Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.
Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph.
Most of them were objects of worship: they were anointed with oil, and victims were slaughtered in their honour; the faithful even came at times to spend the night and sleep near them, in order to obtain in their dreams glimpses of the future.*
* The menhir of Bethel was the identical one whereon Jacob
rested his head on the night in which Jehovah appeared to
him in a dream. In Phoenicia there was a legend which told
how Usôos set up two stellæ to the elements of wind and fire,
and how he offered the blood of the animals he had killed in
the chase as a libation.
Men and beasts were supposed to be animated, during their lifetime, by a breath or soul which ran in their veins along with their blood, and served to move their limbs; the man, therefore, who drank blood or ate bleeding flesh assimilated thereby the soul which inhered in it. After death the fate of this soul was similar to that ascribed to the spirits of the departed in Egypt and Chaldæa. The inhabitants of the ancient world were always accustomed to regard the surviving element in man as something restless and unhappy—a weak and pitiable double, doomed to hopeless destruction if deprived of the succour of the living. They imagined it as taking up its abode near the body wrapped in a half-conscious lethargy; or else as dwelling with the other rephaim (departed spirits) in some dismal and gloomy kingdom, hidden in the bowels of the earth, like the region ruled by the Chaldæan Allât, its doors gaping wide to engulf new arrivals, but allowing none to escape who had once passed the threshold.*
* The expression rephaim means “the feeble”; it was the
epithet applied by the Hebrews to a part of the primitive
races of Palestine.