Fig. 177 it is adored by the king and his son or successor, with their attendant genii. The kings present towards it a well-known symbol of life and good fortune, the fist with the forefinger extended, or "the phallic hand." Here, then, we have evidently the Asherah, or Ashtaroth-symbol, the female Baal, the life-producer, "the door" whence life issues to the world. As such the goddess is here symbolised as an arched door-way. In the Phonician alphabet, the fourth letter, daleth, = a door, has the shape of a tent-door, as on the Moabite stone, A, and also in the Greek [———] But another form, perhaps as ancient, is D, which, when placed in its proper position, would be [—], the very form of the Asherah.* In the plural, this word stands for the labia pudendi, [————], "because it shut not up the doors of the womb," Job iii. 10.** We infer from Numbers xxv. 6-8, that in the rites of Baal-peor, the Kadeshoth, or women devoted to the god, offered themselves to his worshippers each in a peculiar bower or small arched tent, called a qubbah. The part also through which Phinehas drove his spear (see Num. xxv. 8), the woman's vulva, is also called qobbah, the one word being derived from the other, according to Onkelos, Aquila, and others. Qubbah means, according to Fürst, Heb. Lex., "something hollow and arched, an arched tent, like the Arabic El. Kubba, whence the Spanish Al-cova, and our Alcove." In the Latin also, the word fornix, a vault, an arch, meant a brothel, and from it was derived fornicatio. Qubbah is translated by the LXX., kaminos, "an oven or arched furnace" (Liddell and Scott); but it meant also the female parts. See Herodotus v. 92 (7). Thus, then, the Alcove was itself a symbol of woman, as though a place of entrance and emergence, and whence new life issues to the world. And when the male worshipper of Baal entered to the kadeshah, the living embodiment of the goddess, the analogy to the Asherah became complete, as we shall now show.
* The first letter, Aleph, = an ox, is, even on the Moabite
stone, written thus, and has become the modern A. In the
earlier hieroglyph it must have been thus V. The Egyptian
hieroglyph for ten is Compare the Greek [—] and Latin
Decem.
** The first of the Orphic Hymns is addressed to the goddess
Artemisias (Prothnraia) or the Door-keeper, who presided
over childbirths, like the Roman Diana Lucina.
The central object in the Assyrian "grove" is a male date-palm, which was well known as an emblem of Baal, the sun, the phallus, and life. This remarkable tree, Tamar in Phoenician and Hebrew, the phoenix in Greek, was formerly abundant in Palestine and the neighbouring regions. The word Phoenicia (Acts xi. 19, xv. 8) is derived from phoinix, as the country of palms; like the "Idumeo palmo" of Virgil. Palmyra, the city of the sun, was called in the Hebrew Tamar (1 Kings ix. 18). In Vespasian's famous coin, "Judoa capta," Judoa is represented as a female sitting under a palm-tree. The tree can at once be identified by its tall, straight, branchless stem, of equal thickness throughout, crowned at the top with a cluster of long, curved, feather-like branches, and by its singularly wrinkled bark. All these characteristics are readily recognised in the highly conventional forms of the religious emblem, even in the ornament on the king's robe, fig. 174. The date-palm is dioecious, the female trees, which are sometimes used as emblems, being always distinguished by the clusters of date fruit. "Thy stature is like to a palm-tree, thy breasts to clusters" (Cant. vii. 7). "The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree" (Ps. xcii. 12), fruitful and ever green. "They are upright as the palm-tree, but speak not" (Jer. x. 8-5). The prophet is evidently describing the making of an Asherah. There was a Canaanite city called Baal-Tamar, = Baal, the palm-tree, designated so, it is probable, from the worship of Baal there "under the form of a priapus-column," says Fürst, Heb. Lex. The real form was doubtless an "Asherim," a modified palm-tree, as we have already shown. Palm-branches have been used in all ages as emblems of life, peace, and victory. They were strewn before Christ. Palm-Sunday, the feast of palms, is still kept. Even within the present century, on this festival, in many towns of France, women and children carried in procession at the end of their palm-branches a phallus made of bread, which they called, undisguisedly, "la pine," whence the festival was called "La Fête des Pinnes." The "pine" having been blest by the priest, the women carefully preserved it during the following year as an amulet. (Dulaure, Hist, des differens Cultes.)
Again, the Greek name for the palm-tree, phoenix, was also the name of that mythical Egyptian bird, sacred to Osiris, and a symbol of the resurrection. With some early Christian writers, Christ was "the Phoenix." The date-palm is figured as a tree of life on an Egyptian sepulchral tablet, older than the Exodus, now preserved in the museum at Berlin. Two arms issue from the top of the tree; one of which presents a tray of dates to the deceased, whilst the other gives him water, "the water of life." The tree of life is represented by a date-palm on some of the earliest Christian mosaics at Rome. Something very like the Assyrian Asherah, or sacred emblem, was sculptured on the great doors of Solomon's temple, by Hiram, the Tyrian (1 Kings vii. 18-21). We read "he carved upon them carvings of cherubims and palm-trees and open flowers, and spread gold upon the cherubims and palm-trees" (1 Kings vi. 82-35). He also erected two phallic pillars in front of the Temple, Jachin and Boaz, = It stands—In strength. No wonder Solomon fell to worship Astarte, Chemosh, and Milcom.
Although to our modern ideas the mystical tree, symbol of life and immortality, seems out of place in Judaism, yet no sooner did the Jews possess a national coinage under the Maccabees than the palm-tree reappears, always with seven branches (like the golden candlestick, Ex. xxv.), as on the shekel represented Plate xvii., Fig. 4. The Assyrian tree has always the same number, and the tufts of foliage (symbolising the entire female tree) which deck the margins of the mystic D—apt emblems of fertility—have also invariably seven branches. This may remind us of the seven visible spheres that move around our earth "in mystic dance," and of Balak's offering, upon seven altars, seven bulls and seven rams (Num. xxiii. 1; Rev. ii. 1) The mystic door is also barred, like the Egyptian sistrum carried by the priestesses of Isis, to represent the inviolable purity and eternal perfection which were associated with the idea of divinity. When Mary, the mother of Jesus, took the place in Christendom of "the great goddess," the dogmas which propounded her immaculate conception and perpetual virginity followed as a matter of course.
Thus, then, we explain the greatest symbol in Eastern worship,—it is the "Tree of Life in the midst of the Garden," which has remained so long a mystery. To Dr. Inman belongs the distinguished merit of having first broken ground in the right direction. In his Ancient Faiths, vol. 1, 1868, he identified the Assyrian "Asherah" with the female "door of life," and pointed out its analogy to the barred sistrum. We have seen that it is really much more complex, being precisely analogous in meaning to the famous crux ansata (Fig. 170), the central mystery of Egyptian worship; to the lingam or lingyoni of India (Fig. 109), the great emblem of Siva-worship; and to the caduceus of Greece and Rome. As represented on the Assyrian sculptures, it is always substantially the same. Probably this stereotyped form was the result of a gradual refinement upon some rude primitive type, perhaps as coarse as that seen by Captain Burton in the African idol-temple.