We may mark here a difference between Eastern and Western thought in the religious conception of the temple. It was naturally regarded everywhere as sacrosanct, because permeated with the virtue of the divine presence; but Babylonia developed this idea with greater intensity of conviction than the Hellene, and actually deified the temple itself: the King Nabopolassar (circ. 625 B.C.) prays to it in such words as these, “Oh, temple, be gracious to the king thy restorer, and if Marduk enters thee in triumph, report my piety to him.”[225.1] Such exaggeration is not found in Greek religion.[225.2]
As regards the emblem of divinity, the cult-object set up in the shrine to attract and to mark the presence of the deity, the Mesopotamian religion had, as we have seen, already evolved the eikon or image at some period considerably earlier than the second millennium, and the statue of the god or goddess had become an important factor of early ritual: only the emblem of Asshur remained aniconic.[225.3] Of equally early vogue was the image, whether human or theriomorphic, in Egyptian cult. Again, the early Hittite monuments reveal it clearly, though aniconic fetiches appear also on the reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. But it is probable that the Western Semites, and the tribes of Arabia before 1200 B.C., and many of them for centuries after, preferred the aniconic emblem, the “Ashera” or post, or heap of stones or pillar, to the iconic statue; in fact, that temple idolatry in its developed forms as it presents itself in later Mediterranean history was alien to the old and genuine tradition of Semitic public worship. Iconic representations of divinities may indeed be found in Western Semitic regions, and some of these may be of great antiquity; such as the silver statue that Thutmose III. (of the fifteenth century B.C.) carried off from Megiddo and the Lebanon,[226.1] or the “Astarte”-plaques found on the site of Gezer.
But in Semitic communities of the earlier period such objects belonged rather to the private religion, and the public service centred round the sacred pillar or stone, as was the case at Mecca both before and after Islam arose: the evidence for this has been carefully given and estimated by Robertson Smith and Sir Arthur Evans.[226.2]
The same statement holds of many of the non-Semitic peoples of Western Anatolia; in Phrygia, for instance, the earliest emblem of Kybele was the rude pillar or cone-shaped stone, and this survived down to late times in the worship of the Anatolian goddess in some of the Greek cities on the Asiatic coast.
The recent discoveries in the regions of the Minoan and Mycenaean culture reveal the same phenomenon: the cults in this area of the Aegean in the second millennium were in the main aniconic, the favourite emblem being the pillar or tree-trunk, while in ancient Crete the axe and even the cross has been found.[227.1] Where the divinity appears in full human shape, as the snake-goddess in the chapel of the cross, the lion-guarded goddess or the god descending in the air above the pillar on the Minoan seals, these figures cannot, or need not, be interpreted as actual temple-idols. And students of the religion of classical Greece are familiar with the ample evidence of the aniconic tradition in the λίθοι ἀργοί, and the cone-shaped pillars and stocks that served as divine emblems in the later temples of Greece.[227.2]
Now the ethnic question concerning pillar-cult has been critically discussed by Sir Arthur Evans in his treatise mentioned above; and the conclusion at which he arrives, that the striking parallelisms in Semitic Anatolian and Aegean ritual monuments are not to be explained as the result of direct borrowing from one or the other group of peoples, but as the abiding influence of a very early Mediterranean tradition, commends itself as the most reasonable. It is legitimate to maintain that the earliest Hellenes took over much of this aniconic cult from the earlier Minoan and Mycenaean civilisation; but we must not overlook the fact that they also possessed their own, as a tradition derived from Central Europe.[227.3] The most futile hypothesis would be to assume that the early Greeks derived it from Babylon, where it is less in evidence than in any other Semitic community.[227.4]
The iconic impulse whereby the tree-trunk and pillar were gradually supplanted by the fully human statue was beginning to work by the time that the Homeric poems received their present form; for we have in the Iliad[228.1] an undoubted reference to a seated statue of Athena in her temple on the Akropolis of Troy. We see here the working of an instinct that was partly religious, partly, perhaps, aesthetic in its origin. If we are to connect it with foreign influences, Egypt is at least a more “proximate cause” than Babylon.
This comparison of the cult-objects set up in shrines or holy places must take into account the phallic emblem also. This was much in vogue in the worship of Hermes and Dionysos, and was not unknown even in the ritual of Artemis.[228.2] Herodotus maintains that it was adopted by the Hellenes from “the Pelasgians,” but, as I have tried to show elsewhere,[228.3] we cannot attach real value to his induction. It may have descended from an old tradition of European cult, and it was indigenous among other Aryan nations. As regards the Mediterranean races, we find traces of its use in the Samothracian mysteries and in the grave-cult of Phrygia; while some of the records of the Sabazian mysteries suggest that a phallic character attached to them. The Minoan-Mycenaean culture has been regarded as innocent of this, since the phallic emblem does not appear among the monuments yet found; and this opinion is somewhat corroborated by its absence in the ritual of Aphrodite, who may be regarded as a direct descendant of the great Cretan goddess; for only a late and somewhat doubtful text attests the dedication of phalloi to the Cyprian Aphrodite.[229.1] But the evidence from the Phrygian religion, that has many ethnic affinities with Crete, and from such ritual-stories as that of Pasiphae, ought to make us hesitate.
In Semitic ritual the emblem was certainly not commonly in public use, even if it occurred at all; the evidence for it, at present forthcoming, is at least very doubtful; two of the pillars found at Gezer have been supposed to possess phallic attributes;[229.2] but Robertson Smith has well protested against the foolish tendency to interpret sacred pillars generally as phalloi,[229.3] and even regards Lucian’s assertion of the phallic significance of the two sacred pillars, each three hundred feet in height, that flanked the propylaea of the temple at Hierapolis,[229.4] as a mistake suggested to him by the later Hellenic misinterpretation. Other statements of Lucian in that treatise may cause us to believe that a phallic character attached to some part of the ritual of the Syrian goddess; but, if it did, we could not safely regard it as originally Semitic, since so many ethnic strains are mingled in that complex religion.
It is doubtful whether we can recognise the emblem anywhere in the religious monuments of the Hittites, though Perrot would give this interpretation to one of the cult-objects carved on the relief of Boghaz-Keui.[229.5]