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such fetich objects as the sacred pillar or double-headed axe, but
which did not express its actual imagination of its divinities in any art-
type. If this were so, we should not be able to answer the question
how far the Minoan religion was purely anthropomorphic until we
have found the interpretation of Minoan writing. But our store of
monuments has been much enriched by later discoveries in the
Palace of Knossos, and in one of its private chapels in which the
Cross was the central sacred emblem, Sir Arthur Evans found the
interesting figure of the snake-goddess—purely human, but holding
snakes in her hands and girdled with snakes, while before her
stands a votary brandishing a snake:65.1 again, a Minoan signet-ring
published by him65.2 revealed the great mountain-goddess herself on
the summit of a peak flanked by lions and holding a spear. These
may be actual reproductions of cult-images; and many other gems
and other works have now been published by him and others proving
that the people who belonged to this great Aegean culture of the
second millennium habitually conceived of their gods in human form,
even if they did not as a rule erect their idols in their temples. Thus
on a gem which shows us an act of worship performed by a female
votary before a sacred pillar, a human-shaped god with rays round
his head and holding a spear is hovering in the air above it;65.3 and
on the great sarcophagus of Praisos we have on the one side a
complex scene of ritual, conspicuous for the absence of any idol or
eikon of the divinity, and at the other end a human form of god, or it
may be hero, standing as if he had just come forth from his shrine or
heroön.65.4 In fact, the Minoan-Mycenaean religious monuments
have revealed to us at least three personages, anthropomorphically
conceived, of the popular religion of the period that we may call pre-
Hellenic: a great goddess, often represented as throned, with fruits
and emblems of vegetation around her, or as standing on a mountain
and associated with lions; a god who is sometimes conversing with
her or is descending from the sky armed with spear and shield,65.5
and sometimes rayed; thirdly, the goddess with the snake as her
familiar. To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples were
on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia: and the
record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be traced in the Aegean
area back to the fourth millennium B.C. by the nude figures in stone
of a goddess of fecundity with arms pressed across her breasts, a
type belonging to the Neolithic period.
In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art of
the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan
divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia.
But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean
civilisation is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated
evidence that seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and
in Mycenaean Greece which has been supposed by some to have
preceded the former in order of time and in the logical process of
evolution, and which at any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of
the same phenomenon have been noted in the Hittite area, and
more faintly in the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer
who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic elements in the
prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A. Lang in his Custom and
Myth, connecting it with a theory of totemism that does not concern
us here. Afterwards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the
light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean periods was
presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published in the Hellenic Journal
of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age”; and again in
1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a very full
collection of the materials, with some exposition of important
religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, De Graecorum
Diis non referentibus speciem humanam (1900). Miss J. Harrison
has worked further along the same lines, and has published some
special results in her paper read before the Congress of the History
of Religions, 1908, and published in its Transactions, on “Bird and
Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”
Now the material that forms the fabric of these researches is so
intricate, the relevant facts so manifold and minute, that it is
impossible to consider them in detail within the limits of this present
inquiry, of which the leading object is an important question of history
concerning the religious influence of the East on the West; and,
again, the writers above mentioned are deeply concerned with
theories about the origins, or at least the earlier stages in the
evolution of religion. And as I am only comparing East and West in a
limited and somewhat advanced period of their history, I am not
necessarily bound to deal with problems of origin. Nevertheless, a
summary survey of this group of facts may provide us with important
clues towards the solution of our main question. But a few general
criticisms of the assumptions which, whether latent or explicit, are
commonly made in the writings just quoted, may be useful at the
outset. First, one finds that the word “worship” is used very loosely
by the ancients as well as by contemporary writers: and by its vague
and indiscriminate employment an effort is made to convince us that
the pre-Hellenic and proto-Hellenic world worshipped the lion, the ox,
the horse, the ass, the stag, the wolf, the pig, the bird, especially the
dove, the eagle, and lastly even the cock. We should have to deal
with a savage religion rioting in theriolatry, and we should not need
to trouble any longer about the theory of its Mesopotamian origin, for
as we have seen theriomorphism played a very small part in the
Sumerian-Babylonian cult. But one must ask more precisely, What is
worship, and what does lion-worship, for instance, imply? Are we to
believe that every one of these animals was worshipped, the whole
species being divine? And does their “worship” mean that the
superstitious people prayed to them, built altars or sacred columns,
or even shrines to them, and offered them sacrifice? It has become
urgent to reserve some such strict sense for the word as this, in
order to preserve a sense of the distinction between our ritual-
service of a real personal divinity and the various, often trifling, acts
that may be prompted by the uneasy feeling or reverential awe
evoked by the presence of a curious or dangerous animal. Thus, to
abstain from eating or injuring mice or weasels is not to worship mice
or weasels: to lament over a dead sea-urchin is not to worship sea-
urchins: to give a wolf a decorous funeral is not to worship wolves: to
throw a piece of sacrificial meat to flies before a great sacrifice to
some high divinity is not to worship flies. All these things the civilised
Greeks could do, but they ought not for that to be charged with
worshipping whole species of animals directly as gods. Next let us
bear well in mind that secular animals, like secular things, can
become temporarily sacred through contact with the altar: thus the
ox who voluntarily approached the altar and ate of the grain or cakes
upon it, might be believed by the Hellenes to become instantly
divine, full of the life of the divinity, and most ceremonious respect
resembling worship might be meted out to him; but we should not
hastily believe that the Greeks who might feel like this towards that
particular ox worshipped all oxen; or that the society of King Minos
worshipped all axes wherever found, because in peculiar
circumstances and ritual an axe might become charged with divinity.
Finally, I may again protest against the fallacy of supposing that
theriomorphism always precedes anthropomorphism: for an ever-
increasing mass of evidence forces one to the conviction that they
are often co-existent and always compatible one with the other; if
this is so, it is rash and unscientific to say, as is so easy to say and is
so often said, when one meets in the Mediterranean or elsewhere a
human god or goddess accompanied by a lion or a cock, that the
anthropomorphic divinity has been evolved from the animal.
Looking now directly to the Minoan-Mycenaean monuments,
before we consider the early Hellenic records, we must distinguish
between those that are obviously cult-scenes and those that are not
obviously but only hypothetically so, and this second class are those
with which Mr. Cook’s papers mainly deal. The former have been
treated masterfully by Sir Arthur Evans in his paper on “Tree and
Pillar Cult”; from these we gather that the worshipper did not usually
pray before an idol, but before a pillar or a sacred tree combined
often with horns of consecration or an axe; also that he imagined his
deity generally in human form, the pillar serving as a spiritual
conductor to draw down the divinity from heaven. Therefore I may
remark that the phrase “pillar-cult” here, and in Miss Harrison’s paper
quoted above, does not express the inwardness of the facts. But the
latter writer endeavours to prove the prevalence of a direct cult of
birds in this period; and further maintains the dogma that “in the days
of pillar and bird anthropomorphism was not yet.” The Minoan
monuments on which she relies are the great Phaistos sarcophagus,
the trinity of terra-cotta pillars surmounted by doves found in an early
shrine of the Palace of Knossos,69.1 with which are to be compared
the dove-shrine of Mycenae and the gold-leafed goddesses of
Mycenae with a dove perched on their heads; and finally, the semi-
aniconic idol of a dove goddess, with the dove on her head and her
arms outspread like wings, found in another shrine of the palace of
Knossos, and descending from a pre-Mycenaean traditional type.70.1
Whatever we may think of these monuments, they cannot be quoted
as the memorials of a time “when anthropomorphism was not yet”;
for the earliest of them, probably that mentioned last, is of later date
than the type of the naked human-formed goddess of the Neolithic
Aegean period.
The question depends wholly on the true interpretation of the
monuments; as regards the Phaistos sarcophagus, the exact
significance of the ritual is still a matter of controversy, to which I
may return later, when I compare the ritual of east and west; this
much is clear, that a holy service of blood-oblation is being
performed before two sacred trees, into the top of which two axes
are inserted and on the axes are two birds painted black. Is it
immediately clear that “the birds are objects of a definite cult,” as
Miss Harrison maintains?70.2 This may be strongly disputed;
otherwise we must say that the axe and the tree are equally direct
objects of cult. But the illuminative scene on the signet-ring
described above70.3 suggests that the function of the pillar was to
serve as a powerful magnet to attract a personal divinity. And Sir
Arthur Evans has well shown that the tree and the pillar were of
equal value as sacred objects in Minoan-Mycenaean religion. A
sacrifice doubtless of mystic and magical power is being performed
before them here: the worshippers may well believe that the
combined influence of blood-offering, sacred tree, and sacred axe
will draw down the divinity of the skies. In what form visible to the
eye would he descend? The carver of that signet-ring dared to show
him above the pillar in human form, as the mind’s eye though not the
sense-organ of the worshipper discerned him. But the artist of the
Phaistos sarcophagus is more reserved. As the Holy Ghost
descended in the form of a dove, so the unseen celestial divinity of
Crete might use any bird of the air as his messenger, perhaps by
preference the woodpecker or dove. And this natural idea would be
supported by the fact that occasionally birds did alight on the top of
sacred columns, and they would then instantly be charged with the
sanctity of that object and would be regarded as a sign of the deity’s
presence and as an auspicious answer to prayer and sacrifice. Thus
many birds in Greece became sacred by haunting temples; and Dr.
Frazer has suggested that the swallows and sparrows that nested on
the temple or on the altar at Jerusalem acquired sanctity by the
same simple religious logic.71.1 But it is futile to argue that therefore
the Hellenes and Hebrews once worshipped either the whole
species of swallows and sparrows or any single one. And Sir Arthur
Evans’ own interpretation of the doves on the triple group of
columns, as being merely “the image of the divine descent, and of
the consequent possession of the bactylic column by a spiritual
being,” is sane and convincing.71.2 This does not prove or
necessarily lead to “bird-worship.” Further, he suggests71.3 that as
the dove was originally posed on the top of the column as a gracious
sign of the divine presence, so when the human form was beginning
to take the place of the column the dove would then be seen on the
human head, as in the case of the statuettes of goddesses
mentioned above, and as it appeared on the head of the golden
image at Bambyke, which some called Semiramis.72.1 The close
association of the Mediterranean goddess and of the goddess of
Askalon, Phoenicia, and Bambyke with doves may have been
caused by several independent reasons; one may well have been
the habitual frequenting of her temple by the birds. This would easily
grow into a belief that the goddess when she wished to reveal
something of her presence and power to the external eye would
manifest herself in the bird. This we may call theriomorphic
imagination that goes pari passu easily with the anthropomorphic.
But none of these monuments come near to proving that this
Mediterranean race directly worshipped birds, nor do they suggest
any such theory as that the human divinity emerged from the bird.
We shall, in fact, find that evidence of this kind that I have been
examining, used recklessly in similar cases, leads to absurd
results.72.2
Here it is well to remark in passing that the cult of the Dove-
goddess is a test case for trying the question of Oriental influence on
the west. It cannot be traced back to Babylon, and no one would now
maintain the old theory that the dove-shrines of Mycenae were an
import from the Phoenician Astarte cult. Sir Arthur Evans’
discoveries enable us to carry back this particular worship in the
Aegean to pre-Mycenaean times. We could with better right maintain
that the Syrians borrowed it from the Aegean or possibly from
Askalon, where, as Dr. Evans has pointed out, Minoan influences
were strong. But the most reasonable view is that which he
expresses that “the divine associations of the dove were a primitive
heritage of primitive Greece and Anatolia.”73.1
As regards Mr. Cook’s theory of Mycenaean animal-worship, it is
not now necessary to examine it at any length. It was based mainly
on a comparison of a fairly large number of “Mycenaean” seals and
gems from Crete and elsewhere showing monsters bearing animals
on their shoulders or standing by them. He interpreted the
“monsters” as men engaged in a religious mummery, wearing the
skins of lions, asses, horses, bulls, stags, swine, that is, as ministers
of a divine lion, ass, etc., bringing sacrificial animals to these animal-
deities, and he raised the large questions of totemism and totemistic
cult-practices. His theory presents a picture of zoolatric ritual that
cannot be paralleled elsewhere in the world either among primitive or
advanced societies. And we begin to distrust it when it asks us to
interpret the figures in a gem-representation as an ass-man bearing
two lions to sacrifice; for neither in Greece, Egypt, or Asia is there
any record of a lion-sacrifice, a ceremony which would be difficult to
carry out with due solemnity. The more recent discovery of a set of
clay-sealings at Zakro in Crete by Dr. Hogarth, who published them
in the Hellenic Journal of 1902, has rendered Mr. Cook’s view of the
cult-value of these “monsters” now untenable. They are found in
combinations too widely fantastic to be of any value for totemistic or
a zoolatric theory, and the opinion of archaeologists like Sir Arthur
Evans and Winter74.1 that these bizarre forms arose from
modifications of foreign types, such as the Egyptian hippopotamus
goddess, crossed at times with the hippokamp and the lion, has
received interesting confirmation from the discovery of a shell relief
at Phaistos showing a series of monsters with hippopotamus heads,
and in a pose derived undoubtedly from a Nilotic type.74.2 We may
venture to say that the exuberant fancy of the Minoan-Mycenaean
artist ran riot and amused itself with wild combinations of monsters,
men and animals, to which no serious meaning was attached.
 Only rarely, when the monsters are ritualistically engaged in
watering a sacred palm tree or column,74.3 does the religious
question arise. And here we may find a parallelism in Assyrian
religious art, in the representation of “winged genii fertilising the adult
palms with the male cones”; but according to Sir Arthur Evans this
motive is later in the Eastern art than in the Mycenaean. Perhaps
only one type of monster found on these gems and seals is derived
from a real theriomorphic figure of the contemporary religion,
namely, the Minotaur type. A few of the Zakro sealings show the
sealed figure of a human body with bovine head, ears, and tail75.1;
and a clay seal-impression found at Knossos presents a bovine
human figure with possibly a bovine head sealed in a hieratic attitude
before a warrior in armour.75.2 Such archaeological evidence is
precarious, but when we compare it with the indigenous Cretan
legends of the bull-Zeus and the union of Pasiphae with the bull, we
are tempted to believe that a bull-headed god or a wholly bovine
deity had once a place in Minoan cult.
To conclude, this brief survey of the Minoan-Mycenaean
monuments points to a contemporary religion that preferred the
aniconic agalma to the human idol, but imagined the divinity mainly
as anthropomorphic, though this imagination was probably not so
fixed as to discard the theriomorphic type entirely. Therefore this
religion is on the same plane with that of Mesopotamia rather than
with that of Egypt.
Turning now to the proto-Hellenic period, which, without prejudging
any ethnic question, I have kept distinct from the Mycenaean, we
have here the advantage of literary records to assist the
archaeological evidence. I have stated my conviction that the earliest
Hellenes had already reached the stage of personal polytheism
before conquering the southern Peninsula; and the combined
evidence of the facts of myths and cults justifies the belief that their
imagination of the deity was mainly anthropomorphic. By the period
of the Homeric poems, composed perhaps some five centuries after
the earliest entrance of the Hellenes, we must conclude that the
anthropomorphism as a religious principle was predominant in the
more progressive minds that shaped the culture of the race: a minute
but speaking example of this is the change that ensued in
accordance with Homeric taste in the meaning of the old hieratic
epithet βοῶπις; in all probability it originally designated a cow-faced
goddess, but it is clear that he intends it for ox-eyed, an epithet
signifying the beauty of the large and lustrous human eye. The bias
that is felt in the religious poetry of Homer comes to determine the
course of the later religious art, so that the religion, art, and literature
of historic Greece may be called the most anthropomorphic or
anthropocentric in the world. Yet we have sufficient proof that in the
pre-Homeric age the popular mind was by no means bound by any
such law, and that the religious imagination was unfixed and
wavering in its perception of divinity: and the belief must have been
general that the god, usually imagined as a man, might manifest
himself at times in the form of some animal. Apollo Lykeios, the wild
god of the woods, was evidently in the habit of incarnating himself in
the wolf, so that wolves might be sacramentally offered to him or
sacrifice offered to certain wolves.76.1 In the Artemis legend of
Brauron and Aulis we detect the same close communion of the
goddess with the bear. Now, upon the fairly numerous indications in
cult-legend and ritual that the deity was occasionally incarnate in the
animal, much fallacious anthropological theory has been built. It is
not now my cue to pursue this matter au fond. But it is necessary for
my purpose to emphasise the fact that there is fair evidence for
some direct zoolatry in the proto-Hellenic period, though there is less
than is often supposed, and it needs always careful criticism. As I
have already said, the ancients of the later learned period were often
vague and unprecise when they spoke of “the worship” of animals.
Thus Clemens informs us77.1 that the Thessalians “worshipped” ants,
and on the authority of Euphorion that the Samians “worshipped” a
sheep: the word used in each case being σέβειν. But accurate
statements concerning religious psychology demand the nicest
discrimination: “a little more, and how much it is.” We may suspect
that the word σέβειν was as vaguely used in antiquity as the term
“worship” in loose modern writing: and it is to be remarked that when
one authority uses this word, another may employ the verb τιμᾶν,
which does not imply so much. For instance, Clemens states that the
Thebans “honoured” the weasel; Aelian, that they “worshipped” it.77.2
We are nearly always left in doubt how much is meant: whether the
animal was merely treated reverentially and its life spared, or
whether sacrifice and prayers were offered to it: the former practice
may be found in almost any society modern or ancient, the latter is
savage zoolatry, and is a fact of importance for the religious estimate
of a people.
I cannot consider all the cases which are given with sufficient
fullness in the work that I have cited by De Visser.77.3 But 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 theanthropic animal, half-
human, half-divine, like the bull-calf of Tenedos in the cult of
Dionysos,78.1 an 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,78.2 pointing
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.78.2 There 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.78.3
The 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.78.4 The 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.79.1 Yet,
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 from the 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.
 CHAPTER V.
The Predominance of the Goddess.

The next 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 in an 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;82.1 and 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. The monument already
described83.1 on 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;83.2 and for them she is the great divinity
of war, who, armed with bow, quiver, and sword, orders the battle-
ranks. In a famous hymn,83.3 perhaps the most fervent and moving
of all the Babylonian collection, she seems exalted to a supreme
place above all other divinities; another83.4 displays 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 difficult phrase in a hymn to Nebo84.1 which
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.”84.2 The 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.”84.3 But the intercessor
is not supreme; and in spite of the great power of Ishtar and the
fervent devotion 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,”85.1 the 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.85.2
Some 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.85.4 An 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.85.5 Even 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 have the evidence
of the Mesha stone, which mentions the divine pair Ashtor-Chemosh,
and in Numbers86.1 the 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.86.2
Astarte was par excellence the 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,86.3 the other shows her embracing
him.86.4 King Tabnit of Sidon, whose sarcophagus is in the Museum
of Constantinople, styles himself “priest of Astarte, King of the
Sidonians.”86.5 But 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 Babylonian
evidence 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.87.1 We 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.87.2 Besides 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.87.3 Again, 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,87.4 and
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 to 900 B.C.88.1 But 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.”88.2 Can
we draw any conclusions from that extraordinary monument from
Fassirlir88.3 on 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 unnecessary to 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;89.1 but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out,89.2 at 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.89.3 And recently we
have heard Professor Wilamowitz89.4 brilliantly 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 his
mother, 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 no vraisemblance to 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,90.1 is 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 mentions90.2 are 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
or Hekate, 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,91.2 and
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,91.3 and 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