In the sanctuary of the great Phoenician goddess Astarte at Byblus the practice was different. Here, at the annual mourning for the dead Adonis, the women had to shave their heads, and such of them as refused to do so were bound to prostitute themselves to strangers and to sacrifice to the goddess with the wages of their shame.[123] Though Lucian, who mentions the custom, does not say so, there are some grounds for thinking that the women in question were generally maidens, of whom this act of devotion was required as a preliminary to marriage.[124] In any case, it is clear that the goddess accepted the sacrifice of chastity as a substitute for the sacrifice of hair.[125] Why? By many people, as we shall afterwards see, the hair is regarded as in a special sense the seat of strength; and at puberty it might well be thought to contain a double portion of vital energy, since at that season it is the outward sign and manifestation of the newly-acquired power of reproducing the species. For that reason, we may suppose, the beard rather than the hair of the head is offered by males on this occasion. Thus the substitution permitted at Byblus becomes intelligible: the women gave of their fecundity to the goddess, whether they offered their hair or their chastity. But why, it may be asked, should they make such an offering to Astarte, who was herself the great goddess of love and fertility? What need had she to receive fecundity from {p31} her worshippers? Was it not rather for her to bestow it on them? Thus put, the question overlooks an important side of polytheism, perhaps we may say of ancient religion in general. The gods stood as much in need of their worshippers as the worshippers in need of them. The benefits conferred were mutual. If the gods made the earth to bring forth abundantly, the flocks and herds to teem, and the human race to multiply, they expected that a portion of their bounty should be returned to them in the shape of tithe or tribute. On this tithe, indeed, they subsisted, and without it they would starve. Their divine bellies had to be filled, and their divine reproductive energies to be recruited; hence men had to give of their meat and drink to them, and to sacrifice for their benefit what is most manly in man and womanly in woman. Sacrifices of the latter kind have too often been overlooked or misunderstood by the historians of religion. Other examples of them will meet us in the course of our enquiry. At the same time it may well be that the women who offered their hair to Astarte hoped to benefit through the sympathetic connexion which they thus established between themselves and the goddess; they may in fact have expected to fecundate themselves by contact with the divine source of fecundity. And it is probable that a similar motive underlay the sacrifice of chastity as well as the sacrifice of hair.
Hair offered to rivers as sources of fertility.
Delos and Delphi as centres of fertilisation and of fire.
If the sacrifice of hair, especially of hair at puberty, is sometimes intended to strengthen the divine beings to whom it is offered by feeding or fertilising them, we can the better understand, not only the common practice of offering hair to the shadowy dead,[126] but also the Greek usage of shearing it for rivers, as the Arcadian boys of Phigalia did for the stream that runs in the depths of the tremendous woody glen below the city.[127] For next perhaps to rain and sunshine, nothing in nature so obviously contributes to fertilise a country as its rivers. Again, this view may set in a clearer light the custom of the Delian youths and maidens, {p32} who offered their hair on the maidens’ tomb under the olive-tree. For at Delos, as at Delphi, one of Apollo’s many functions was to make the crops grow and to fill the husbandman’s barns; hence at the time of harvest tithe-offerings poured in to him from every side in the form of ripe sheaves, or, what was perhaps still more acceptable, golden models of them, which went by the name of the “golden summer.”[128] The festival at which these first-fruits were dedicated may have been the 6th and 7th of the harvest-month Thargelion, corresponding to the 24th and 25th of May, for these were the birthdays of Artemis and Apollo respectively.[129] In Hesiod’s day the corn-reaping began at the morning rising of the Pleiades, which then answered to our 9th of May,[130] and in Greece the wheat is still ripe about that time.[131] In return for these offerings the god sent out a sacred new fire from both his great sanctuaries at Delos and Delphi, thus radiating from them, as from central suns, the divine blessings of heat and light. A ship brought the new fire every year from Delos to Lemnos, the sacred island of the fire-god Hephaestus, where all fires were put out before its arrival, to be afterwards rekindled at the pure flame.[132] The fetching of the new fire from Delphi to Athens appears to have been a ceremony of great solemnity and pomp. All the chief Athenian magistrates repaired to Delphi for the purpose. The holy fire blazed or smouldered in a sacred {p33} tripod borne on a chariot and tended by a woman who was called the Fire-bearer. Soldiers, both horse and foot, escorted it; magistrates, priests, and heralds accompanied it; and the procession moved to the music of trumpet and fife.[133] We do not know on what occasion the fire was thus solemnly sent from Delphi to Athens, but we may conjecture that it was when the Pythaists at Athens, watching from the hearth of Lightning Zeus, saw lightning flash over Harma on Mount Parnes, for then they sent a sacrifice to Delphi and may have received the fire in return.[134] After the great defeat of the Persians at Plataea, the people of that city extinguished all the fires in the country, deeming them defiled by the presence of the barbarians. Having done so they relit them at a pure new fire fetched by a runner from the altar of the common hearth at Delphi.[135]
The graves of Apollo and Artemis at Delos.
Now the maidens on whose grave the Delian youths and damsels laid their shorn locks before marriage, were said to have died in the island after bringing the harvest offering, wrapt in wheaten straw, from the land of the Hyperboreans in the far north.[136] Thus they were in popular opinion the mythical representatives of those bands of worshippers who bore, year by year, the yellow sheaves with dance and song to Delos. But in fact they had once been much more than this. For an examination of their names, which are commonly given as Hekaerge and Opis, has led modern scholars to conclude, with every appearance of probability, that these maidens were originally mere duplicates of Artemis herself.[137] Perhaps indeed we may {p34} go a step farther. For sometimes one of this pair of Hyperboreans appears as a male, not a female, under the name of the Far-shooter (Hekaergos), which was a common epithet of Apollo.[138] This suggests that the two were originally the heavenly twins themselves, Apollo and Artemis, and that the two graves which were shewn at Delos, one before and the other behind the sanctuary of Artemis, may have been at first the tombs of these great deities, who were thus laid to their rest on the spot where they had been born. As the one grave received offerings of hair, so the other received the ashes of the victims which were burned on the altar.[139] Both sacrifices, if I am right, were designed to strengthen and fertilise the divine powers who made the earth to wave with the golden harvest, and whose mortal remains, like the miracle-working bones of saints in the Middle Ages, brought wealth to their fortunate possessors. Ancient piety was not shocked by the sight of the tomb of a dead god. The grave of Apollo himself was shewn at his other great sanctuary of Delphi,[140] and this perhaps explains its disappearance at Delos. The priests of the rival shrines may have calculated that one tomb sufficed even for a god, and that two might prove a stumbling-block to any but the most robust faith. Acting on this prudent conviction, they may have adjusted their respective claims to the possession of the holy sepulchre {p35} by leaving Apollo to sleep undisturbed at Delphi, while his grave at Delos was dexterously converted into the tomb of a blessed virgin by the easy grammatical change of Hekaergos into Hekaerge.
Hippolytus and Artemis.
Artemis a goddess of the wild life of nature.
Artemis not originally regarded as a virgin.
Artemis a goddess of childbirth.