The fish was sacred to Atargatis, who undoubtedly had been represented in that shape at first, as Dagon always was.[[34]] The fish were kept in ponds in the proximity of the temples.[[35]] A superstitious fear prevented people from touching them, because the goddess punished the sacrilegious by covering their bodies with ulcers and tumors.[[36]] At certain mystic repasts, however, the priests and initiates consumed the forbidden food in the belief that they were absorbing the flesh of the divinity herself. That worship and its practices, which were spread over Syria, probably suggested the ichthus symbolism in the Christian period.[[37]]
However, over this lower and primordial stratum that still cropped out here and there, other less rudimentary beliefs had formed. Besides inanimate objects and animals, the Syrian paganism worshiped personal divinities especially. The character of the gods that were originally adored by the Semitic tribes has been
ingeniously reconstructed.[[38]] Each tribe had its Baal and Baalat who protected it and whom only its members were permitted to worship. The name of Ba‘al, "master," summarizes the conception people had of him. In the first place he was regarded as the sovereign of his votaries, and his position in regard to them was that of an Oriental potentate towards his subjects; they were his servants, or rather his slaves.[[39]] The Baal was at the same time the "master" or proprietor of the country in which he resided and which he made fertile by causing springs to gush from its soil. Or his domain was the firmament and he was the dominus caeli, whence he made the waters fall to the roar of tempests. He was always united with a celestial or earthly "queen" and, in the third place, he was the "lord" or husband of the "lady" associated with him. The one represented the male, the other the female principle; they were the authors of all fecundity, and as a consequence the worship of the divine couple often assumed a sensual and voluptuous character.
As a matter of fact, immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor. In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phœnicians had imported it, as on Mount Eryx. Those aberrations, that were kept up until the end of paganism,[[40]] probably have their explanation in the primitive constitution of the Semitic tribe, and the religious custom must have been originally one of the forms of exogamy, which compelled the woman to unite herself first with a stranger.[[41]]
As a second blemish, the Semitic religions practised human immolations longer than any other religion, sacrificing children and grown men in order to please sanguinary gods. In spite of Hadrian's prohibition of those murderous offerings,[[42]] they were maintained in certain clandestine rites and in the lowest practices of magic, up to the fall of the idols, and even later. They corresponded to the ideas of a period during which the life of a captive or slave had no greater value than that of an animal.
These sacred practices and many others, on which Lucian complacently enlarges in his opuscule on the goddess of Hierapolis, daily revived the habits of a barbarous past in the temples of Syria. Of all the conceptions that had successively dominated the country, none had completely disappeared. As in Egypt, beliefs of very different date and origin coexisted, without any attempt to make them agree, or without success when the task was undertaken. In these beliefs zoolatry, litholatry and all the other nature worships outlived the savagery that had created them. More than anywhere else the gods had remained the chieftains of clans[[43]] because the tribal organizations of Syria were longer lived and more developed than those of any other region. Under the empire many districts were still subjected to the tribal régime and commanded by "ethnarchs" or "phylarchs."[[44]] Religion, which sacrificed the lives of the men and the honor of the women to the divinity, had in many regards remained on the moral level of unsocial and sanguinary tribes. Its obscene and atrocious rites called forth exasperated indignation on the part of
the Roman conscience when Heliogabalus attempted to introduce them into Italy with his Baal of Emesa.
How, then, can one explain the fact that in spite of all, the Syrian gods imposed themselves upon the Occident and made even the Cæsars accept them? The reason is that the Semitic paganism can no more be judged by certain revolting practices, that perpetuated in the heart of civilization the barbarity and puerilities of an uncultivated society, than the religion of the Nile can be so judged. As in the case of Egypt we must distinguish between the sacerdotal religion and the infinitely varied popular religion that was embodied in local customs. Syria possessed a number of great sanctuaries in which an educated clergy meditated and expatiated upon the nature of the divine beings and on the meaning of traditions inherited from remote ancestors. As their own interests demanded, that clergy constantly amended the sacred traditions and modified their spirit when the letter was immutable, in order to make them agree with the new aspirations of a more advanced period. They had their mysteries and their initiates to whom they revealed a wisdom that was above the vulgar beliefs of the masses.[[45]]