Fig. 408.—Bronze statuette, Aust-on-Severn, Gloucs.
From A Guide to the Antiquities of the Bronze Age (B.M.).
According to an Assyrian hymn, Istar, the immaculate great Star, the “Lady Ruler of the Host of Heaven,” the “Lady of Ladies,” “Goddess without peer,” who shaped the lives of all mankind was the “Stately world-Queen sov’ran of the Sky”.
Adored art thou in every sacred place,
In temples, holy dwellings, and in shrines.
Where is thy name not lauded? Where thy will
Unheeded, and thy images not made?[750]
In the caves or “fetish shrines” of Crete have been found rude figurines of the Mother and the Child, and it is probable that the pathetically crude bronze statuettes here illustrated represent the austere wielder of the wand of doom. Fig. 407 comes from Iberia where it was discovered in the vicinity of what was undoubtedly a shrine near the pass over the Sierra Morena at Despena Perros: Fig. 408 comes from the English village of Aust-on-Severn. The place-name Aust appears in Domesday as Austreclive, and the authorities suppose it to have meant “not East as often thought, but the Roman Augusta”: I doubt whether any Roman Augusta ever troubled to claim a mere cleeve, and it is more probable that Austreclive was a cleft or pass sacred to the austere Austre. There is an Austrey at Atherstone, an Austerfield at Bawtry, and an “Austrells” at Aldridge: this latter, which may be connoted with the Oyster Hills round Verulam, the authorities assume to have meant “Austerhill, hill of the hearth, forge or furnace”. That Istar was the mighty Hammer Smith is probable, for the archaic hymnist writes:—
I thee adore—
The gift of strength is thine for thou art strong.