Cinyras beloved by Aphrodite. Pygmalion and Aphrodite. The Phoenician kings of Cyprus or their sons appear to have been hereditary lovers of the goddess. Sacred marriage of the kings of Paphos. Sons and daughters, fathers and mothers of a god.
Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite [pg 049] beauty[150] and to have been wooed by Aphrodite herself.[151] Thus it would appear, as scholars have already observed,[152] that Cinyras was in a sense a duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable goddess also lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of Aphrodite for two members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly be dissociated from the corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, the Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed.[153] When we consider that Pygmalion was the father-in-law of Cinyras, that the son of Cinyras was Adonis, and that all three, in successive generations, are said to have been concerned in a love-intrigue with Aphrodite, we can hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician kings of Paphos, or their sons, regularly claimed to be not merely the priests of the goddess[154] but also her lovers, in other words, that in their official capacity they personated Adonis. At all events Adonis is said to have reigned in Cyprus,[155] and it appears to be certain that the title of Adonis was regularly borne by the sons of all the Phoenician kings of the island.[156] It is true that the title strictly signified no more than “lord”; yet the legends which connect these Cyprian princes with the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed the [pg 050] divine nature as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story of Pygmalion points to a ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the king wedded the image of Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that was so, the tale was in a sense true, not of a single man only, but of a whole series of men, and it would be all the more likely to be told of Pygmalion, if that was a common name of Semitic kings in general, and of Cyprian kings in particular. Pygmalion, at all events, is known as the name of the famous king of Tyre from whom his sister Dido fled;[157] and a king of Citium and Idalium in Cyprus, who reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the Greeks corrupted into Pygmalion.[158] Further, it deserves to be noted that the names Pygmalion and Astarte occur together in a Punic inscription on a gold medallion which was found in a grave at Carthage; the characters of the inscription are of the earliest type.[159] As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to have been founded by King Cinyras and observed by his daughters,[160] we may surmise that the kings of Paphos played the part of the divine bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the form of marriage with a statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each of them had to mate with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who played Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by the Christian fathers that the Aphrodite worshipped [pg 051] by Cinyras was a common whore.[161] The fruit of their union would rank as sons and daughters of the deity, and would in time become the parents of gods and goddesses, like their fathers and mothers before them. In this manner Paphos, and perhaps all sanctuaries of the great Asiatic goddess where sacred prostitution was practised, might be well stocked with human deities, the offspring of the divine king by his wives, concubines, and temple harlots. Any one of these might probably succeed his father on the throne[162] or be sacrificed in his stead whenever stress of war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes did,[163] for the death of a royal victim. Such a tax, levied occasionally on the king's numerous progeny for the good of the country, would neither extinguish the divine stock nor break the father's heart, who divided his paternal affection among so many. At all events, if, as there seems reason to believe, Semitic kings were often regarded at the same time as hereditary deities, it is easy to understand the frequency of Semitic personal names which imply that the bearers of them were the sons or daughters, the brothers or sisters, the fathers or mothers of a god, and we need not resort to the shifts employed by some scholars to evade the plain sense of the words.[164] This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel [pg 052] Egyptian usage; for in Egypt, where the kings were worshipped as divine,[165] the queen was called “the wife of the god” or “the mother of the god,”[166] and the title “father of the god” was borne not only by the king's real father but also by his father-in-law.[167] Similarly, perhaps, among the Semites any man who sent his daughter to swell the royal harem may have been allowed to call himself “the father of the god.”
Cinyras, like King David, a harper. The use of music as a means of prophetic inspiration among the Hebrews.
If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name of Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras is clearly connected with the Greek cinyra, “a lyre,” which in its turn comes from the Semitic kinnor, “a lyre,” the very word applied to the instrument on which David played before Saul.[168] We shall probably not err in assuming that at Paphos as at Jerusalem the music of the lyre or harp was not a mere pastime designed to while away an idle hour, but formed part of the service of religion, the moving influence of its melodies being perhaps set down, like the effect of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity. Certainly at Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the music of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals;[169] and it appears that the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on some such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took for immediate converse with the divinity.[170] Thus we read of a band of prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel, a pipe, and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went.[171] Again, when the united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing the wilderness of Moab in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water for [pg 053] three days, and were like to die of thirst, they and the beasts of burden. In this emergency the prophet Elisha, who was with the army, called for a minstrel and bade him play. Under the influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the water that had drained down into them underground from the desolate, forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet's success in striking water in the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers, though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he rendered another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from their lairs among the rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected in the water, and taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an omen of the blood, of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack the camp and were defeated with great slaughter.[172]
The influence of music on religion.
Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from the Lord vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the harp, which soothed and composed his troubled thoughts,[173] may well have seemed to the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his good angel whispering peace. Even in our own day a great religious writer, himself deeply sensitive to the witchery of music, has said that musical notes, with all their power to fire the blood and melt the heart, cannot be mere empty sounds and nothing more; no, they have escaped from some higher sphere, they are outpourings of eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the Magnificat of saints.[174] It is thus that the rude imaginings of primitive man are transfigured and his feeble lispings echoed with a rolling reverberation in the musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence of music on the development [pg 054] of religion is a subject which would repay a sympathetic study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to express the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply the fabric of belief to which at first sight it seems only to minister. The musician has done his part as well as the prophet and the thinker in the making of religion. Every faith has its appropriate music, and the difference between the creeds might almost be expressed in musical notation. The interval, for example, which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the stately ritual of the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs the dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies of Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the difference of the music.[175]
The function of string music in Greek and Semitic ritual.
The legend which made Apollo the friend of Cinyras[176] may be based on a belief in their common devotion to the lyre. But what function, we may ask, did string music perform in the Greek and the Semitic ritual? Did it serve to rouse the human mouthpiece of the god to prophetic ecstasy? or did it merely ban goblins and demons from the holy places and the holy service, drawing as it were around the worshippers a magic circle within which no evil thing might intrude? In short, did it aim at summoning good or banishing evil spirits? was its object inspiration or exorcism? The examples drawn from the lives or legends of Elisha and David prove that with the Hebrews the music of the lyre might be used for either purpose; for while Elisha employed it to tune himself to the prophetic pitch, David resorted to it for the sake of exorcising the foul fiend from Saul. With the Greeks, on the other hand, in historical times, it does not appear that string music served as a means of inducing the condition of trance or ecstasy in the human mouthpieces of Apollo and the other oracular gods; on the contrary, its sobering and composing influence, as contrasted with the exciting influence of flute music, is the aspect which chiefly impressed [pg 055] the Greek mind.[177] The religious or, at all events, the superstitious man might naturally ascribe the mental composure wrought by grave, sweet music to a riddance of evil spirits, in short to exorcism; and in harmony with this view, Pindar, speaking of the lyre, says that all things hateful to Zeus in earth and sea tremble at the sound of music.[178] Yet the association of the lyre with the legendary prophet Orpheus as well as with the oracular god Apollo seems to hint that in early days its strains may have been employed by the Greeks, as they certainly were by the Hebrews, to bring on that state of mental exaltation in which the thick-coming fancies of the visionary are regarded as divine communications.[179] Which of these two functions of music, the positive or the negative, the inspiring or the protective, predominated in the religion of Adonis we cannot say; perhaps the two were not clearly distinguished in the minds of his worshippers.
Traditions as to the death of Cinyras.
A constant feature in the myth of Adonis was his premature and violent death. If, then, the kings of Paphos regularly personated Adonis, we must ask whether they imitated their divine prototype in death as in life. Tradition varied as to the end of Cinyras. Some thought that he slew himself on discovering his incest with his daughter;[180] others alleged that, like Marsyas, he was defeated by Apollo in a musical contest and put to death by the victor.[181] Yet he cannot strictly be said to have perished in the flower of his youth if he lived, as Anacreon averred, to the ripe age of one hundred and sixty.[182] If we must choose between the two stories, it is perhaps more likely that he died a violent death than that he survived to an age which surpassed that of [pg 056] Thomas Parr by eight years,[183] though it fell far short of the antediluvian standard. The life of eminent men in remote ages is exceedingly elastic and may be lengthened or shortened, in the interests of history, at the taste and fancy of the historian.