[160] Strabo, ix, 3.
[161] Republic, iv.
[162] See Pindar’s Pythian Ode, iv.
[163] Strabo, ix, 3.
[164] In most of the Oriental countries, including Egypt, there was always more or less of a belief in one great divinity. “The Supreme Omnipotent Intelligence” of the Hindus was “a spirit by no means the object of any sense, which can only be conceived by a mind wholly abstracted from matter.” (Institutes of Menu). El was a name given the Ineffable One by the Phœnicians and other peoples. Il or Ilu and Jaoh, the “being,” the “Eternal,” the “Jehovah” of the Hebrews, were designations of him used by the Babylonians, and from him, it was believed, the great trinity, Anu, Hea, and Bel emanated. Some, however, especially in early times, confounded him with Anu. Baal, the “Lord,” was a common designation of him in Syria and elsewhere.
[165] Dictionary of Mythology. London, 1793.
[166] Anantas.
[167] Ancient Art and its Remains, p. 519.
[168] The reader is doubtless familiar, through the Bible, with consecrated stones. A Maççeba was a necessary mark of every “high place.” Jacob set one up (Gen., xxxi, 45).
[169] See Lenormant’s Ancient History of the East, vol. ii, p. 230. A pillar, cone, or tree-stem, more or less ornamented, constituted the Ashêrah of the Syrians and others, which many of the Israelites long looked on with favor (see Numbers, xxv, and 2 Judges, xxii), and which is in the authorized version of the Bible translated “grove,” as in the phrase, “the women wove hangings for the grove” (2 Judges, xxxiii, 7). It was the image of the goddess of fertility and life, the Istar of the Babylonians, The Baal-peor of the Moabites, Midianites, and others, and the Priapus of the Greeks and Romans were practically similar. I may add that the Phallus (derived from Apis, the Egyptian sacred bull), the linga of the Hindus, has been taken by many peoples as emblematic of the widely-worshipped, active, renovating power in nature, the sun; just as an oval or round figure, the cteis of the Greeks, the yoni of the Hindus, has been of the passive power, the earth. (See Cox’s Mythology of the Aryans). The latter is the Mipleçeth, or “abominable image for an Ashêrah,” spoken of in the Bible (1 Kings, xv, 13, and 2 Chronicles, xv, 16). The whole subject is well presented in a little book by Messrs. Westropp and Wake,—Ancient Symbol Worship. New York, 1874.