So far as we have gone our main question must be still regarded as an open one. We may now compare the particular conceptions concerning divinity that prevailed at the period to which our search is limited, in the valley of the Euphrates, and in the other communities that are in our route of comparison. Many striking points of general similarity will present themselves, upon which we must not lay too much weight for our argument, since all polytheisms possess a certain family likeness: of more importance will be certain strikingly dissimilar features, if we find any.
First, in regard to the general concepts or characters of the divinities, the same formula seems mainly applicable to the Mesopotamian as to the Hellenic facts: the leading divinities have usually some distinct association with the world of nature; but the natural phenomenon or elemental fact that may be there in the background of their personality, becomes overlaid and obscured by the complex ethical and mental traits that are evolved. Therefore the mere nature-fact rarely explains the fully-developed god, either of Babylon or of Hellas. A few salient examples will make this clear. It is only perhaps Shamash the sun-god of Sippar, and Sin the moon-god of Ur, that retain their nature-significance rarely obscured. The hymn to Sin in Dr. Langdon’s collection reveals an intelligible lunar imagery throughout; but in another published by Zimmern,[100.1] his personality becomes more spiritual and mystical; he is at once “the mother-body who bears all life, and the pitiful gracious father,” the divinity who has created the land and founded temples; under the Assyrian régime he seems to have become a god of war.[100.2] Shamash even surpasses him in grandeur and religious value, so far as we can judge from the documents; but his whole ethical and spiritual character, clearly articulated as it is, can be logically evolved from his solar. But in studying the characters of Marduk and Nergal, for instance, we feel that the physical theories of their origin help us but little, and are at times self-contradictory; and it might be well for Assyriologists to take note of the confusion and darkness that similar theories have spread in this domain of Hellenic study. Thus we are told that the Sun in the old Sumerian-Babylonian system gave birth to various special personalities, representing various aspects of him: Marduk is the spring-sun, rejoicing in his strength, although his connection with Shamash does not seem specially close; yet Jeremias, who expresses this opinion,[100.3] believes also that Marduk is a storm-god, because “his word can shake the sea.” Shall we say, then, that Jahwé is a storm-god “because the voice of the Lord shaketh the cedar-trees”? The phrase is quite innocent if we only mean by it that any and every personal God could send a storm; it becomes of doubtful value if it signifies here that Marduk is an impersonation of the storm. The texts seem sometimes to contradict each other; Ninib, for instance, is regarded by Jeremias[101.1] as the rising sun, on the ground of certain phrases in his hymn of praise; but the concept of him as a storm-god is more salient in the oldest texts, and thus he is pre-eminently a deity of destruction and death, and becomes specially an Assyrian war-god. Does it help us if we imagine him originally as the Storm-Sun, as Jensen would have us? or is it not allowable to suspect that solar terms of religious description became a later Babylonian convention, and that any deity might attract them? Nergal, again, the god of Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar origin, as the god of the midday and destructive sun;[101.2] yet his special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side of the goddess Allatu, and his name is doubtfully interpreted as the Lord of the Great Habitation, and thus he is regarded as a god of disease and death. This did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase, nor a pious Babylonian poet from exalting him as “God of the little ones, he of the benevolent visage.”[101.3] In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he is designated by an ideogram, that almost certainly means “the god of iron.”[101.4] This last fact, if correct, is an illustration of that which a general survey of the Babylonian texts at last impresses upon us: the physical origin of the deity, if he had one, does not often shape and control his whole career; the high god grows into manifold forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, progresses with the life of his people, reflects new aspects of life, altogether independently of any physical idea of him that may have originally prevailed. Adad, the god of storms, becomes a god of prophecy, and is addressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn.[102.1] Ea the god of waters becomes par excellence the god of wisdom, not because waters are wise, but probably because Eridu, the seat of his cult, was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic. As for the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias,[102.2] who is otherwise devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks on the absence of any sign of his nature-origin: his ideogram designates “the prophet,” in his earliest character he is the writer, his symbol is the “stilus” of the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing: he is interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn as “he who openeth the springs and causeth the corn to sprout, he without whom the dykes and canals would run dry.” Surely this interest comes to him, not from the planet Mercury,[102.3] but from his wisdom and his concern with Babylonian civilisation, which depended upon dykes and canals. We are presented here with a progressive polytheism, that is, one of which the divinities show the power of self-development parallel with the self-development of the people.
The question we have just been considering, the physical character of the Babylonian deities in relation to their whole personality, suggests two last reflections. Their gods have a certain relation to the planets, which is preserved even in our modern astronomy. That the early Sumerians worshipped stars is probable,[102.4] as the Sumerian sign for divinity is a star; but that the Sumerian-Babylonian high gods were personal forms of the planets, is denied by leading modern Assyriologists,[103.1] except in the case of the sun and the moon, Shamash and Sin. It was only the Chaldaean astronomic theory that came to regard the various planets in their varying positions as special manifestations of the powers of the different personal gods; and the same planet might be a manifestation, according to its different positions, of different gods: the “star Jupiter at one point is Marduk, at another point Nebo”; this dogma is found on a seventh-century tablet, which declares at the same time that “Mercury” is Nebo.[103.2] This planetary association of the deities is well illustrated by the memorial relief of Asarhaddon found at Sinjerli, and the relief of Maltaija, showing stars crowning their heads;[103.3] but both these are later than the period with which we are here immediately concerned.
Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the old Babylonian religion which may be called nature-worship, any clear worship of the earth regarded as a personal and living being, as the Hellenes regarded Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at once warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste, terrible and merciful, the bright virgin of the sky, Bau, the wife of Ninib, the “amorous lady of heaven,” are certainly not of this character. Still less is Allatu, the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast the lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians conceived the earth as a personal divinity at all, they imagined it as a male divinity. For in the inscriptions of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a Lord of the underworld, meaning our earth as distinct from the heavens: he is hymned as the “lord of the harvest-lands, lord of the grain-fields”[104.1]—he is the “husbandman who tends the fields”; when Enlil is angry, “he sends hunger everywhere.” In another hymn he is thus described: “The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the mountain-storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose foundation is the bright abyss”;[104.2] and again, “Lord, who makest to abound pure oil and nourishing milk;… in the earth Lord of life art thou”; “to give life to the ground thou dost exist.”[104.3] It is evident that Enlil is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid substance; he is rather the god of all the forces and life that move on and in the earth, hence he is “the lord of winds.”[104.4] He is more, then, than the mere equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected to find a Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit, the wife and female double of Enlil or Bel: but in an inscription that is dated as early as 4000 B.C. she is styled “The Queen of Heaven and Earth,”[104.5] and though in a hymn of lamentation addressed to her[104.6] she is described as the goddess “who causeth plants to come forth,” yet the ecstatic and mysticising Babylonian imagination has veiled and clouded her nature-aspect.
This strange religious poetry which had been fermenting for thousands of years, was likely enough to transform past recognition the simple aboriginal fact. It is only the lesser deities, the “Sondergötter” of the Sumerian pantheon, whose nature-functions might remain clear and unchanged: for instance, such a corn-deity as we see on a cylinder, with corn-ears in his hand and corn-stalks springing from his shoulders.[105.1] Even the simple form of Tammuz, the darling of the Sumerian people, has been somewhat blurred by the poetry of passion that for long ages was woven about him. As Zimmern has shown in a recent treatise,[105.2] he was never the chief deity of any Babylonian or Assyrian state, but nevertheless one of great antiquity and power with the Sumerian people, and his cult and story were doubtless spreading westward in the second millennium. In spite of all accretions and the obscurity of his name, which is interpreted to mean “real son of the water-deep,”[105.3] we can still recognise the form of the young god of vegetation who dies in the heat of the summer solstice and descends to the world below, leaving the earth barren till he returns. This idea is expressed by some of his names, “the Lord of the land’s fruitfulness, the Lord of the shepherd’s dwelling, the Lord of the cattle-stall, the God of grain,”[105.4] and by many an allusion to his legend in the hymns, which are the most beautiful and pathetic in the old Sumerian psalmody: “in his manhood in the submerged grain he lay”; “how long still shall the verdure be imprisoned, how long shall the green things be held in bondage?”[105.5] An interesting title found in some of the incantation liturgies is that of “the shepherd,” and like some other vegetation-powers he is at times regarded as the Healer. Though he was not admitted as the compeer of the high gods into the Babylonian or Assyrian pantheon, he may be said to have survived them all, and his name and myth became the inspiration of a great popular religion. No other of that vast fraternity of corn-spirits or vegetation-spirits into which Dr. Frazer has initiated us, has ever had such a career as Tammuz. In one of his hymns he is invoked as “Lord of the world of Death,” because for a time he descended into Hell.[106.1] If this idea had been allowed to germinate and to develop its full potentiality, it might have changed the aspect of Babylonian eschatology. But, as we shall see, the ideas naturally attaching to vegetation, to the kindly and fair life of seeds and plants, were never in Babylonia properly harmonised with those that dominated belief concerning the lower world of the dead. The study of the Tammuz-rites I shall reserve for a later occasion.
We have now to consider the other Anatolian cults from the point of view of nature-worship. The survey need not detain us long as our evidence is less copious. As regards the western Semites, our trustworthy records are in no way so ancient as those that enlighten us concerning Mesopotamia. Philo of Byblos, the interpreter of the Phoenician Sanchuniathon, presents us only with a late picture of the Canaanite religion, that may be marred by their own symbolic interpretations. Because we are told[106.2] that “the Phoenicians and Egyptians were the first to worship the sun and the moon and the stars,”[106.2] or “the first to deify the growths of the earth,”[106.3] we cannot conclude that in the second millennium the religion of the Phoenicians was purely solar or astral, or merely the cult of vegetation-gods. “Baalshamin” means the lord of the heavens, an Aramaic and Phoenician god, and Sanchuniathon explained him as the sun;[107.1] but Robertson Smith gives good reason for the view that the earliest conception of the local Baal was of a deity of the fertilising spring, a local divine owner of a well-watered plot, hence the giver of all life to fruits and cattle.[107.2] Nor are we sure what was the leading “nature-aspect” of the cult of Astarte. The title “Meleket Ashamaim,” “the Queen of the Heavens,” which Ezekiel attaches to her, does not inform us precisely concerning her earliest and original character. From her close association with the Minoan goddess of Cyprus, she was no doubt worshipped as the source of the life of plants and animals and men. Also, it is of some value to bear in mind the later records concerning the worship of Helios at Tyre in the Roman Imperial period, and of Helios and the thunder-god at Palmyra, where Adad-Rimmon, the storm-god who was in power among the western Semites in the earliest period, may have survived till the beginning of Christianity. We may conclude from all this that in the oldest period of the western Semite societies the cult of special nature-deities was a prominent feature of the religion. But even these may already in the second millennium have acquired a complex of personal attributes ethical and spiritual. In the later Carthaginian religion, the personal deities are clearly distinguished from the mere nature-powers, such as the sun, earth, and moon; and this important distinction may have arisen long before the date of the document that proves it.[107.3]
Of the Hittite gods we may say this much at least, that the monuments enable us to recognise the thunder-god with the hammer or axe, and in the striking relief at Ibreez we discern the form of the god of vegetation and crops, holding corn and grapes. The winged disk, carved with other doubtful fetich-emblems above the head of the god who is clasping the priest or king on the Boghaz-Keui relief, is a solar emblem, borrowed probably from Egyptian religious art. And the Hittite sun-god was invoked in the Hittite treaty with Rameses II.[108.1] Whether the mother-goddess was conceived as the personal form of Gaia is doubtful; her clear affinity with Kybele would suggest this, and in the Hittite treaty with Rameses II. mentioned above, the goddess Tesker is called the Mistress of the Mountains, the express title of the Phrygian Mother, and another “the Mistress of the Soil.”[108.2] Yet evidently the Hittite religion is too complex to be regarded as mere nature-worship: the great relief of Boghaz-Keui shows a solemn and elaborate ritual to which doubtless some spiritual concepts were attached.
As regards the original ideas underlying the cults of those other Anatolian peoples who were nearer in geographical position and perhaps in race to the Aegean peoples, we have no explicit ancient records that help us to decide for the second millennium. For some of these various communities the goddess was, as we have seen, the supreme power. The great Phrygian goddess Kybele is the cult-figure of most importance for our purpose, and it is possible to divine her original character with fair certainty.[108.3] In her attributes, functions, and form, we can discern nothing celestial, solar or lunar; she was, and remained to the end, a mother-goddess of the earth, a personal source of and life of fruits, beasts, and man: her favourite haunt was the mountains, and her earliest image that we know, that which the Greeks called Niobe on Mount Sipylos, seems like a human shape emerging from the mountain-side: she loved also the mountain caverns, which were called after her κύβελα; and according to one legend she emerged from the rock Agdos, and hence took the name Agdestis. The myth of her beloved Attis is clear ritual-legend associated with vegetation; and Greek poetry and Greek cult definitely linked her with the Greek Gaia. We gather also from the legend of Attis and other facts that her power descended to the underworld, and the spirits of the dead were gathered to her;[109.1] hence the snake appears as her symbol, carved as an akroterion above her sepulchral shrine, where she is sculptured with her two lions at Arslan Kaya—“the Lion Rock in Phrygia”;[109.2] and her counterpart, the Lydian Mother Hipta, is addressed as χθονίη.[109.3]
In all her aspect and functions she is the double of the great Minoan mother-goddess described already, whose familiar animals are the lion and the serpent, who claims worship from the mountain-top, and whose character is wholly that of a great earth goddess with power doubtless reaching down to the lower world of the dead. Only from Crete we have evidence which is lacking in pre-Aryan Phrygia of the presence of a thunder or sky-god by her side.[109.4]
Turning our attention now to the early Hellenic world, and to that part of its religion which we may call Nature-worship, we discern certain general traits that place it on the same plane in some respects with the Mesopotamian. Certain of the higher deities show their power in certain elemental spheres, Poseidon mainly in the water, Demeter in the land, Zeus in the air. But of none of these is the power wholly limited to that element: and each has acquired, like the high gods of Assyria and Babylon and Jahwé of Israel, a complex anthropomorphic character that cannot be derived, though the old generation of scholars wearily attempted to derive it, from the elemental nature-phenomenon. Again, other leading divinities, such as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, are already in the pre-Homeric period, as far as we can discern, pure real personalities like Nebo and Asshur, having no discoverable nature-significance at all. Besides these higher cults, we discern a vast number of popular local cults of winds, springs, rivers, at first animistically and then anthropomorphically imagined. So in Mesopotamia we find direct worship of canals and the river. Finally, we discern in early Hellas a multitude of special “functional” divinities or heroes, “Sondergötter,” like Eunostos, the hero of the harvest: and it may be possible to find their counterparts in the valley of the Euphrates.[110.1] We have also the nameless groups of divine potencies in Hellas, such as the Πραξιδίκαι, Μειλίχιοι, these being more frequent in the Hellenic than in the Mesopotamian religion, which presents such parallels as the Annunaki and the Igigi, nameless daimones of the lower and upper world: and these in both regions may be regarded as products of animism not yet developed into theism.