The first type, which is almost ubiquitous in the human societies that have arrived at the belief in personaldeities, is sufficiently attested by Homer of the early Greeks, who promise and perform the sacrifice partly as an offering to please or to appease the deity. What is more important is the evidence, which I have dealt with elsewhere,236.1that Homeric society was familiar also with the more genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal where the worshipper and the deity meet around the altar; this emerges clearly in the accounts that Homer has given us of an Achaean sacrificial feast.236.2Even the germs are already visible of the idea from which the third or more mystic type of sacrifice, what I have called the sacramental type, might be evolved; for special significance attaches to the acts described in the phrases οὐλοχύτας προβάλοντο and σπλάγχν᾽ ἐπάσαντο, “they threw forward the barley-shreddings” and “they tasted the entrails”: the first phrase is not wholly clear, but it may signify that stalks of barley are first placed on the altar, and thereby consecrated or filled with the divine virtue that is inherent there, and then the beast is touched with these on the forehead and thereby becomes himself filled with the spirit of godhead;236.3the second is also a mystic act, for the σπλάγχνα specially contain the life, which is now infused with divinity, and by tasting them the worshippers partake of the divine life. All this arises solely from the extraordinary degree of supernatural force or “Mana” which the altar itself possesses, a force which may havebeen an inheritance from long ages of pillar-worship, if we believe the altar to have been evolved from the sacred pillar.237.1It explains other details in the old Hellenic sacrificial act; such as the casting the hairs of the victim into the altar-flame,237.2which established a communion between the animal and the deity, the practice of solemnly consecrating the lustral water by ceremoniously carrying it round the altar,237.3and charging it with a still more potent infusion of divinity by plunging into it a lighted brand from the altar-fire.237.4
The communion sacrifice must then have been in vogue in pre-Homeric times; and the idea that gave it its meaning never wholly faded from the State-ritual; for the rule, expressed by such formulae as οὐκ ἀποφορά, δαινύσθων αὐτοῦ, bidding the worshipper conclude the feast round the altar and take none of the flesh home, seems to arise partly from the feeling that the ceremony was meaningless unless he feasted wholly with the deity.237.5But it was most vividly realised in the religious services of the θίασοι, the later religious orders or fraternities devoted each to the cult of its special divinity; for these a common religious meal formed the chief binding-tie.237.6
Apart from the Homeric evidence, we have the record of the Attic Bouphonia as attestation of the great antiquity of this type of sacrifice in Greece. Tothe actual statement of the details given us by Theophrastos and Pausanias, much is added by the curious aetiological legends that grew up around it.238.1We see the ox marking himself for sacrifice by voluntarily going up to the altar and eating the corn upon it, being thus called, as it were, by the god into communion with himself. As he is thus full of the spirit of the god, it is regarded a sacrilegious act to slay him; but all the citizens partake of his flesh, and even the stranger who eats becomes himself a citizen, as through this feast he enters into kinship with Zeus Polieus. All this can be explained by the belief that Zeus Polieus is in the altar; and we need not resort to such theories as that the ox is a totem-animal or the spirit of vegetation.
We must, however, beware of concluding that because the victim was thus temporarily possessed with godhead and in this holy state devoured, he was therefore literally regarded as the full incarnation of the god, or that the worshipper consciously believed he was eating his own deity who died in the sacrifice. For religious consciousness by no means always draws the full logical corollaries of a religious act. The more mystic idea, that has played a great part in the religion of Europe, can only be detected or suspected, apart from written direct ancient testimony, where the animal is treated with reverence apart from and before his association with the altar, or is regarded as the habitual incarnation of the deity. The immolation and devouring of such a victim would be of the true sacramental type, which Robertson Smith believed was the aboriginal form of all sacrifice. But we have no clear example of it from the earliest period of genuine Hellenic religion, unless weforce the evidence or exaggerate its meaning.239.1We have only certain myths that we may doubtfully venture to interpret by means of this hypothesis. And these are no myths about animals, but about human victims devoured in sacrifice: the most significant is the story of the cannibalistic feast held by King Lykaon, who cooked his own son and offered the flesh to Zeus, a ritual of which some survival, whether mimetic or half-real, was witnessed by Pausanias himself on Mount Lykaon.239.2This would point to sacramental cannibalism, if we assume that King Lykaon was the human incarnation of Zeus Lykaios and that his son was therefore a divine infant. But it is possible that the story enshrines the remembrance of the more ordinary clan-sacrifice of the life of a clansman to procure them communion with the clan-god by the common partaking of his flesh: the kinsman is offered rather than the animal, not so much that the sacrificers may eat their god, but that the god by consuming their most valued life may be more closely incorporate with them.
Again, in one of the darkest and most perplexing of Greek legends, the story of Klumenos of Argos and his incestuous love of his daughter Harpalyke, who revenges herself by slaying her own child and offering it to the father in a sacrificial meal, we may discern the glimmer of a remembrance of a cannibal sacrament. The associations of the story dimly indicate a Thracian origin.239.3And it is in the range of the Greek Dionysiaccult, which according to the most probable view was adopted from Thrace, that we find imprinted on legend and ritual the tradition of a savage type of sacrament, in which the human or animal incarnation of the god was devoured. Such is the significance that we may fairly attach to the Titan-story of the murder of the infant Dionysos, to the σπαραγμός of the goat or bull or snake periodically practised by the Bacchoi or Bacchae, and to the death of Pentheus.240.1And in later Greek ritual the consciousness here and there survived that the victim offered to Dionysos incarnated the very deity, even before it acquired the temporary mystic afflatus from contact with the altar. The record of the ritual of Tenedos, in which a sacred pregnant cow was tended reverently and the calf that she bore was dressed in the buskins and then sacrificed to Dionysos, “the render of men,” is the most piquant example.240.2
This Dionysiac tradition reaches back undoubtedly to the second millennium in Greece; the evidence of a similar sacramental ritual in purely Hellenic worship is shadowy and slight, for the critical examination of the Eleusinian mysteries does not clearly reveal it; and the growth and diffusion of the idea in later Paganism does not concern us now.
But the consideration of the early Hellenic sacrifice, of which the salient features have been slightly sketched above, is of signal value for our present purpose. For it reveals at once a marked contrast to Babylonian ideas so far as these at present are revealed to us. The Babylonian-Assyrian liturgies, epics, and chronicles have failed to disclose any other theory of the sacrifice than that which is called the gift-theory. A generalterm for the Babylonian sacrifice is “kishtu” or “present.”241.1The deities are supposed to eat what is given them; in the Epic of the Deluge the naïve phrase occurs, “The gods smell the savour, the delightful savour, the gods swarm like flies around the sacrificer.” No evidence is as yet forthcoming that the sacrificer was supposed or was allowed to eat with the deity, as in the Hellenic communion-sacrifice. On the contrary, certain texts can be quoted which seem expressly to forbid such a thing.241.2The document already cited that was found in Assurbanipal’s library, containing the Job-like lament of the good man who had found no profit in goodness, contains a verse in which he compares himself with the sinner who neglects all religious ordinances, and who has even “eaten the food of God.” And so we find that among the various evil or impure or unlucky deeds that could bring a man under the ban of the gods, the “devouring of sacrificial flesh” is expressly mentioned.241.3
Unless, then, documents yet to be revealed contradict this positive and negative evidence, we have here a fact of great weight to set against the theory that we are discussing. Whencesoever the Hellenes derived their genial conception of the sacrifice as a communion-meal, they did not derive it from Babylon. And all Robertson Smith’s speculations concerning the inner significance of the Semitic sacrifice cannot yet be applied to Mesopotamia, whence he was not able to glean any evidence. In Babylonia the sacrificer got no share of the victim. He might eat with the spirits of the dead in certain ritual, but he was not, it appears, privilegedto eat with the god or goddess. The deity took the victim, or the sacrifice of cereals and fruits, as a present, and the priest got his share. But we are not told that the priest ate with the god, or where he ate; nor can we say that the priest represented the worshipper.
If a true sacrament is yet to be discovered in Babylonian religion, it will probably be found in some document of the Tammuz ritual. For it is probable that Tammuz was identified with the corn as with other parts of vegetation, and that the mourning for him was accompanied with abstinence from bread. His resurrection ended the fast, and if in their joy the worshippers ceremoniously broke bread, they may have supposed they were eating the body of their risen lord. But such a reconstruction of the old Tammuz ritual rests at present only on the indirect evidence of the later records of Attis-Adonis cult and of the Tammuz-worship among the heathen Syrians of Harran in the tenth century of our era.242.1
It belongs to the Babylonian conception of the sacrifice as a gift, that the animal was often regarded as a ransom for the man’s own life; that is to say, when sin had been committed, the deity might be placated by the gift of an agreeable victim, and be persuaded to accept it in place of the sinner whose life was properly forfeit. For instance, a sick man is always supposed to have sinned; and the priest who is performing an animal sacrifice in his behalf uses the prayer, “Take his present, take his ransom”;242.2and the formula of a sacrifice offered by way of exorcism is very explicit: “A male sheep, a female sheep, a living sheep, a deadsheep shall die, but I shall live.”243.1Another inscription243.2throws further light on the ritual of the vicarious sacrifice: “To the high-priest may one cry out: the kid of substitution for the man, the kid for his soul he hath brought: place the head of the kid to the head of the man, place the neck of the kid to the neck of the man, place the breast of the kid to the breast of the man.” Whether this solemn manipulation was performed after or before the sacrifice, its object must have been to establish by contact a communion between the man and the victim, so that the kid might be his most efficacious representative. It thus became part of the higher ethical teaching of Babylon that “sacrifice brings life,” just as “prayer takes away sin,” a doctrine expressed in a fragmentary tablet that contains a text of striking spiritual import.243.3
The type of sacrifice that may be called vicarious must have been an ancient as well as a later tradition in Greece; for the legends associated with many sacrifices clearly attest it, explaining certain animal victims as substitutes for a human life that was formerly demanded by the offended deity, the vicarious sacrifice usually carrying with it the ideas of sin and atonement.243.4The substitution might occasionallybe apologised for by a legal fiction, as, for instance, when in the ritual of the Brauronian Artemis the angry goddess demanded the life of a maiden, and the Athenian parent sacrificed a goat, “calling it his daughter.”244.1
But though this idea is common to the Mesopotamian and Hellenic communities, they differ widely in respect of the evidence they afford, of the prevalence of human sacrifice. As regards ancient Greece, the evidence is indubitable, though much that has been brought by modern scholars is due to false interpretation of ritual, such as the scourging of the Spartan boys; later, the human sacrifice became repugnant to the advancing ethical thought of the nation, but according to one authority did not wholly die out till the age of Hadrian. On the other hand, no literary text nor any monument has yet been found that proves the existence of such a ritual in Babylonia. In one of his biographical inscriptions Assurbanipal proclaims that he “sacrificed” prisoners of war to avenge his murdered father on the spot where his father was slain.244.2He boasts of worse things than this; and we can well believe that he murdered them in cold blood. But thewords by no means suggest a ceremonious tomb-ritual with human sacrifice.
Slightly more important is a passage in a legal document, to which Mr. Johns245.1calls attention; whence it appears that a forfeit for reopening an already adjudicated cause was the consecration of one’s eldest child by fire to a god or goddess; and, as incense and cedar-wood are mentioned in the same context as concomitants of the threatened ceremony, the conclusion seems natural that this was once at least a real threat of human sacrifice inflicted as a legal punishment. This legal clause gives us the right to conclude that in the earliest period the Semites and Sumerians of Mesopotamia occasionally resorted to this rite. They would be indeed a peculiar people and a favoured nation if they had always been innocent of it. It is sufficiently attested by direct evidence, either of record or excavation, or by the suggestion of legend, of the Arabs, Syrians, the early Canaanites,245.2the Israelites, the Phoenicians; also of the Phrygians and other non-Semitic peoples of Anatolia. Yet it must be put to the credit of the Babylonian culture of the second millennium, that the Mesopotamians had either completely or almost abandoned it. At this time it was doubtless in full vogue in Greece; and certainly Babylon could not have been their evil teacher in this matter. But they needed no teachers in what was an ancient tradition of their northern ancestors, and of the people with whom they mingled. Yet only twenty years ago a distinguished writer on Greek ritual could say, “It is certain that theHellenes borrowed the practice of human sacrifice from the Orientals.”246.1
As we discover no trace of the idea of communion in the ordinary Babylonian sacrifice, we are the less surprised that scarcely any hint is given by the sacred literature or monuments of any mystic application of the blood of the victim, which was used for so many purposes of communion-ritual by the early Hellenes and Hebrews. I can find no other evidence for this in Mesopotamia except one passage quoted by Zimmern,246.2in which the sacrificer is ordered to sprinkle some part of the door with the blood of the lamb. It is not probable that the Babylonians were incapable of the notion that by physical contact with certain sacred objects a temporary communion could be established between the mortal and the divinity: it appears, for instance, in one of the formulae of the purification-ritual—“May the torch of the Fire-god cleanse me”246.3—in the yearly practice of the king grasping the hands of the idol of the god, perhaps in the custom of attaching the worshipper to the deity with a cord,246.4and in the diviner’s habit of grasping the cedar-staff, which is called “the beloved of the gods.”246.5But it may be that they never applied this notion to the sacrifice, so as to evolve the institution of the communion-meal; or they may have evolved it in early times, and through long agesof power the priests may have become strong enough to suppress it and to substitute for it the gift-ritual, which would be more profitable for themselves. It accords with this absence of any mystic significance in the sacrifice that we do not find in the Babylonian service any mystic use of the sacrificial skins, of which some evidence can be gathered from various details of Greek ritual.247.1
Again, the Babylonian records have so far failed to reveal any evidence for any such public ceremony as the sending forth of the scapegoat, whether human or animal, charged with the sins of the community. This ritual was common to the Hellenes, Egyptians, and Hebrews, and probably to other Semitic communities.247.2The idea of sin-transference on which it rests was familiar enough to the ancient Babylonian; but he seems only to have built upon this a private system of exorcism and purgation of sin and disease for the individual. As far as we know, it did not occur to him to effect by this method a solemn annual expulsion of all the sins of the nation.
On the other hand, there is another type of sacrifice common to Babylonia and Greece, by which an oath or an engagement might be cemented: the animal is slaughtered with an imprecation that the same fate may befall him who breaks his oath or violates the compact. Zimmern quotes a good example of this, relating to the compact made between the Assyrian king Assurnirariand Mati’ilu, prince of Arpad:248.1a sheep is sacrificed and the formula pronounced: “This head is not the head of a sheep, it is the head of Mati’ilu, of his sons, of his great ones, of the people of his land. If Mati’ilu breaks this oath, the head of Mati’ilu will be cut off, like the head of this sheep.” The same idea underlies the oath-sacrifice in theIliad,248.2though it is not expressed with such naïve make-believe or such logic in the detail; but as the beast is slaughtered or wine poured, a curse is uttered invoking on the perjured a similar fate, or with a prayer that “his brains may be poured out like this wine.” The original idea is magical: the symbolic explanation is later. Another parallel is the Latin oath over the stone.248.3
Such resemblance in special forms by no means weakens the impression that we receive from the striking differences discernible in the Babylonian and Hellenic significance of sacrifice. To those already noted we may add yet another, which concerns the association of sacrifice with divination. It is Professor Jastrow’s opinion248.4that the chief motive of the Babylonian sacrifice was the inspection of the liver of the victim, from the markings of which the skilled expert could interpret the future by a conventional system revealed to us in certain ancient Babylonian documents. This superstition is so elaborate and artificial that if we find it in adjacent countries, it is more reasonable to suppose that one borrowed it from the other, than that it was developed independently in each. We find it in later Greece, Etruria, and Rome; but the evidence of the Homeric poems suggests that it was unknown to theHellenes of the earlier period. They are very likely to have borrowed it from Babylonian sources in post-Homeric times; and we note here, as in other cases where the influence of Babylon upon Greece can be reasonably posited, it reaches the western shores of the Aegean at a post-Homeric rather than a pre-Homeric epoch.
The comparative study of Mesopotamian and Hellenic sacrifice confronts us finally with another problem belonging to the history of religions, and one of the greatest, the dogma of the death of the divinity and the origin and significance of that belief. For where the mystic type of communion-sacrifice is found, where the animal that is slain for the sacrament is regarded as the incarnation of the deity, the divinity may be supposed himself to die temporarily, doubtless to rise again to life, either immediately or at some subsequent festival. This momentous conclusion need not always have been drawn, for religious logic is not often persistently thorough, nor does the evolution of the idea belong necessarily to the sphere of totemism, as Robertson Smith supposed, and M. Reinach is still inclined to maintain. It is not my concern here to discuss the totemistic hypothesis, but I may point out that in the rare examples where the totem-animal is slain, it is not clear that it is slain as a divinity.
Again, the belief in the periodic death of a deity might arise independently of the sacrifice, namely, from the essential idea of the godhead itself, when the divine life is identified with the annual life of vegetation: the phenomena of nature in autumn and spring may suggest to the worshipper the annual death and resurrection of the god or goddess. It is important to note that in this, as in the other source of the belief, the conclusion need not always have been drawn, for the vegetation-deitymight be supposed not to die in autumn or winter, but merely to disappear, and the story of his or her disappearance need not carry the same religious consequences as the story of the divine death.
The immolation of the divine victim in a communion-service, wherein the worshippers partake symbolically or realistically of the divine flesh and blood, though suggested by a thought that we must call savage, may be pregnant with consequences momentous for higher religion, as the history of Christian dogma attests. And even the annual death of the nature-god may be raised to a higher significance than its mere nature-meaning, and may be linked with the promise of human immortality.
We may note, finally, that a religion which expresses in its ritual the idea of the deity’s death and resurrection is likely to be charged with a stronger emotional force than one that lacks it; for the two events will excite an ecstasy of sorrow and of joy in the believer.
As the phenomenon, then, is of such importance, it is necessary to be critical and unbiased in the collection of statistics. Our present field of inquiry is the Eastern and Western Mediterranean area; and here our conspicuous example is the ancient Sumerian-Babylonian ritual of Tammuz,250.1a folk-service of lamentation and rapture, psychologically akin in many respects to Christianity, and of most powerful appeal.
The Tammuz hymns preserved to us are of the highest Babylonian poetry, and though they are chiefly litanies of lamentation, sorrowing over the death of the young god, yet one or two echoes are heard at their close of the rapturous rejoicing over his resurrection.251.1With them is associated the story of the descent of his consort Ishtar, or of his goddess-sister; another great motive of the religious imagination which neighbouring peoples and faiths were quick to capture and adapt to their own religious use. We have seen251.2that the evidence is clear that the life of Tammuz is the life of the crops and fruits; and we discern a pure nature-religion unmoralised and without dogma, but evoking a mood and a sentiment that might supply the motive force to more complex and more spiritual creeds. It was not suited to the religious atmosphere of the Assyrian and Babylonian courts; but its influence spread far through Asia Minor. It captivated the other polytheistic Semites, and at times, as Ezekiel shows us, the women of Israel, revealing to these latter, no doubt, a vein of religious sentiment unknown in the austere Mosaic monotheism. The ritual of Adonis is mainly borrowed from the Tammuz service. For instance, the rite of planting the short-lived “garden of Adonis,” of which possibly the earliest record is in Isaiah xvii. 10, appears to be alluded to in a verse of a Tammuz hymn.251.3The figure of Tammuz is primevally Sumerian; therefore the diffusion of his cult among the various Semitic communities does not enable us to conclude that the death and resurrection of a divinity is an aboriginal Semitic tradition. As regards other evidence on the strength of which this dogma has been attributed to them by some scholars, it is of late authority and of doubtful validity. Josephus251.4tells us that at Tyre theresurrection of Herakles was once celebrated by Hiram; but this might well be a derivative of the non-Semitic Sandon cult of Tarsos, which will be considered below. And the legend of the death of Dido at Carthage, even if there is no doubt that the queen was originally the great goddess of Tyre, is no sufficient proof of a Phoenician ritual in which the divinity died annually.
But as regards the non-Semitic peoples of anterior Asia, the question of borrowing is more difficult to answer with certainty.
No Hittite monument nor any Hittite text has as yet revealed to us any figure that we can identify with Tammuz. But certain indications incline us to believe that the idea of the death of the god was not unfamiliar to the Hittite religion or to some of the communities under Hittite influence. On the Boghaz-Keui relief we have noted the presence in the religious procession of those mysterious animals, calves, or bulls, wearing caps of peculiar Hittite fashion.252.1Are not these “theanthropic animals” to be sacrificed as a communion-link between man and God? We know that the bull was worshipped as an incarnation of a Hittite deity; and therefore from the sacrifice of the bull might emerge the dogma that the deity ceremoniously died at certain periods. From the sanctity of the bull in ancient Hittite cult-centres may have descended the mystic communionrite of the Taurobolion or Tauropolion, which Cumont has shown good reason for supposing to have arisen in the worship of the Persian Anahita, and to have been adopted into the service of Kybele.253.1
More direct evidence is to be gleaned from the cult of Sandon or Sandes of Tarsos, a city which was once within the area of Hittite culture. The god of Tarsos comes later to be identified with the Tyrian Baal and the Hellenic Herakles; and the legend of the death of the latter hero may be an echo of a ἱερὸς λόγος of Tarsos, inspired by an annual rite in which the god of the city was consumed on a funeral pyre, and was supposed to rise again from the flames in the form of an eagle.253.2The later Tarsian coins display the image of the god, the pyre, the eagle, the double-headed axe, and the lion;253.3and the last three of these symbols belong to the oldest religious art of the Hittites. The proof would be complete if it could be shown that the name Sandon or Sandes belongs to the Hittite language. All we know at present is that it is not a Babylonian or Sumerian word, or found in the vocabulary of any Semitic people. Prof. Sayce believes himself to have found it in a cuneiform inscription of Boghaz-Keui. This would be the direct proof that we require; but the word that he transliterates as Sandes is said to be the ideogram of Hadad, the Syrian Semitic god, and that Hadad is used as the Semitic equivalent of Sandes is merely a conjuncture.253.4
A still clearer and more striking example of the phenomenon with which we are dealing is the Phrygianand Lydian cult and legend of Attis. The various and often conflicting details in the story of his birth, life, and death, the various elements in his cult, are known to us from late sources; the consideration of the whole question would not be relevant here; but it is necessary for our purpose to determine, if possible, what are the aboriginal motives of the myth and cult. It seems likely that the earliest form of the Phrygian religion was the worship of the great mother-goddess, coupled with a son or lover,254.1a young and beautiful god who dies prematurely, and whose death was bewailed in an annual ritual, whose resurrection was presented in a subsequent or accompanying service. Of the death and the lamentation we have older evidence than for the resurrection and the rejoicing, but the one seems to be a necessary complement of the other. The family likeness of Attis to Tammuz strikes us at first sight. As Tammuz appears as a young vegetation deity, identified partly with the life of trees, partly with the corn, so Attis in the Phrygian legend and ritual is presented as a tree-divinity, and in the verse of a late hymn, which is inspired by an ancient tradition, is invoked as “the corn cut by the reaper.”
And these two personalities of the Sumerian and Phrygian religions evoked the same psychologic sentiment, sorrowful, romantic, and yearning. The hypothesis naturally suggests itself that the more Western people borrowed the cult from Mesopotamia, and that this had happened as early as B.C. 1500.254.2All scholars are agreed at all events that the figure of Attis belongs to the older pre-Aryan stratum of the population ofPhrygia; modern speculation is sometimes inclined to regard this as Hittite, and we know that the Hittites adopted some part of the Babylonian religion. But the name Attis itself is a stumbling-block to the hypothesis of borrowing from Mesopotamia. Believing Adonis to be a Western-Semitic form of Tammuz, we can explain the name as meaning merely “the Lord,” a natural appellative of the Sumerian god. But we cannot so explain “Attis.” It is non-Semitic, and must be regarded as belonging to an Anatolian language-group, nor can we yet discover its root-meaning.
Again, there are many features of the Attis-worship and legend that are not found in the corresponding Sumerian, and one at least that seems essentially alien to it. The death of the vegetation-god, originally suggested by the annual phenomenon of nature, may be explained by various myths, when the personal deity has so far emerged from his nature-shell that he is capable of personal drama. The death of Tammuz does not appear to have been mythologically explained at all. We may suppose that the killing of Adonis by the boar was borrowed from the Attis legend, for in Phrygia, and also in Lydia—as the Herodotean Ates story proves—this animal was sometimes regarded as the enemy that slew the god. It is a reasonable belief that the boar came to play this part in the story through a misunderstanding of certain ritual, in which this victim was annually offered as incarnating the deity, or was reverentially spared through a sacrificial law of tabu. If this is an original fact of Attis-cult, it counts somewhat against the hypothesis of derivation from Mesopotamia, for the pig does not appear to have played any such part, positive or negative, in Mesopotamian, as in the ritual of the Western Semites andon the shores of Asia Minor; nor can any connection at present be discovered between Tammuz and this animal.
But another version of the death of Attis, current at some time among his worshippers, was that he died from the effects of self-mutilation, a motive suggested by the emasculation of the Phrygian Galloi. We have here a phenomenon in the cult and myth that was alien to the religious habits of the Mesopotamian communities. The eunuch as a secular functionary is a figure belonging to an immemorial social tradition of the East; but the eunuch-priest is the morbid product of a very few religions, and there is no trace of such in Mesopotamia. The Babylonian church-law demanded an unblemished priesthood of strong virility, agreeing in this respect with the Judaic and the Hellenic, and according with an ancient sentiment that the vigour of the priest was the pledge of that continued flow of divine power which supported the vigour of the community. Self-emasculation was penalised in the religious rule of Jahwé, and the Gallos was excluded from temple-worship by the ritual code of Lesbos. The records of modern savagery and the history of asceticism, whether in modern and mediaeval India or in early Christianity, afford us varied illustration of the wildest excesses of self-inflicted cruelty against the human body, but not—so far as I am aware—of this particular form of self-destruction.256.1
As a religious practice it is a special characteristic of Phrygia, a land always fascinating to the student on account of its strange freaks of religious psychology; and from Phrygia the practice spread into some adjacent communities, such as Bambyke. One may be allowedto pause a little to consider the original motive that prompted it. At first sight one is tempted to explain it as due to a morbid exaggeration of the craving for purity. But elsewhere, where this impulse was most powerful, for instance, in the later Orphic and Isis cults, and in early and mediaeval Christianity, it produced many mental aberrations but not this particular one. Nor, again, have we any reason for supposing this craving to have been strong in the devotees of Phrygia; the Galloi of Bambyke, according to Lucian, were possessed by strong though impotent sexual desires and were allowed full license with women. The form of communion most ardently sought with the Phrygian goddess and with the later Sabazios was a marriage symbolised by a sexual act; and Greek and Latin writers, both pagan and Christian, agree in reprobating the obscenities of Kybele-Attis worship; we may note also that Phrygian sacred mythology is somewhat grosser than the Hellenic.
We are compelled to seek another explanation, and I can suggest none other than that which I have hazarded elsewhere; namely, that Phrygian religious emasculation was an act performed in a frenzy of exaltation by the priest ormystesdesirous of assimilating himself as far as possible to the female nature of the great divinity.257.1The worship was under male ministration for the highest part; but for the full exercise of divine power the male priest must become quasi-female and wear a female dress, the latter part of the rôle being common enough in primitive “theurgy.” The priest is himself at times the incarnation of the young god, and is called Attis. Therefore Attis was himself supposed to have performed the same act, even at the cost of his life. How early was this institution of a eunuch priesthood in Phrygia we have no direct evidence to prove. It may be a “Hittite” tradition; for figures that Perrot reasonably interprets as eunuch-priests are seen on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui.
Returning to the topic of the death of the divinity, we may assume that in Phrygia this was a very ancient tradition, enacted yearly by a ceremonious laying out of the vegetation puppet on a bier, or the suspension of it on a pine-tree. We have no direct or otherwise trusty evidence for the immolation of the priest who incarnates the god; doubtless the stories about the death of Marsyas and the harvest-sacrifice of Lityerses point to a ritual of human-sacrifice; whom Marsyas stands for is doubtful, but in the Lityerses legend it is merely the passing stranger who is slain, and neither of these traditions is explicitly linked with Attis-cult.
Finally, we may pronounce the hypothesis of the derivation of the Phrygian cult from Mesopotamia to be unproved and unnecessary.
Pursuing this phenomenon further afield, we come to the area of Minoan-Mycenaean culture. If the legend of the death of the Minotaur could be safely interpreted as arising from the periodic immolation of a bull-god, the idea that we are in quest of would be proved to belong to the Minoan Cretans; but thefrescoes of Knossos present that event with such a gay and sportingentouragethat one feels shy of forcing a solemn religious significance into it. More important for our purpose is the traditional Zeus-legend of Crete. It is generally felt to be alien to the genuine Hellenic tradition concerning their high god, as something adopted by the immigrant Hellenes from an earlier Eteocretan ritual and creed.259.1We have a glimpse of a ritual in which the deity is born, is worshipped as an infant, and then as a boy—κοῦρος, as he is invoked in the new fragment of the hymn of the Kouretes—and especially as the son of a great mother, not as a mature independent personality. Again, there appears an orgiastic emotion and passion in the ritual that strikes a note in harmony with the Phrygian Kybele-Attis worship. The very early associations of Crete and the countries adjacent to the Troad are now being revealed by accumulating evidence, and may point to an affinity of stock. It may well have been, then, that the Minoan Cretans had their counterpart to Attis, a young god who was born and died periodically, whom they may have named Velchanos, the name of the young deity seen sitting under a tree on a Cretan coin of the fifth century. Though in age and character so unlike the Hellenic Zeus, we may suppose that the incoming Hellenes named him so because they found him the chief god of the island. We can also understand why the later Bacchic mystery flourished so fruitfully in Crete, if it found here already the ritual of a young god who died and rose again, and why in later times the inhabitants celebrated with such enthusiasm the Hilaria,259.2the Easter festival of the resurrection of the Phrygian divinity.
This attempt to reconstruct a portion of old Cretan religion on the lines of the early Phrygian has only a precarious value, until some more positive evidence is forthcoming from the Minoan art-record, which hitherto has revealed to us nothing concerning an annual divine birth and death. The ritual-legend is incomplete: we hear sufficiently of the birth, and we may arguea priorithat a periodic ritual of the god’s birth implies a periodic death. Unfortunately all that we glean from ancient literature is that there was a grave of Zeus, perhaps in the Idaean cave, on which Pythagoras is said to have written an epitaph.260.1But a sceptical doubt arises here from the fact which was pointed out by Rohde, that the grave of a divine personage was often a misnomer of the underground sanctuary of a chthonian deity; and either the Idaean cave or the great cavern on Mount Dikte, whence the interesting relics of an immemorial cult have recently been gathered,260.2might at a later period have come to be regarded as a grave. Still, we may ask, could the phrase “the grave of Zeus” have become prevalent among a people with whom the worship of this god was still a living creed, unless the faith also prevailed that the god who died rose again to power? In that case the “grave of Zeus” could be a name for a sanctuary where the ritual of the death was enacted preliminary to the ritual of the birth.
This reconstruction then, and thea priorideduction emphasised above, may claim to be at least legitimate.
Finally, some evidence may be added from Cyprian cult for the view that the Minoan civilisation wascognisant of the dogma of the death of the divinity. We hear of the grave of Ariadne-Aphrodite which was shown in later times in Cyprus,261.1and the Cretan and Cypriote legends of the maidens called Gorgo, Parakuptousa, and Galatea261.2reveal to us an Aphrodite who died periodically and was laid out on a bier and revived. The Aphrodite of Cyprus is most probably of “Minoan” origin; and, being a goddess of vegetation, the idea of periodic death and resurrection might naturally attach to her, and might be associated with another type of ritual also, the annual casting of her puppet into the sea, which probably gave rise to such stories as the leap of Britomartis or Derketo into the waves.261.3
We can now deal with the purely Hellenic evidence. Confining our view first to the cults and legends of the higher divinities of Hellas, we cannot affirm that the death and resurrection of the deity is a primitive tradition of the Hellenes. We may suspect it to have been a leading motive in some of the local Arcadian cults of Artemis, if, for instance, we interpret the Arcadian Kallisto as a form of the great goddess herself; but it is very probable that Artemis in Arcadia and many other of her cult-centres represents the pre-Hellenic divinity of birth and fruitfulness. What we may dare to call the Hellenic spirit seems to speak in the answer given by Xenophanes to the people of Elea when they asked him whether they ought to sacrifice to Leukothea and bewail her: “If you regard her as a deity, do not bewail her; if as human, do not sacrifice.”261.4
But when we descend from the higher religion tothe old Hellenic agrarian cults associated with the heroes or daimones of the soil and field, we find evidence of sorrowful rites, ceremonies of bewailing, which belong to the same type as that of Tammuz; and in the Greek, as in the Babylonian, the personage to whom they are attached is a youthful hero or heroine of vegetation: such are Linos, perhaps the earliest theme of a melancholy harvest-song of pre-Homeric days; Hyakinthos, the “youth” of the Laconian land who may or may not have been Hellenic, to whom the greater part of the Hyakinthia were consecrated; Eunostos of Tanagra; Erigone, “the early-born,” of Ikaria. The life of all these passes away as the verdure passes, or as the crops are gathered in; and to one of them at least, Hyakinthos, and perhaps to the others, the idea of an annual resurrection was attached. But none of these came like Tammuz to play a world-part; they remain the naïve, half-realised forms of poetic folk-religion. Like to them is Bormos of Bithynia,262.1whose death was bewailed at the harvest-time with melancholy songs, accompanied by sad flute-music, and Lityerses of Phrygia, whom the reapers lamented around the threshing-floor.
Shall we say that all these are merely reflections cast afar by the great cult-figure of Babylon?
Then we must say the same of the peasant-hero “German” whom the modern Bulgarians adore and bewail, of the Russian Yarilo,262.2and our own John Barleycorn. And at this point we shall probably fall back on the theory of independent similar developments, and shall believe that peasant religion in different parts of the world is capable of evolving strikingly parallelfigures in obedience to the stimulus of similar circumstances and needs.
We have no surety, then, for a belief that Tammuz, or any shadow of Tammuz, was borne to the western shores of the Aegean in the days before Homer. And we know that Adonis, his nearest Anatolian representative, only arrived late in the post-Homeric period. Meantime, whatever view we may hold concerning prehistoric religious commerce between East and West, this vital difference between Mesopotamian and Hellenic religion must be strongly emphasised: Babylonian liturgy is mainly a service of sorrow, and part of that sorrow is for Tammuz; Hellenic worship was mainly cheerful and social, and only in a few chthonian cults is a gloomier tone discernible, nor can we anywhere hear the outbursts of violent and ecstatic grief. In this respect, and in its remoteness from any idea of the death and resurrection of the deity, Hellenic religion was further removed from that of Catholic Europe than was the old Phrygian or the Sumerian.
The Babylonian temple-service was complex and varied, and offers many problems of interest to the comparative student. We gather that a Holy Marriage was part of a religious drama perhaps performed annually; for instance, we find reference to the solemn nuptials of Ninib and Bau, and to the marriage presents given to Bau.263.1In every anthropomorphic polytheism, especially when idolatry provides images that could be used for religious drama, this ritual act is likely to occur. It is recorded of the southern Arabians in the days before Islam, an ancient inscription speaking of the marriage ceremony of Athtar.263.2It is a marriage of the great Godand Goddess that according to the most reasonable interpretation is represented on the Hittite reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. We may conjecture that it was a ceremony of Minoan worship; a Mycenaean signet-ring shows us a seated goddess with a young god standing before her and joining his forearm to hers, while both make a peculiar gesture with their fingers that may indicate troth-plighting;264.1also, the later legends and the later ritual commemorating the marriages of Aphrodite and Ariadne may descend from the pre-Hellenic religious tradition. Finally, we have fairly full evidence of the same religious act in purely Hellenic cult. The ἱερὸς γάμος of Zeus and Hera was enacted in many communities with certain traits of primitive custom;264.2the nuptials of Kore and the lower-world god might be found in the ceremonies of certain temples;264.3while the central scene of the Eleusinia, the greater if not the lesser, included a Holy Marriage.264.4The Roman religion, in the original form of which there may have been no marrying or giving in marriage, no family ties or genealogies of divinities, no doubt borrowed its “Orci nuptiae” from the Greek. But for the other cases, there is no need to resort to any theory of borrowing to explain a phenomenon so natural at a certain stage of religion.
Nor is it an important phenomenon, so long as the ceremony was enacted merely by puppets or idols, as in the Boeotian Daidala.264.5It only begins to be of higher significance for the history of religious practice and thought, when the part of one of the divinities in this drama is played by a human representative. For not only does this offer indefinite possibilities of exaltationfor the mortal, but it may engender the mystic ideal and practice of communion with the divinity through sexual intercourse, which played a great part in Phrygian religion, and left a deep impress on early Christian symbolism. The question whether the Mesopotamian religion presents us with evidence of a “holy marriage” solemnised between a mortal and the divinity must finally involve the more difficult question as to the function and purpose of that strange Mesopotamian institution of temple-prostitutes. But, leaving this latter alone for the moment, we find explicit testimony in Herodotus to the fact with which we are immediately concerned. In describing the great temple of Bel at Babylon,265.1he asserts, on the authority of his “Chaldean priests,” that the deity chose as his nightly partner some native woman, who was supposed to pass the night on the couch with him, and who was obliged to abstain from all other intercourse with men; and he compares a similar practice of belief found in the temple of Zeus in Egyptian Thebes, and in the oracular shrine of Apollo at Patara in Lycia. Now Herodotus’ trustworthiness in this matter has been doubted by Assyriologists;265.2nevertheless, a phrase used in the code of Hammurabi concerning a holy woman dedicated to temple service, calling her “a wife of Marduk,” seems to give some colour to the Herodotean statement.265.3Only, this term might have merely a spiritual-symbolic significance, like the designation of a nun as “the bride of Christ”; for the original Babylonian documents have supplied as yet, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a woman fulfilling the rôle of Belit, the wife of Bel.
As regards the adjacent religions, the idea that a mortal might enter into this mode of communion with the divinity was probably an ancient heritage of the Phrygian religions, for it crops up in various forms. The priest of Attis was himself called Attis, and, therefore, probably had loving intercourse with the goddess, and the later mysteries of Kybele extended this idea and offered to every votary the glory of a mystic marriage;266.1it was the unconscious stimulus of an immemorial tradition that prompted the Phrygian heresiarch Montanus to give himself out as the husband of the Virgin Mary.266.2It also appears as a fundamental tenet of the Sabazian mystery and of the Hellenistic-Egyptian Hermetic theosophy. The simple ritual-fact, namely, that a woman serves as the bride of the god, could probably be traced far afield through many widely distant peoples. According to Sahagun,266.3the human sacrifices of the Mexicans had sometimes the purpose of sending away a woman victim into divine wedlock. In pre-Christian Sweden we find a priestess generally regarded as the wife of the god Freyr, and enjoying considerable power from the connection.266.4Similar examples can be quoted from modern savage communities. Therefore if we find the same institution in the Mediterranean, we shall not think it necessary to suppose that it was an import from Babylon or from any Semitic people. As regards the Minoan worship, it is legitimate at least to regard the legend of Pasiphaë and her amour with the bull-god as an unfortunateaetiologic myth distorting the true sense of a ritual in which a mortal woman enjoyed this kind of divine communion, and here again we should mark a religious affinity between Crete and Phrygia. And it is likely that the idea was not unfamiliar to the Hellenes, though the record of it is scanty and uncertain. According to the early Christian fathers, the inspiration of the Pythia of Delphi was due to a corporeal union with Apollo akin at least to—if not identical with—sexual intercourse. Of more value is Herodotus’ definite assertion that the priestess of Patara gained her inspiration by her nuptial union with Apollo. In the rare cases where the cult of a Hellenic god was administered by a priestess we may suspect that a ἱερὸς γάμος was part of the temple-ritual; in the two examples that I have been able to find, the cults of Poseidon at Kalaureia and of Heracles at Thespiai, the priestess must be a maiden, as on this theory would be natural.267.1The maiden-priestesses of the Leukippides, the divine brides of the Dioskouroi at Sparta, were themselves called Leukippides; in all probability because they were their mortal representatives in some ceremony of holy marriage.267.2But the most salient and explicitly recorded example is the yearly marriage of the Queen-Archon at Athens with Dionysos, the bull-god, in the feast of Anthesteria, the significance of which I have discussed elsewhere.267.3It seems that the Queen by uniting her body with the god’s, unites to him the whole Athenian state and secures its prosperity and fruitfulness; this historic fact may also explain the myth of the unionof Althaia, Queen of Kalydon, with the same god. Finally, let us observe that nothing in any of these Hellenic records suggests any element of what we should call impurity in the ritual; we are not told that these holy marriages were ever consummated by the priest as the human representative of the god; or that the ceremony involved any real loss of virginity in the maiden-priestess. The marriage could have been consummated symbolically by use of a puppet or image of the deity. We may believe that the rite descends from pre-Homeric antiquity; the ritual which the Queen-Archon performed might naturally have been established at the time of the adoption into Athens of the Dionysiac cult, and there are reasons for dating this event earlier than 1000 B.C.268.1
We now come to a very difficult and important question concerning the position of women in the old Mesopotamian temple-ritual. Our first document of value is the code of Hammurabi, in which we find certain social regulations concerning the status of a class of women designated by a name which Winckler translates doubtfully as “God’s-sisters,” regarding it, however, as equivalent to consecrated, while Johns translates it merely as “votary.”268.2At least, we have proof of a class of holy women who have certain privileges and are under certain restrictions. They were the daughters of good families dedicated by their fathers to religion; they could inherit property, which was exempt from the burden of army-tax; they could not marry, and were prohibited from setting-up or even entering a wine-shop under penalty of death. It is something to know even as much as this about them,but we would very gladly learn more. Is it to their order that the personage described as “the wife of Marduk”269.1belongs, who has been considered above? Is it from among them that the priestesses of Ishtar were chosen, who interpreted the oracles of the goddess?269.2It seems clear that a father could dedicate his daughter to any divinity, that their position was honourable, and that they are not to be identified with the temple-prostitutes of Babylon or Erech, who excited the wonder and often the reprobation of the later Greek world. This peculiar order of temple-harlots is also recognised—according to some of the best authorities269.3—in Hammurabi’s code, where they are mentioned in the same context with the “consecrated” or the “God-sisters,” and yet are clearly distinct from them; another clause seems to refer to male prostitutes (§ 187). Certain rules are laid down concerning their inheritance of property, and concerning the rearing of their children, if they had any, who might be adopted into private families. Evidently these “Qadishtu” were a permanent institution, and there is no hint of any dishonour. There may be other references in Babylonian literature to these temple-women; in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the courtesan who won over Eabani evidently belongs to the retinue of Ishtar of Erech.
From these two institutions we must distinguish that other, for which Herodotus is our earliest authority:269.4according to his explicit statement, once in her lifetime every Babylonian woman, high or low, had to stand in the temple-precincts of the goddess Mylitta—probably afunctional appellative of Ishtar, meaning “the helper of childbirth”—and to prostitute herself to any stranger who threw money into her lap and claimed her with the formula, “I invoke the goddess Mylitta for you.” Herodotus hastens to assure us that this single act of unchastity—which took place outside the temple—did not afterwards lower the morality of the women, who, as he declares, were otherwise exemplary in this respect. But he is evidently shocked by the custom, and the early Christian and modern writers have quoted it as the worst example of gross pagan or Oriental licentiousness. Some devoted Assyriologists have tried to throw doubt on the historian’s veracity:270.1the wish is father to the thought: and it is indeed difficult for the ordinary civilised man to understand how an ancient civilisation of otherwise advanced morality could have sanctioned such a practice. But Herodotus’ testimony ought not to be so impugned; nor is it sufficient evidence for rejecting it that no reference to the custom which he describes has been found hitherto in the cuneiform literature. Strabo merely repeats what Herodotus has said; but independent evidence of some value is gathered from the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremias:270.2“The women also with cords about them sit in the ways, burning bran for incense; but if any of them, drawn by some that pass by, lie with them, she reproacheth her fellow that she was not thought as worthy as herself, nor her cord broken.” The context is altogether religious, and this is no ordinary secular immorality; certain details in the narrative remind us of Herodotus, and make it clear that the writer has in mind the same social usage that the historian vouches for. This usage may be described as the consecration to the goddess ofthe first-fruits of the woman’s virginity before marriage; for, though Herodotus does not explicitly say that it was a rite preliminary to marriage, yet the records of similar practices elsewhere in Asia Minor assure us on this point.
We have now to begin the comparative search in the adjacent regions, keeping distinct the three types of consecration which I have specified above, which are too often confused.271.1
The first type has its close analogies with the early Christian, mediaeval, and modern conventual life of women. The code of Hammurabi presents us with the earliest example of what may be called the religious sisterhood; the Babylonian votaries were dedicated to religion, and while the Christian nuns are often called the brides of Christ, their earliest prototypes enjoyed the less questionable title of “God’s-sisters.” We find no exact parallel to this practice in ancient Greece; from the earliest period, no doubt, the custom prevailed of consecrating individual women of certain families as priestesses to serve certain cults, and sometimes chastity was enforced upon them; but these did not form a conventual society; and usually, apart from their occasional religious duties, they could lead a secular life. In fact, the monastic system was of Eastern origin and only reached Europe in later times, being opposedto the civic character of the religion of the old Aryan states.
The second class of consecrated women served as temple-harlots in certain cult-centres of Asia Minor. We cannot say that the custom in all cases emanated from Babylon; for there is reason to think that it was a tradition attaching to the cult of the goddess among the polytheistic Semitic stocks. We have clear allusions in the Bible to temple-prostitution practised by both sexes in the Canaanite communities adjacent to the Israelites, who were themselves sometimes contaminated by the practice.272.1We hear of “hierodouli” among the pagan Arabs,272.2of women “of the congregation of the people of Astarte” at Carthage,272.3of numbers of dedicated slave women in the cult of Aphrodite at Eryx,272.4which was at least semi-Semitic; and it is likely that some of these at least were devoted to the impure religious practice. As regards non-Semitic worships, it is only clearly attested of two, namely, of the worship of Mā at Comana in Pontos,272.5and of Aphrodite Ourania in Corinth.272.6In these cases we have the right to assume Semitic influences at work; for we do not find traces of this practice in the ancient cult of Kybele; and Ma of Cappadocia and Pontus, who had affinities with her, was partly contaminated with Anahita, a Persian goddess, who had taken on Babylonian fashions. Nor can we doubt that the practice gained recognition at Corinth in post-Homeric times through its Oriental trade; for it was attached to the cult of AphroditeOurania, whose personality, partly at least, was identical with that of the Semitic goddess. The practice survived in Lydia in the later period of the Graeco-Roman culture. For a woman of Tralles, by name Aurelia Aemilia, erected a column with an inscription that has been published by Sir William Ramsay,273.1in which she proclaims with pride that she had prostituted herself in the temple service “at the command of an oracle,” and that her female ancestors had done likewise. Finally, we may find the cult-practice reflected in certain legends; in the legend of Iconium, for instance, of the woman who enticed all strangers to her embraces and afterwards slew them, but was herself turned to stone by Perseus, and whose stone image gave the name to the State.273.2
The other custom recorded by Herodotus of Babylon, the consecration of the first-fruits of virginity to the goddess before marriage, which I have considered as distinct from the foregoing, may often have been combined or confused with it; for the temple-harlotry, carried on for some considerable period, might be occasionally a preliminary to marriage. The most exact parallels to the Babylonian custom are found in the records of Byblos, Cyprus, and the Syrian Heliopolis or Baalbec. Lucian attests the rule prevailing at Byblos, that in the festival of Adonis women exposed themselves for purchase on one single day, andthat only strangers were allowed to enjoy them; but that this service was only imposed upon them if they refused to cut off their hair in lamentation for Adonis.274.1Similarly the Byzantine historian Sozomenos declared that at Heliopolis (Baalbec), in the temple of Astarte, each maiden was obliged to prostitute herself before marriage, until the custom and the cult were abolished by Constantine.274.2The statements about Cyprus, though less explicit, point to the same institution: Herodotus, having described at length the Babylonian practice, declares that it prevailed in Cyprus also, and Justin274.3that it was a custom of the Cyprians “to send their virgins before marriage on fixed days to the shore, to earn their dowry by prostitution, so as to pay a first-offering to Venus for their virtue henceforth (pro reliqua pudicitia libamenta Veneri soluturas).” The procession to the shore may indicate the rule that intercourse was only allowed them with strangers,274.4and nothing points to prolonged prostitution. It is probably the same rite that the Locrians of the West vowed to perform in honour of Aphrodite in the eventof deliverance from a dangerous war.275.1But in the worship of Anaitis at Akilisene in Armenia, according to Strabo,275.2the unmarried women served as temple-harlots for an indefinite time until they married; and Aurelia Aemilia of Tralles may have been only maintaining the same ancient ritual in Lydia. In these two countries, then, it seems as if there had been a fusion of two institutions that elsewhere were distinct one from another, harlot-service for a prolonged period in a temple, and the consecration of each maiden’s virginity as a preliminary to marriage.
Such institutions mark the sharpest antagonism between the early religious sentiment of the East and the West. Of no European State is there any record, religious or other, that the sacrifice before marriage of a woman’s virginity to a mortal was at any time regarded as demanded by temple ritual. Such a rite was abhorrent to the genuine Hellenic, as it was to the Hebraic, spirit; and only in later times do we find one or two Hellenic cult-centres catching the taint of the Oriental tradition: while such legends as that of Melanippos and Komaitho and the story of Laokoon’s sin express the feeling of horror which any sexual licence in a temple aroused in the Greek.275.3