Then we must say the same of the peasant-hero “German” whom the modern Bulgarians adore and bewail, of the Russian Yarilo,[262.2] and our own John Barleycorn. And at this point we shall probably fall back on the theory of independent similar developments, and shall believe that peasant religion in different parts of the world is capable of evolving strikingly parallel figures in obedience to the stimulus of similar circumstances and needs.
We have no surety, then, for a belief that Tammuz, or any shadow of Tammuz, was borne to the western shores of the Aegean in the days before Homer. And we know that Adonis, his nearest Anatolian representative, only arrived late in the post-Homeric period. Meantime, whatever view we may hold concerning prehistoric religious commerce between East and West, this vital difference between Mesopotamian and Hellenic religion must be strongly emphasised: Babylonian liturgy is mainly a service of sorrow, and part of that sorrow is for Tammuz; Hellenic worship was mainly cheerful and social, and only in a few chthonian cults is a gloomier tone discernible, nor can we anywhere hear the outbursts of violent and ecstatic grief. In this respect, and in its remoteness from any idea of the death and resurrection of the deity, Hellenic religion was further removed from that of Catholic Europe than was the old Phrygian or the Sumerian.
The Babylonian temple-service was complex and varied, and offers many problems of interest to the comparative student. We gather that a Holy Marriage was part of a religious drama perhaps performed annually; for instance, we find reference to the solemn nuptials of Ninib and Bau, and to the marriage presents given to Bau.[263.1] In every anthropomorphic polytheism, especially when idolatry provides images that could be used for religious drama, this ritual act is likely to occur. It is recorded of the southern Arabians in the days before Islam, an ancient inscription speaking of the marriage ceremony of Athtar.[263.2] It is a marriage of the great God and Goddess that according to the most reasonable interpretation is represented on the Hittite reliefs of Boghaz-Keui. We may conjecture that it was a ceremony of Minoan worship; a Mycenaean signet-ring shows us a seated goddess with a young god standing before her and joining his forearm to hers, while both make a peculiar gesture with their fingers that may indicate troth-plighting;[264.1] also, the later legends and the later ritual commemorating the marriages of Aphrodite and Ariadne may descend from the pre-Hellenic religious tradition. Finally, we have fairly full evidence of the same religious act in purely Hellenic cult. The ἱερὸς γάμος of Zeus and Hera was enacted in many communities with certain traits of primitive custom;[264.2] the nuptials of Kore and the lower-world god might be found in the ceremonies of certain temples;[264.3] while the central scene of the Eleusinia, the greater if not the lesser, included a Holy Marriage.[264.4] The Roman religion, in the original form of which there may have been no marrying or giving in marriage, no family ties or genealogies of divinities, no doubt borrowed its “Orci nuptiae” from the Greek. But for the other cases, there is no need to resort to any theory of borrowing to explain a phenomenon so natural at a certain stage of religion.
Nor is it an important phenomenon, so long as the ceremony was enacted merely by puppets or idols, as in the Boeotian Daidala.[264.5] It only begins to be of higher significance for the history of religious practice and thought, when the part of one of the divinities in this drama is played by a human representative. For not only does this offer indefinite possibilities of exaltation for the mortal, but it may engender the mystic ideal and practice of communion with the divinity through sexual intercourse, which played a great part in Phrygian religion, and left a deep impress on early Christian symbolism. The question whether the Mesopotamian religion presents us with evidence of a “holy marriage” solemnised between a mortal and the divinity must finally involve the more difficult question as to the function and purpose of that strange Mesopotamian institution of temple-prostitutes. But, leaving this latter alone for the moment, we find explicit testimony in Herodotus to the fact with which we are immediately concerned. In describing the great temple of Bel at Babylon,[265.1] he asserts, on the authority of his “Chaldean priests,” that the deity chose as his nightly partner some native woman, who was supposed to pass the night on the couch with him, and who was obliged to abstain from all other intercourse with men; and he compares a similar practice of belief found in the temple of Zeus in Egyptian Thebes, and in the oracular shrine of Apollo at Patara in Lycia. Now Herodotus’ trustworthiness in this matter has been doubted by Assyriologists;[265.2] nevertheless, a phrase used in the code of Hammurabi concerning a holy woman dedicated to temple service, calling her “a wife of Marduk,” seems to give some colour to the Herodotean statement.[265.3] Only, this term might have merely a spiritual-symbolic significance, like the designation of a nun as “the bride of Christ”; for the original Babylonian documents have supplied as yet, so far as I am aware, no evidence of a woman fulfilling the rôle of Belit, the wife of Bel.
As regards the adjacent religions, the idea that a mortal might enter into this mode of communion with the divinity was probably an ancient heritage of the Phrygian religions, for it crops up in various forms. The priest of Attis was himself called Attis, and, therefore, probably had loving intercourse with the goddess, and the later mysteries of Kybele extended this idea and offered to every votary the glory of a mystic marriage;[266.1] it was the unconscious stimulus of an immemorial tradition that prompted the Phrygian heresiarch Montanus to give himself out as the husband of the Virgin Mary.[266.2] It also appears as a fundamental tenet of the Sabazian mystery and of the Hellenistic-Egyptian Hermetic theosophy. The simple ritual-fact, namely, that a woman serves as the bride of the god, could probably be traced far afield through many widely distant peoples. According to Sahagun,[266.3] the human sacrifices of the Mexicans had sometimes the purpose of sending away a woman victim into divine wedlock. In pre-Christian Sweden we find a priestess generally regarded as the wife of the god Freyr, and enjoying considerable power from the connection.[266.4] Similar examples can be quoted from modern savage communities. Therefore if we find the same institution in the Mediterranean, we shall not think it necessary to suppose that it was an import from Babylon or from any Semitic people. As regards the Minoan worship, it is legitimate at least to regard the legend of Pasiphaë and her amour with the bull-god as an unfortunate aetiologic myth distorting the true sense of a ritual in which a mortal woman enjoyed this kind of divine communion, and here again we should mark a religious affinity between Crete and Phrygia. And it is likely that the idea was not unfamiliar to the Hellenes, though the record of it is scanty and uncertain. According to the early Christian fathers, the inspiration of the Pythia of Delphi was due to a corporeal union with Apollo akin at least to—if not identical with—sexual intercourse. Of more value is Herodotus’ definite assertion that the priestess of Patara gained her inspiration by her nuptial union with Apollo. In the rare cases where the cult of a Hellenic god was administered by a priestess we may suspect that a ἱερὸς γάμος was part of the temple-ritual; in the two examples that I have been able to find, the cults of Poseidon at Kalaureia and of Heracles at Thespiai, the priestess must be a maiden, as on this theory would be natural.[267.1] The maiden-priestesses of the Leukippides, the divine brides of the Dioskouroi at Sparta, were themselves called Leukippides; in all probability because they were their mortal representatives in some ceremony of holy marriage.[267.2] But the most salient and explicitly recorded example is the yearly marriage of the Queen-Archon at Athens with Dionysos, the bull-god, in the feast of Anthesteria, the significance of which I have discussed elsewhere.[267.3] It seems that the Queen by uniting her body with the god’s, unites to him the whole Athenian state and secures its prosperity and fruitfulness; this historic fact may also explain the myth of the union of Althaia, Queen of Kalydon, with the same god. Finally, let us observe that nothing in any of these Hellenic records suggests any element of what we should call impurity in the ritual; we are not told that these holy marriages were ever consummated by the priest as the human representative of the god; or that the ceremony involved any real loss of virginity in the maiden-priestess. The marriage could have been consummated symbolically by use of a puppet or image of the deity. We may believe that the rite descends from pre-Homeric antiquity; the ritual which the Queen-Archon performed might naturally have been established at the time of the adoption into Athens of the Dionysiac cult, and there are reasons for dating this event earlier than 1000 B.C.[268.1]
We now come to a very difficult and important question concerning the position of women in the old Mesopotamian temple-ritual. Our first document of value is the code of Hammurabi, in which we find certain social regulations concerning the status of a class of women designated by a name which Winckler translates doubtfully as “God’s-sisters,” regarding it, however, as equivalent to consecrated, while Johns translates it merely as “votary.”[268.2] At least, we have proof of a class of holy women who have certain privileges and are under certain restrictions. They were the daughters of good families dedicated by their fathers to religion; they could inherit property, which was exempt from the burden of army-tax; they could not marry, and were prohibited from setting-up or even entering a wine-shop under penalty of death. It is something to know even as much as this about them, but we would very gladly learn more. Is it to their order that the personage described as “the wife of Marduk”[269.1] belongs, who has been considered above? Is it from among them that the priestesses of Ishtar were chosen, who interpreted the oracles of the goddess?[269.2] It seems clear that a father could dedicate his daughter to any divinity, that their position was honourable, and that they are not to be identified with the temple-prostitutes of Babylon or Erech, who excited the wonder and often the reprobation of the later Greek world. This peculiar order of temple-harlots is also recognised—according to some of the best authorities[269.3]—in Hammurabi’s code, where they are mentioned in the same context with the “consecrated” or the “God-sisters,” and yet are clearly distinct from them; another clause seems to refer to male prostitutes (§ 187). Certain rules are laid down concerning their inheritance of property, and concerning the rearing of their children, if they had any, who might be adopted into private families. Evidently these “Qadishtu” were a permanent institution, and there is no hint of any dishonour. There may be other references in Babylonian literature to these temple-women; in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the courtesan who won over Eabani evidently belongs to the retinue of Ishtar of Erech.
From these two institutions we must distinguish that other, for which Herodotus is our earliest authority:[269.4] according to his explicit statement, once in her lifetime every Babylonian woman, high or low, had to stand in the temple-precincts of the goddess Mylitta—probably a functional appellative of Ishtar, meaning “the helper of childbirth”—and to prostitute herself to any stranger who threw money into her lap and claimed her with the formula, “I invoke the goddess Mylitta for you.” Herodotus hastens to assure us that this single act of unchastity—which took place outside the temple—did not afterwards lower the morality of the women, who, as he declares, were otherwise exemplary in this respect. But he is evidently shocked by the custom, and the early Christian and modern writers have quoted it as the worst example of gross pagan or Oriental licentiousness. Some devoted Assyriologists have tried to throw doubt on the historian’s veracity:[270.1] the wish is father to the thought: and it is indeed difficult for the ordinary civilised man to understand how an ancient civilisation of otherwise advanced morality could have sanctioned such a practice. But Herodotus’ testimony ought not to be so impugned; nor is it sufficient evidence for rejecting it that no reference to the custom which he describes has been found hitherto in the cuneiform literature. Strabo merely repeats what Herodotus has said; but independent evidence of some value is gathered from the apocryphal Epistle of Jeremias:[270.2] “The women also with cords about them sit in the ways, burning bran for incense; but if any of them, drawn by some that pass by, lie with them, she reproacheth her fellow that she was not thought as worthy as herself, nor her cord broken.” The context is altogether religious, and this is no ordinary secular immorality; certain details in the narrative remind us of Herodotus, and make it clear that the writer has in mind the same social usage that the historian vouches for. This usage may be described as the consecration to the goddess of the first-fruits of the woman’s virginity before marriage; for, though Herodotus does not explicitly say that it was a rite preliminary to marriage, yet the records of similar practices elsewhere in Asia Minor assure us on this point.
We have now to begin the comparative search in the adjacent regions, keeping distinct the three types of consecration which I have specified above, which are too often confused.[271.1]
The first type has its close analogies with the early Christian, mediaeval, and modern conventual life of women. The code of Hammurabi presents us with the earliest example of what may be called the religious sisterhood; the Babylonian votaries were dedicated to religion, and while the Christian nuns are often called the brides of Christ, their earliest prototypes enjoyed the less questionable title of “God’s-sisters.” We find no exact parallel to this practice in ancient Greece; from the earliest period, no doubt, the custom prevailed of consecrating individual women of certain families as priestesses to serve certain cults, and sometimes chastity was enforced upon them; but these did not form a conventual society; and usually, apart from their occasional religious duties, they could lead a secular life. In fact, the monastic system was of Eastern origin and only reached Europe in later times, being opposed to the civic character of the religion of the old Aryan states.
The second class of consecrated women served as temple-harlots in certain cult-centres of Asia Minor. We cannot say that the custom in all cases emanated from Babylon; for there is reason to think that it was a tradition attaching to the cult of the goddess among the polytheistic Semitic stocks. We have clear allusions in the Bible to temple-prostitution practised by both sexes in the Canaanite communities adjacent to the Israelites, who were themselves sometimes contaminated by the practice.[272.1] We hear of “hierodouli” among the pagan Arabs,[272.2] of women “of the congregation of the people of Astarte” at Carthage,[272.3] of numbers of dedicated slave women in the cult of Aphrodite at Eryx,[272.4] which was at least semi-Semitic; and it is likely that some of these at least were devoted to the impure religious practice. As regards non-Semitic worships, it is only clearly attested of two, namely, of the worship of Mā at Comana in Pontos,[272.5] and of Aphrodite Ourania in Corinth.[272.6] In these cases we have the right to assume Semitic influences at work; for we do not find traces of this practice in the ancient cult of Kybele; and Ma of Cappadocia and Pontus, who had affinities with her, was partly contaminated with Anahita, a Persian goddess, who had taken on Babylonian fashions. Nor can we doubt that the practice gained recognition at Corinth in post-Homeric times through its Oriental trade; for it was attached to the cult of Aphrodite Ourania, whose personality, partly at least, was identical with that of the Semitic goddess. The practice survived in Lydia in the later period of the Graeco-Roman culture. For a woman of Tralles, by name Aurelia Aemilia, erected a column with an inscription that has been published by Sir William Ramsay,[273.1] in which she proclaims with pride that she had prostituted herself in the temple service “at the command of an oracle,” and that her female ancestors had done likewise. Finally, we may find the cult-practice reflected in certain legends; in the legend of Iconium, for instance, of the woman who enticed all strangers to her embraces and afterwards slew them, but was herself turned to stone by Perseus, and whose stone image gave the name to the State.[273.2]