The story of this bird goes back to the misty dawn of civilization and religion in Mesopotamia, the Garden-of-Eden land, where arose the dual “nature-worship” of the combining elements heaven and earth, male and female. The fecund soil, yielding its fruits to the fertilizing sunshine and rain, sent by the sky-god, became personified as Ishtar (Ashtaroth), and to her was assigned the amorous and prolific dove as a type of the family concord and productiveness she represented; and white doves were sold to worshippers at Babylon to be offered as sacrifices in her temple. Her worship was spread to Asia Minor and the shore of the Ægean by Babylonian and Assyrian conquests, and she became known to the Phrygians as Cybele, to the Syrians as Darketo, and to the Phoenicians as Atagartis, whom the Ionian Greeks called Astarte.
In these transformations the primitive Ishtar gradually fell from her original state as a type of motherhood to the baser one of physical love-indulgence, and among her votaries were troops of maidens who publicly offered their virginity at her shrine, as a form of sacrifice and service.
Some of the Syrians are said to have thought of their goddess Darketo as “Semiramis,” but this was by confusion with her fabled daughter. Whether or not a real woman and queen of that name ever existed, I leave to the historians, but a mythical Semiramis belongs to my story, and her history was first written by Ctesias, an Asiatic-Greek historian of the fourth century B.C. Ctesias says that near Askalon was a large lake beside which Darketo (otherwise Atagartis) had a habitation; she is represented with the face of a woman and the body of a fish—perhaps the most antique conception of a mermaid. She fell in love with a fair youth and a girl-baby resulted. Then, in shame, Darketo destroyed her lover, exposed the child in a rocky desert, and flung herself into the lake. The babe, nurtured by doves on milk and cheese, was discovered and reared by a herdsman, who called the child Semiramis—a Syrian word for “doves.” At the close of her life this mythical Semiramis changed herself into a dove and flew away with certain other birds. Hence, in Ctesias’s time, divine honors were paid in the East to doves; and a dove is the badge of Semiramis in Syrian monumental art. Diodorus Siculus repeats this account with additional details.
The sceptre in the hand of the revered image of Atagartis in her great temple at Hierapolis bore the golden figure of a dove on its summit; and in Phoenicia, Cyprus, Sardinia, and wherever the Phocians and other Levantine traders of that day traded and colonized, have been found small terra-cotta figures of this goddess, or of one of her priestesses, always with a dove.
To the devotees of this cult, which was confined to the coastal region, and in which the Hebrews and other Semites of the interior desert-plains took no part, a dove was so sacred that if a person even accidentally touched one he was “unclean” throughout the day. Hence the birds thronged in the villages and houses and swarmed about the temple yards, where they were fed by visitors, as still is the custom in the Mohammedan mosques that have taken their place. This was noted especially at Hierapolis, where, according to Lucian, one of the venerated images had a pigeon’s head.
This religious doctrine, and more particularly the Phrygian cult of Cybele, was undoubtedly carried to the Ægean islands and to Greece, while civilization was still in its infancy there, for the “sea-born” Aphrodite—an epithet indicative of her arrival from across the waters—is only Astarte transformed in Greek thought, which seems to explain the classic story that Aphrodite was born from an egg, with a dove brooding upon it, rolled ashore by a fish.
The focus of religious emotion in those early centuries of Greece, at least in Attica, was probably in the most ancient of oracles, that at Dodona. Tradition ascribed its origin to a dove that spoke with a human voice; and among those who served the shrine were three priestesses popularly called “Doves,” whose duty it was to announce oracles requested as if real birds uttered them from the foliage of the surrounding oaks—divine trees. Connected with the cult of Zeus at Dodona was that of Aphrodite, then regarded as the goddess of exalted love, not of the sensual passion by which in later times her cult in Rome, as Venus, became degraded. It was natural, as we have seen, that the dove should be associated with this pristine Aphrodite, and equally suitable that it should be adopted subsequently as the attendant of lascive Venus, for as De Kay[[18]] observes, doves are forever making love and caressing each other. “Chaucer speaks of ‘the wedded turtil with her herte trewe’.... So the bird is by its nature and habits fitted to be the attendant and symbol of the goddess of love—the bird that draws her flower-studded chariot through the air.” A Persian poet asks:
Knowest thou why round his neck the dove
A collar wears?—it is to tell
He is the faithful slave of love,