This résumé of the facts, so far as it has gone, appears to justify the theorem with which it started, that the “Mycenaean” peoples and proto-Hellenes in the second millennium were on the whole, in respect of the morphology of their religion, on the same plane as those of the Euphrates valley; only it appears that theriomorphism played slightly more part in the cults and legends of the West than in those of the Sumerian-Babylonian culture. It is obvious to any student of comparative religion that such general similarity which we have here observed, and which we might observe if we compared early Greece with Vedic India, neither proves nor disproves a theory of borrowing. And so far there seems no occasion for resorting to such a theory, unless the type of the fish-goddess at Phigaleia be considered a reason for supposing Semitic influences here at work and for tracing her ancestry to Derketo of Bambyke. For such transference of cult we might have to invoke the help of Phoenicians, who arrive on the scene too late to help us in the present quest, and who are not likely to have been attracted into the interior of Arcadia.
CHAPTER V.
The Predominance of the Goddess.
The next clue that I propose to follow in our general comparison is the relative prominence of the goddess-cult in the areas that we are surveying. The subject is of importance and interest, partly because it may throw some light on the question of the interdependence of the adjacent religions, partly because it brings into view certain striking facts of religious psychology. A religion without a goddess is liable to differ markedly in tone and colour, and probably in ritual, from those that possess one. Wherever anthropomorphism is allowed free play, the same instinct which evolves the father-god will evolve the mother-goddess; and when the religion is one of the type which Tiele calls “Nature-religions,” one, that is, where ideas reflecting the forces of the natural world lie on the surface of the conception of the divine personality, some of these forces are so naturally regarded as feminine that the evolution of a goddess appears inevitable; and the only world-religions that have rejected this idea are the Judaic, the Islamic, and Protestant Christianity. Now goddess-cult is often found to exercise a powerful influence on the religious emotion; and the religious psychology of a people devoted to it will probably differ from those who eschew it; often it will be likely to engender a peculiar sentiment of tenderness, of sentimentality in an otherwise austere and repellent religious system; and the clinging entreaty of the child is heard in the prayers or reflected in the ritual; and just as the mother frequently stands between the children and the father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world; such at times was Athena for the Athenians; such is the Virgin for Mediterranean Christendom.
Or the goddess may be more merciless than any god, more delighting in bloodshed, more savage in resisting progress: such often was Artemis for the Greeks, such is Kala at this moment in India, a dangerous and living force that threatens our rule. Again, the goddess may encourage purity in the sexual relations; this was the potential value of the ideal of Artemis in Greece, and perhaps the actual value of Mariolatry in the Middle Ages. Or the goddess-cult may be the source of what to us appears gross licentiousness, as was the case in Babylon and some parts of Asia Minor. This discordance in the character of goddess-cults may reflect the diversity of the masculine feeling towards women, and also to some extent the position of women at different stages of culture in the family and in the State. The whole subject has many fascinating aspects, which relevance prevents me presenting in detail. I have considered elsewhere the sociologic questions involved in goddess-cult;[82.1] and I must limit my attention here to its value as ethnic evidence.
In Mesopotamia the phenomenon presents itself at the very earliest period of which we have record. The monument already described[83.1] on which the goddess Nini is presenting captives to the King Annabanini, attests the prevalence of goddess-cult in the third millennium; and Tiele supposes—without, I think, sufficient evidence—that it was stronger in the Sumerian than in the Semitic period. At all events, the conquering Semites may have found the cult of goddesses well developed in the land; and in all probability they brought at least one of their own with them, namely, Ishtar, whose name has its phonetic equivalents in Semitic Anatolia. Also at least by the second millennium B.C., the Babylonian pantheon was organised after the type of the human family to this extent, that each male divinity has his female consort; and it would not help us now to consider the theorem put out by Jeremias and others that the various Babylonian goddesses are all emanations and varieties of one original All-mother. Only the mighty Ishtar remains for the most part aloof from the marriage system, and her power transcends that of the other goddesses. Originally the chief goddess of the Sumerian Erech, she was raised by the Assyrians to the highest position next to their national god Asshur;[83.2] and for them she is the great divinity of war, who, armed with bow, quiver, and sword, orders the battle-ranks. In a famous hymn,[83.3] perhaps the most fervent and moving of all the Babylonian collection, she seems exalted to a supreme place above all other divinities; another[83.4] displays the same ecstasy in adoration of the goddess Belit, imputing omnipotence to her, as one to whom the very gods offer prayers. The same idea may be expressed in a difficult phrase in a hymn to Nebo[84.1] which contains his dialogue with Assurbanipal: “Nebo, who has grasped the feet of the divine goddess, Queen of Nineveh,” the goddess who came to be regarded as Ishtar.
From such isolated indications we might conclude that the Babylonian-Assyrian religion was more devoted to the goddess than to the god. We should certainly be wrong, as a more critical and wider survey of the facts, so far as they are at present accessible, would convince us. These hymns imputing supreme omnipotence to the goddess, whether Ishtar or another, may be merely examples of that tendency very marked in the Babylonian liturgies, to exalt the particular divinity to whom worship is at that moment being paid above all others. The ecstatic poet is always contradicting himself. To the omnipotent Belit, in the last-mentioned hymn, a phrase is attached which Zimmern interprets as “she who carries out the commands of Bel,” as if after all she were only a vicegerent. In the beautiful prayer to Ishtar proffered by the Assyrian King Asurnasirabal (18th cent. B.C.) he implores her to intercede for him, “the Priest-King, thy favourite… with Thy beloved the Father of the gods.”[84.2] The beloved wife naturally plays the Madonna part of the intercessor; thus Sanherib prays that Ninlil “the consort of Ashur, the mother of the great gods, may daily speak a favourable word for Sanherib, the king of Assyria, before Ashur.”[84.3] But the intercessor is not supreme; and in spite of the great power of Ishtar and the fervent devotion she aroused, the state-pantheon is predominantly masculine.
Nor can we, looking at the ancient records of the other Semitic peoples, which are often too scanty to dogmatise about, safely speak of the supremacy of the goddess in any Semitic community, except in Sidon. All that we find everywhere, except among the Israelites, is a goddess by the side of a god. According to Weber, in his treatise, “Arabien vor dem Islam,”[85.1] the aboriginal god of all the Semites when they were in the nomadic condition was the moon-god; and the male divinity is nowhere found to be displaced. He is prominent among the polytheistic Arabs under the name Athtar.[85.2] Some of the Arab deities in North Arabia are revealed to us in an inscription dating probably from the fifth century B.C., which mentions the gods Salm, Sangala, Asira, and of these Salm was evidently a war-god, as he is represented on a relief with a spear.[85.3]
The Aramaic inscriptions only reveal the goddess Ishtar by the side of many powerful gods such as Ramman, Adad the god of storms, Shamash the sun-god, Reshef the god of lightning and war, Baal-charran the Lord of Harran.[85.4] An eighth-century Aramaic inscription found at Sinjerli in North Syria, written in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III., mentions no goddess, but regards the kings as under the protection of Hadad, Elreshef, and Shamash.[85.5] Even in Canaan and Phoenicia we have no reason to say that Astarte rose above Baal; such an epithet as “the Face of Baal” appears to maintain the supremacy of the God. In Moab we have the evidence of the Mesha stone, which mentions the divine pair Ashtor-Chemosh, and in Numbers[86.1] the Moabites are called the people of Chemosh. But we have Phoenician inscriptions of the period of Persian supremacy in which the king of Byblos, Jachumelek, speaks of himself as raised to the kingdom by the Baalat, the queen-goddess of that state; and he prays to her that the queen may give him favour in the eyes of the gods and in the eyes of the people of his land.[86.2] Astarte was par excellence the city-goddess of Sidon, and on the later Imperial coinage we see her image drawn in a car. Two representations of her have been found, in one of which she is seated in front of the king,[86.3] the other shows her embracing him.[86.4] King Tabnit of Sidon, whose sarcophagus is in the Museum of Constantinople, styles himself “priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians.”[86.5] But in the other Phoenician settlements, such as Tyre, Cyprus, and Carthage, the memorials of the male divinity, whether Baal, Baal Samin, Baal Ammon, Reshef Mikal, Esmun-Melqart, are at least as conspicuous. It is likely that at certain places in the Mediterranean the Semites were touched by the influences of the aboriginal Aegean goddess’s cult; this may well have been the case at Sidon, and still more probably at Askalon, and it may have penetrated as far as Bambyke.
Speaking generally, however, we may conclude that among the early Semites the male divinity was dominant. And if we could believe that this is a reflection in their theology of the patriarchal system in society, let us observe that the earliest Babylonian evidence proves that the patriarchal type of family was dominant in Babylonia in the third millennium.
Passing over to the non-Semitic group of Anatolian cults, and considering first the Hittite, we have ample evidence in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui of the importance of the goddess; and it may well be, as Dr. Frazer has conjectured, that that monument, on which we see the great god borne on the shoulders of his worshippers to meet the goddess on the lion, gives us the scene of a Holy marriage.[87.1] We find the male and female divinity united in a common worship on a relief found near Caesarea in the middle of Cappadocia, on the left side of which is depicted a warrior-god standing before a pillar-shaped altar, while a man in the guise of a warrior is pouring a libation before him; on the right is a similar scene, making libation before a seated goddess, on whose altar a bird is seated.[87.2] Besides this, we have another type of goddess shown us on a Hittite votive-relief, on which is carved a large seated female figure with a child on her knees; we may surely interpret this as a θεὰ κουροτρόφος.[87.3] Again, on two of the reliefs at Euzuk we find a seated goddess holding a goblet and approached with prayers, libations, and other offerings by priest and priestess,[87.4] and we may venture to add to this list of Hittite types the mysterious veiled goddess found by Von Oppenheim at Tel-Halaf in Mesopotamia on the Chabur, a branch of Euphrates, with an inscription containing the name Asshur, a work which, on the evidence of other cuneiform inscriptions found on the site, he would date near to 900 B.C.[88.1] But this evidence in no way amounts to any proof or affords any suggestion of the predominance of the goddess—and the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence of the Hittite kings implies that the male and female divinity were linked in an equal union in the Hittite religion. The text of the treaty between Rameses II. and the Kheta (circ. 1290 B.C.) includes various sun-gods, Sutekh, the Egyptian name for the Hittite war-god, and Antheret (possibly a form of the name Astoret), and other goddesses called “the Queen of Heaven, the Mistress of the Soil, the Mistress of Mountains.”[88.2] Can we draw any conclusions from that extraordinary monument from Fassirlir[88.3] on the borders of Lycaonia and Pisidia, representing a young god in a high cap that suggests Hittite fashion, standing on the neck of a stooping goddess at whose side are two lions? This might seem a naïve indication of male supremacy; but the sex of the supporting figure does not seem clear.[88.4]