the original ideas underlying the cults of those other Anatolian peoples who were nearer in geographical position and perhaps in race to the Aegean peoples, we have no explicit ancient records that help us to decide for the second millennium. For some of these various communities the goddess was, as we have seen, the supreme power. The great Phrygian goddess Kybele is the cult-figure of most importance for our purpose, and it is possible to divine her original character with fair certainty.108.3In her attributes, functions, and form, we can discern nothing celestial,solar or lunar; she was, and remained to the end, a mother-goddess of the earth, a personal source of and life of fruits, beasts, and man: her favourite haunt was the mountains, and her earliest image that we know, that which the Greeks called Niobe on Mount Sipylos, seems like a human shape emerging from the mountain-side: she loved also the mountain caverns, which were called after her κύβελα; and according to one legend she emerged from the rock Agdos, and hence took the name Agdestis. The myth of her beloved Attis is clear ritual-legend associated with vegetation; and Greek poetry and Greek cult definitely linked her with the Greek Gaia. We gather also from the legend of Attis and other facts that her power descended to the underworld, and the spirits of the dead were gathered to her;109.1hence the snake appears as her symbol, carved as an akroterion above her sepulchral shrine, where she is sculptured with her two lions at Arslan Kaya—“the Lion Rock in Phrygia”;109.2and her counterpart, the Lydian Mother Hipta, is addressed as χθονίη.109.3
In all her aspect and functions she is the double of the great Minoan mother-goddess described already, whose familiar animals are the lion and the serpent, who claims worship from the mountain-top, and whose character is wholly that of a great earth goddess with power doubtless reaching down to the lower world of the dead. Only from Crete we have evidence which is lacking in pre-Aryan Phrygia of the presence of a thunder or sky-god by her side.109.4
Turning our attention now to the early Hellenic world, and to that part of its religion which we may call Nature-worship, we discern certain general traits that place it on the same plane in some respects with the Mesopotamian. Certain of the higher deities show their power in certain elemental spheres, Poseidon mainly in the water, Demeter in the land, Zeus in the air. But of none of these is the power wholly limited to that element: and each has acquired, like the high gods of Assyria and Babylon and Jahwé of Israel, a complex anthropomorphic character that cannot be derived, though the old generation of scholars wearily attempted to derive it, from the elemental nature-phenomenon. Again, other leading divinities, such as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, are already in the pre-Homeric period, as far as we can discern, pure real personalities like Nebo and Asshur, having no discoverable nature-significance at all. Besides these higher cults, we discern a vast number of popular local cults of winds, springs, rivers, at first animistically and then anthropomorphically imagined. So in Mesopotamia we find direct worship of canals and the river. Finally, we discern in early Hellas a multitude of special “functional” divinities or heroes, “Sondergötter,” like Eunostos, the hero of the harvest: and it may be possible to find their counterparts in the valley of the Euphrates.110.1We have also the nameless groups of divine potencies in Hellas, such as the Πραξιδίκαι, Μειλίχιοι, these being more frequent in the Hellenic than in the Mesopotamian religion, which presents such parallels as the Annunaki and the Igigi, nameless daimones of the lower and upper world: andthese in both regions may be regarded as products of animism not yet developed into theism.
But such general traits of resemblance in two developed polytheisms deceive no trained inquirer; and it would be childish to base a theory of borrowing on them. What is far more important are the marked differences in the nature-side of the Greek polytheism, as compared with the Sumerian-Babylonian. In the latter, the solar-element was very strong, though perhaps not so omnipresent as some Assyriologists assure us. On the contrary, in the proto-Hellenic system it was strikingly weak, so far as we can interpret the evidence. The earliest Hellenes certainly regarded the Sun as a personal animate being, though the word Helios did not necessarily connote for them an anthropomorphic god. But the insignificance of his figure in the Homeric poems agrees well with the facts of actual cult. As I have pointed out in the last volume of myCults,111.1it was only at Rhodes that Helios was a great personal god, appealing to the faith and affections of the people, revered as their ancestor and the author of their civilisation, and descending, we may believe, from the period of the Minoan culture111.2with which Rhodes was closely associated in legend. And it appears from the evidence of legend and Minoan art that sun-worship was of some power in the pre-Hellenic Aegean civilisation. In the Mycenaean epoch he may have had power in Corinth, but his cult faded there in the historic age before that of Athena and Poseidon. The developed Hellene preferred the more personaldeity, whose name did not so obviously suggest a special phenomenon of nature. And if he inherited or adopted certain solar personages, as some think he adopted a sun-god Ares from Thrace, he seems to have transformed them by some mental process so as to obliterate the traces of the original nature-perception.
Even more significant for our purpose is the comparison of the two regions from the point of view of lunar-cult. We have sufficiently noted already the prominence of the moon-god Sin in the Babylonian pantheon, an august figure of a great religion: and among all the Semitic peoples the moon was a male personality, as it appears to have been for the Vedic Indians and other Aryan peoples. The Hellenic imagination here presents to us this salient difference, that the personal moon is feminine, and she seems to have enjoyed the scantiest cult of all the great powers of Nature. Not that anywhere in Greece she was wholly without worship.112.1She is mentioned in a vague record as one of the divinities to whom νηφάλια, “wineless offerings,” were consecrated in Athens: she had an ancient place in the aboriginal religion of Arcadia; of her worship in other places the records are usually late and insignificant. The great Minoan goddess may have attracted to herself some lunar significance, but this aspect of her was not pronounced.
Here, then, is another point at which the theory of early Babylonian influence in nascent Hellenic religion seriously breaks down. And in this comparison of Nature-cults it breaks down markedly at two others. The pantheon of Mesopotamia had early taken on an astral-character. The primitive Hellenes doubtless had, like other peoples, their star-myths; and theirsuperstitions were aroused and superstitious practices evoked by celestial “teratology,” by striking phenomena, such as eclipses, comets, falling stars.113.1But there is no record suggesting that they paid direct worship to the stars, or that their deities were astral personations, or were in the early period associated with the stars: such association, where it arose, is merely a sign of that wave of Oriental influence that moved westward in the later centuries. The only clear evidences of star-cult in Hellenic communities that I have been able to find do not disturb this induction: Lykophron and a late Byzantine author indicate a cult of Zeus Ἀστέριος in Crete, which cannot, even if real, be interpreted as direct star-worship:113.2at Sinope, a city of Assyrian origin, named after the Babylonian moon-god, a stone with a late inscription suggests a cult of Seirios and the constellations;113.3and an Attic inscription of the Roman Imperial epoch, mentions a priest of the φωσφόροι, whom we must interpret as stellar beings.113.4What, then, must we say about the Dioskouroi, whom we are generally taught to regard as the personal forms of the morning- and the evening-star? Certainly, if the astral character of the great Twin-Brethren of the Hellenes were provedly their original one, the general statement just put forth would have to be seriously modified. But a careful study of their cult does not justify the conventional view; and the theory that Wide has insisted on113.5appears to me the only reasonable accountof them, namely, that originally they were heroic “chthonian” figures, to whom a celestial character came later to be attached: it is significant that the astral aspect of them is only presented in comparatively late documents and monuments, not in Homer or the Homeric hymn, and that their most ancient ritual includes a “lectisternium,” which properly belonged to heroes and personages of the lower world.
Lastly, the nature-worship of the Hellenes was pre-eminently concerned with Mother-earth—with Ge-meter, and this divine power in its varied personal forms was perhaps of all others the nearest and dearest to the popular heart: so much of their ritual was concerned directly with her. And some scholars have supposed, erroneously, I think, but not unnaturally, that all the leading Hellenic goddesses arose from this aboriginal animistic idea. We may at least believe this of Demeter and Kore, the most winning personalities of the higher Hellenic religion. And even Athena and Artemis, whatever, if any, was their original nature-significance, show in many of their aspects and much of their ritual a close affinity to the earth-goddess. But, as I have indicated above, it is impossible to find in the early Mesopotamian religion a parallel figure to Ge: though Ishtar was naturally possessed of vegetative functions—so that, when she disappears below the world, all vegetation languishes—yet it would be hazardous to say that she was a personal form of earth: we may rather suspect that by the time the Semites brought her to Mesopotamia from the West, she had lost all direct nature-significance, and was wholly a personal individual.
Finally, the cleavage between the two groups of peoples in their attitude towards the powers of nature is still further marked in the evolution of certain moral andeschatologic ideas. The concept of a Ge-Themis, of Earth as the source of righteousness, and of Mother-earth as the kindly welcomer of the souls of the dead, appears to have been alien to Mesopotamian imagination, for which, Allatu, the Queen of the lower world, is a figure wholly terrible.