In the other ancient Semitic communities we find the same phenomenon, a prevailing anthropomorphism with some slight admixture of theriomorphic idea. At Bambyke, the later Hierapolis, we have the record and tradition of Atargatis-Derketo, of human and fish-form combined. In the cult of Esmun in Phoenicia, Baudissin[57.2] suspects the incarnation of the god in a snake, which brought about his later identification with Asklepios, and he suggests that the bronze serpent that healed the Israelites in the desert was borrowed from a Canaanite idol of a healing snake. The Astarte-images found in prehistoric Palestine are mainly of human type, but one gives her the curving horns of a ram, and a rude bronze was found at Tel Zakariya of an amphibious goddess with human head and the tail of a fish.[57.3] Something real underlies the statement of Sanchuniathon, quoted by Eusebios, that Astarte placed on her own head the head of a bull.[58.1]
But these are exceptional phenomena; and as the Hellenes in the later period were usually able to identify the leading Semitic deities with their own, we may see in this another proof that the Western and Eastern religions were nearly on the same plane as regards their perception of divine personality.
Only, we discern signs in Canaan as in Mesopotamia, that the anthropomorphism is, as I have called it, unstable; for not only can the divinity be imagined as embodied in other forms than the human, but the demarcations of individuality tend at certain points to fall away: the most curious instance of this is that the female divinity seems at times to have been almost absorbed in the god. We must, however, distinguish here between what is real belief and what is mere theologic phrasing. In a hymn of praise to Ishtar, composed for the King Ashurbanapal, the equality of the goddess with the great Assyrian god Asshur is quaintly expressed by the phrase, “like Ashur, she wears a beard”; but Jastrow[58.2] protests against the inference that the goddess was therefore really regarded as male in the Mesopotamian religion. And indeed this is probably only a fantastic expression of the idea that Ishtar is the compeer in power of the god, and has much of the masculine temperament. Even in the full vogue of an anthropomorphic religion which insists on the distinctions of sex, a mystical religious thinker could rise to the idea that the divinity might assume the powers of both natures, an idea of which we find a glimpse in the later Greek and Greek-Egyptian theosophy. Thus a Sumerian hymn to Enlil characterises him as “Lord of winds, father and mother who creates himself”;[59.1] and a well-known hymn to Sin speaks of him as “Maternal Body that brings everything to birth,” and in the next line as “Compassionate, gracious father.”[59.2]
The close approximation of the goddess to the god is more clearly discernible in the Canaanite religion. On the Moabite Mesha stone, Ashtar-Chemosh appears as a double divinity; and one of the earlier Carthaginian inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte.[59.3] Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmounazar of Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal, which signifies Astarte the Face of Baal; and in the Carthaginian inscriptions the same designation occurs for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as expressing the dogma that the goddess is an emanation of the god, but Dr. Langdon would explain it as arising from the close opposition of the two statues face to face, Astart-Shem-Baal merely meaning, then, “She who fronts Baal.” Whichever interpretation be correct, such close assimilation of the pair might evolve here and there the concept of a bisexual divinity. Unless the evidence of the classical writers is false, it did so at a later period under Phoenician influences in Cyprus. Macrobius tells us that there was in that island a statue of a bearded deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual, and he quotes Philochoros as witness to the fact, and to the curious phenomenon in the ritual in which the men wore female dress and the women male. This explains Catullus’ phrase “duplex Amathusia” of the bisexual goddess. Servius and the Christian fathers repeat the statement, and Joannes Lydus asserts that the Pamphylians at one time worshipped a bearded Aphrodite;[60.1] if we trust his authority, we might explain the fact as due to late Semitic influence, which is somewhat attested by inscriptions on the coinage of Pamphylia under the Persian domination.[60.2] But, at the most, we can only regard this cult as a late phenomenon, a local eccentricity, and a morbid development of a certain vague idea that was working sporadically in the old Semitic religion. We have no right to assert, as some have occasionally ventured, that the Semitic peoples generally accepted the dogma of a bisexual divinity.
Turning now to the other great area of culture that lay between Mesopotamia and the coast, that of the Hittite kingdoms, we find that the Hittite deity is usually presented in human form. On the great relief of Boghaz-Keui, the distinctions of the human family appear in the divine forms, in whom we may recognise the father god, the mother goddess with her young son, or it may be, as Dr. Frazer suggests, with her young lover. And the other Hittite representations of divinity to which I have referred above are of purely human form, and so also are the small Hittite bronze idols in the Ashmolean Museum. Nevertheless here, as in Mesopotamia, the theriomorphic fancy was active at the same time. On the relief at Boghaz-Keui, nearest to the innermost shrine, the Holy of Holies, is an idol of human visage with a body composed of a bizarre arrangement of lion-forms; and in the procession near to the main deities we note a strange representation of two bulls in mitred caps of Hittite fashion, and to these mystic beasts we may apply the name theanthropic, which Robertson Smith suggested for the sacrificial animal that was half-divine, half-human. And clearer evidence still is afforded by another relief found not far from this site at the palace of Euiuk, where a bull is represented on a pedestal with worshippers approaching.[61.1] He is not here the sacrificial animal, for he and the altar before him are on a higher plane, while the priest and priestess below are raising their hands to him as if in adoration, and are leading rams evidently as victims to the bull-god. We may be sure, then, that there was some close association of the Hittite divinity with the bull, as there was with the lions upon which both god and goddess are standing; and this is further illustrated by the horns that adorn the conical cap of the god at Ibriz,[61.2] to whom the grapes and corn were consecrated.
Again, the relief on the gate at Sinjerli[61.3] affords us another clear example of a divinity only partly anthropomorphic: a god with the body of a man and the head of a lion; as he bears a hunting weapon in one hand and a hare in the other, and on each shoulder a bird is sitting, we may regard him as a deity of the chase. Finally, from certain cuneiform texts found at Boghaz-Keui, and recently published and interpreted by Professor Sayce,[61.4] we gather that the eagle, probably the double-headed eagle which appears as an ensign on Hittite monuments, was deified; for we appear to have a reference to “the house” or temple “of the eagle” (Bit Id Khu), and this fact may help to explain the figure of a man’s body with a bird’s head on a relief of Sinjerli.[62.1]
As regards the test, then, that we are at present applying, it seems that the Hittite and the Mesopotamian religions were more or less on the same plane, though we may suspect that theriolatry was stronger in the former. It is also important for our purpose to register in passing the clear proof of certain religious approximations, probably in the second millennium B.C., between the Hittites and the Assyrian-Babylonian kingdom. The Hittite god Teshup, with the double-headed hammer or axe and the forked lightning in his hand, is of close kin and similar in type to the Canaanite, Syrian, and Babylonian Ramman-Adad, the god of storms.[62.2] But the evidence does not yet seem to me to make it clear which people or group of peoples was in this case the borrower, which the lender. And the same doubt arises in respect of the striking art-type of the divinity standing on the lion; we find it in the early Hittite monuments, such as the Boghaz-Keui sculptured slabs; and again on the relief of Gargamich, on which is a winged male deity standing on a lion and a priest behind him, also on a lion;[62.3] and later among the Tarsos representations of the Hittite Sandon: it was in vogue at the Syrian Bambyke and at Babylon. The assumption of Perrot[62.4] is that it was of Babylonian origin, but the art-chronology does not seem to speak decisively in this matter. It is not necessary here to prejudge this difficult problem: it does not directly affect our present question, as the type of the goddess with lions comes into Hellas only at a later period. As regards the other Anatolian peoples who came into close contact with the Hellenes, we may find abiding influences of certain Hittite religious ideas and motives of religious art. We may admit that the lion-borne goddess of Boghaz-Keui is the prototype of Kybele, even the crenelated headdress that she wears suggesting the turreted diadem of the later goddess: it is likely that the ancient type of Teshup, the weather-god with hammer or axe and the lightning, survived in Commagene in the cult-figure that was afterwards interpreted as Jupiter Dolichenus: and it may have influenced the ideas about the thunder-god in Pontus, as a primitive relief of a god brandishing a thunderbolt and holding a shield has been found near Amasia.[63.1] Speaking generally, we must pronounce the native pre-Hellenic religious art of the Asia Minor littoral, of Phrygia, Lydia, Caria, anthropomorphic, so far as it tried at all to embody the imagined form of the divinity. The record is generally blurred by the later Hellenic influences. But we have at least in Phrygia rude images of the pre-Hellenic Cybele; the intention of these is anthropomorphic, and in the rough outline of the goddess’s form as hewn out of the rock of Sipylos above Smyrna, the Hellenes could discern their sorrowing Niobe. Where the anthropomorphism fails, as in the Phrygian monument, which shows Cybele seated with a phiale and human-shaped in other respects, but with a head fashioned like “the round capital of a pillar,”[64.1] the influence of the aniconic fetich may be the cause. At any rate, we have no clear trace of theriomorphism either in the legend nor in the monuments of the great mother, the Kybele of Phrygia, or the Mā of Cappadocia. The power of the mountain-goddess was incarnate in the lions, but we have no ground for saying that she herself was ever worshipped as a lion.
We turn at last to the Minoan-Mycenaean and proto-Hellenic periods; for our present purpose the two cannot well be kept apart, as much of the evidence concerning the former is derived from records of myths and religious customs that were in vogue in the later period. Our first glimpse of the Minoan religion, which Sir Arthur Evans more than any one else has revealed to us,[64.2] gave us the impression of an aniconic worship that had for its sacred “agalmata” such fetich objects as the sacred pillar or double-headed axe, but which did not express its actual imagination of its divinities in any art-type. If this were so, we should not be able to answer the question how far the Minoan religion was purely anthropomorphic until we have found the interpretation of Minoan writing. But our store of monuments has been much enriched by later discoveries in the Palace of Knossos, and in one of its private chapels in which the Cross was the central sacred emblem, Sir Arthur Evans found the interesting figure of the snake-goddess—purely human, but holding snakes in her hands and girdled with snakes, while before her stands a votary brandishing a snake:[65.1] again, a Minoan signet-ring published by him[65.2] revealed the great mountain-goddess herself on the summit of a peak flanked by lions and holding a spear. These may be actual reproductions of cult-images; and many other gems and other works have now been published by him and others proving that the people who belonged to this great Aegean culture of the second millennium habitually conceived of their gods in human form, even if they did not as a rule erect their idols in their temples. Thus on a gem which shows us an act of worship performed by a female votary before a sacred pillar, a human-shaped god with rays round his head and holding a spear is hovering in the air above it;[65.3] and on the great sarcophagus of Praisos we have on the one side a complex scene of ritual, conspicuous for the absence of any idol or eikon of the divinity, and at the other end a human form of god, or it may be hero, standing as if he had just come forth from his shrine or heroön.[65.4] In fact, the Minoan-Mycenaean religious monuments have revealed to us at least three personages, anthropomorphically conceived, of the popular religion of the period that we may call pre-Hellenic: a great goddess, often represented as throned, with fruits and emblems of vegetation around her, or as standing on a mountain and associated with lions; a god who is sometimes conversing with her or is descending from the sky armed with spear and shield,[65.5] and sometimes rayed; thirdly, the goddess with the snake as her familiar. To this extent, then, the Minoan-Mycenaean peoples were on the same plane of religion as those of Mesopotamia: and the record of the anthropomorphic divinity can be traced in the Aegean area back to the fourth millennium B.C. by the nude figures in stone of a goddess of fecundity with arms pressed across her breasts, a type belonging to the Neolithic period.
In passing, let us observe that neither the earliest prehistoric art of the Mediterranean nor the great religious types of the Minoan divinities recall the art style of Mesopotamia.
But this developed anthropomorphism of the early Aegean civilisation is not the whole story. Modern research has accumulated evidence that seems to point to a theriomorphic religion in Crete and in Mycenaean Greece which has been supposed by some to have preceded the former in order of time and in the logical process of evolution, and which at any rate survived by the side of it. Traces of the same phenomenon have been noted in the Hittite area, and more faintly in the valley of the Euphrates. The first modern writer who proclaimed with emphasis the theriomorphic elements in the prehistoric religions of Greece was Mr. A. Lang in his Custom and Myth, connecting it with a theory of totemism that does not concern us here. Afterwards, a systematic treatment of the problem in the light of the monuments of the Cretan and Mycenaean periods was presented by Mr. Cook in a paper published in the Hellenic Journal of 1894 on “Animal Worship in the Mycenaean Age”; and again in 1895 by an essay on “The Bee in Greek Mythology”: a very full collection of the materials, with some exposition of important religious theory, will be found in De Visser’s treatise, De Graecorum Diis non referentibus speciem humanam (1900). Miss J. Harrison has worked further along the same lines, and has published some special results in her paper read before the Congress of the History of Religions, 1908, and published in its Transactions, on “Bird and Pillar Worship in relation to Ouranian Divinities.”