Chapter IX: Purity a Divine Attribute

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We may next consider the attribute of purity as a divine characteristic, to see whether in this respect the East differed markedly from the West. As regards ritual-law, all the religions of the old world agree in demanding ritual-purity: the worshipper who approaches the deities must be free from physical taint and impurity: this idea is so world-wide and so deeply embedded in primitive thought, that the mere presence of it is of no service for proving the interdependence of any religions in the historic period. From this ritual-law the concept naturally arises of “pure gods,” deities who themselves are believed to be pure because they insist on purity in their worshippers. Marduk is called “the purifier” in one of the incantation-texts, in allusion to his power of exorcising the evil demon of sickness by cleansing processes.[163.1] The cathartic rules that the law of ritual prescribes will differ according to the instincts and prejudices of different societies. But the Babylonian service demanded more than mere ritual-purity; for instance, in a fragment of a striking text published by Delitsch, we find this injunction: “In the sight of thy God thou shalt be pure of heart, for that is the distinction of the Godhead.”[163.2]

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As regards the moral and spiritual sense of purity, the sense in which we speak of “purity of heart,” we should naturally include purity in respect of sexual indulgence. But in applying this test to the Mesopotamian religion we are confronted with a singular difficulty. In the first place, the mythology is strikingly pure in our modern sense of the word, so far as the materials have as yet been put before us. It agrees in this respect with the Hebraic, and differs markedly from the Hellenic; the gods live in monogamic marriage with their respective goddesses, and we have as yet found no licentious stories of their intrigues. It may be that generally the Babylonian imagination was restrained by an austerity and shy reverence that did not control the more reckless and lighter spirit of the Hellene; or it may be that the priestly and royal scribes, to whom we owe the whole of the Babylonian religious literature that has come down to us, deliberately excluded any element of licentiousness that they may have found in the lower folklore. But there is one curious exception. In the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero repulses the proffered love of Ishtar, and taunts her with her cruel amours, giving a long list of her lovers whom she had ruined: one of these is Tammuz, “the spouse of thy youth,” upon whom “thou didst lay affliction every year”: then he mentions her other lovers who suffered at her hands--a singular list: a bird, a lion, a horse, a shepherd of the flock, some Babylonian Paris or Anchises, whom Ishtar treated as Artemis treated Aktaion. We must suppose these allusions are drawn from Babylonian folklore, of which nothing else has survived, concerning the amorous adventures of the goddess. Hence modern accounts are apt to impute a licentious character to Ishtar, as a goddess of violent {165} and lawless passion, and to connect with this aspect of her the institution in her temple at Erech of the service of sacred prostitutes, attested by certain cuneiform texts. In comparing the ritual of East and West, I shall give some consideration to this phenomenal practice. But this view of Ishtar is utterly contrary to that presented of her in the hymns and liturgies. Not only are certain hymns to Ishtar transcendently noble and spiritual in tone, surpassing most of the greatest works of Babylonian religious poetry, but certain phrases specially exalt her as the virgin-goddess. In one of the lamentations we read, “Virgin, virgin, in the temple of my riches, am I.”[165.1] “The spirit-maid, glory of Heaven: the Maiden Ishtar, glory of Heaven.”[165.2] In a psalm to Nana, one of the by-names of Ishtar, she is called “Virgin-goddess of Heaven”;[165.3] in another she speaks of herself, “she of the pure heart, she without fear was I.”[165.4] This virgin-character of hers must then be regarded as fixed by such epithets and phrases, of which more examples might no doubt be found. Therefore the phrase attached to her in the Epic of Gilgamesh,[165.5] “Kadisti Ilani,” must not be translated as Dhorme would translate it,[165.6] “the courtesan of the Gods,” merely on the ground that the same word is applied to her temple-harlots: for the word properly means “pure” from stain, hence “holy,”[165.7] and in this latter sense it could be applied to her consecrated votaries, in spite of their service, which seems to us {166} impure: the same word “Kedesh” is used for the votaries of the same ritual in Phoenicia and Syria. This apparent contradiction in the conception of Ishtar’s character is sometimes explained[166.1] by the suggestion that she was really a combination of two distinct goddesses, a voluptuous and effeminate goddess of Erech, and a pure and warlike Assyrian goddess of Nineveh. But there is no real contradiction; for in Babylonian religious and liturgical literature the lower view of Ishtar is never presented at all. She is always worshipped as pure and holy; the licentiousness of folklore, if there was any such in vogue, was not allowed to intrude into the temple-service. Therefore Ishtar is no real exception to the rule that purity, even in our sense, is a prevailing characteristic of Babylonian divinity, as it was of the Hebraic.

But now another phenomenon claims our interest: while being a virgin-goddess, she is sometimes addressed as a mother. In the inscription of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) she is described as “the Lady of the Heavenly Crown, the Mother of the Gods”;[166.2] and in some of the older hymns, which have already been quoted, she speaks of herself at one time as mother and at another as maid: “Mother who knows lamentation,” and “I am the Virgin-Goddess.”[166.3] Similarly, in the hymn to Nana she is called in one place “the Virgin-Goddess of Heaven”; in another, “Mother of the faithful breasts.”[166.4] Another goddess, Bau, who is eminently the mother or the wife-goddess, the spouse of Ningirsu or Ninib, is characterised in a hymn to the latter god as “thy spouse, the maid, the Lady of Nippur.”[166.5]

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From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the conception of a virgin-mother. Only we must not press it too far, or suppose at all that it crystallised into a dogma. It is characteristic of the ecstatic Babylonian imagination that in the swoon of rapture the intellect does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the mystic enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused in one divine personality. Thus even a divinity naturally and properly male, might be mystically addressed as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves that the godhead should be all in all to him. Thus motherhood is the natural function and interest of the goddess; therefore the Babylonian supplicated his goddess as mother, even as mother of the gods, without thinking of any divine offspring or of any literal genealogy or theogony. Virginity is also beautiful, and a source of divine power and virtue. Therefore the mother Bau might rejoice to be addressed occasionally as maid. As for Ishtar, she was aboriginally, perhaps, a maid, in the sense that no god entered into her worship; and this idea shaped the early spiritual conception of her. But as a great goddess she must show her power in the propagation of life; therefore she must be recognised in prayer and supplication as a mother; the adorer wishing to give her the virtue of both states, probably without dogmatising or feeling the contradiction. This explanation appears more likely, when we consider the psychologic temper of the Babylonian poetry, its often incoherent rapture, than the other obvious one that Ishtar the virgin happened in many places to appropriate to herself the cult of a mother-goddess, though this might easily happen.

As regards the other polytheistic Semitic races, we can infer that the same religious ideas concerning ritual-purity {168} were in vogue; but our scanty records do not enable us to determine whether and how far they were quickened by spiritual significance.[168.1] But we can trace through Asia Minor the double concept of mother and virgin in the personality of the goddesses; though it is difficult to decide whether they ever coincided, and with what degree of definiteness, in the same personage. Astarte must have been imagined generally as a mother-goddess, and she appears conspicuously as the female consort of Baal; thus her Hellenic equivalent is often given as Aphrodite; yet in another aspect of her worship she must have appeared as virginal, for she is also often identified with Artemis, just as a similar goddess Anath in Cyprus was identified with Athena.[168.2] The goddess Atargatis of Hierapolis, described by Lucian, was evidently a mother-goddess, bearing, according to him, a marked resemblance to Rhea, and placed in the temple by the side of her husband, Bel or Zeus. Among the Sabaean inscriptions of South Arabia, we find a dedication by some parents in behalf of their children to the goddess Umm-Attar, a name that signifies “Mother-Attar” (or “Mother Astarte”[168.3]; and a late record, too late to serve as witness for the early period we are considering, speaks of a virgin-mother among the Arabs.[168.4] Finally, the earliest Carthaginian inscriptions record the cult of the great goddess Tanit, addressed usually as the “Lady Tanit, the Face of Baal,” and called in one dedication “The Great Mother.”[168.5] If she is the same as the divinity whom Augustine describes as the Virgo Caelestis, the {169} Heavenly Virgin,[169.1] then either the dual concept was mystically combined in the same personage, or the Carthaginian goddess was worshipped at different times and at different seasons as the mother and then as the maid. But the evidence is quite uncertain, and we must not combine too rashly the records of different ages.

Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we have noted the monumental evidence among the Hittites for the worship of a mother-goddess, who with her son figures in the procession on the reliefs at Boghaz-Keui. It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive relief as a large seated female with a child on her knees,[169.2] a type which the Greeks would call κουροτρόφος. Her name may have been Umma; for this divine word is now given us among the names of Hittite divinities in cuneiform texts recently discovered, which have been published and interpreted by Professor Sayce in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society_.[169.3] He there connects the word with the Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hittite goddess as the ancestress both by name and nature of the Cappadocian goddess Mā, famous at Comana in the later period. Now the name Mā designates “the mother,” and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only with the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis. I believe the external inducement to this latter assimilation was the isolation of Mā in her cult, into which no god entered. From this late evidence it is too hazardous to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially as the processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with a ἱερὸς γάμος, the solemn union of a god and a goddess. As regards the great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, it {170} has been somewhat hastily concluded that here and there her cult included the mystic idea of a virgin-mother. We have only some evidence from a late period, and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from it to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak. I have criticised it elsewhere, and I found it and still find it very frail.[170.1] I have not been able to detect any clear consciousness of the idea in the cult and cult-legends of Kybele: we must not build much on the Pessinuntian story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance to the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of Kybele and Attis is inconsistent with any dogma of the goddess’s virginity, nor was she ever called Παρθένος in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with whom the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united in corporeal union.[170.2]

If we search the other parts of the Asia-Minor littoral, neither in the prehistoric nor in the later periods before Christianity is the concept we are seeking clearly to be traced. I cannot find the Leto-Artemis, the goddess who was at once essentially a virgin and a mother. What we discern in Crete is a great mother-goddess and a virgin, Ἀφαία or Britomartis, “the Sweet Maid.” That the prehistoric or later Cretans mystically combined {171} the two concepts in one personality we do not know. When we examine legends and ritual, usually dateless, of early Hellas, we are aware that a goddess who was worshipped as a Maid in one locality might be worshipped as a Mother in another; or the same goddess at different times of the year might be worshipped now under one aspect, now under another. Hera of Argos yearly renews her divinity by bathing in a certain stream. Kore, the young earth-goddess, was probably an early emanation from Demeter. How powerful in pre-Hellenic days was the appeal of the virginal aspect of certain goddesses, is shown by the antiquity and the tenacity of the dogma concerning the virginity of Artemis and Athena. Yet the latter was called Μήτηρ at Elis[171.1]. But it would be very rash to declare that here at last the Virgin-Mother is found in old Greece. Athena has no offspring; there is neither loss nor miraculous preservation of her virginity. Only the Elean women, wishing themselves to be mothers, pray to the Virgin-goddess for offspring, and strengthen their prayer by applying a word to Athena of such powerful spell-efficacy as “Mother.” It would be a misinterpretation of the method of ancient hieratic speech to suppose that Athena Μήτηρ was mystically imagined as herself both Virgin and Mother.[171.2]

The ritualistic value of purity was probably a postulate of the religious feeling of early Hellas, though Homer gives us only faint glimpses of the idea. Φοῖβος was an old cult-title of Apollo, and its root-significance may well have been “Pure.” We hear of Hagné, “the pure goddess,” probably a reverential {172} name for Kore at the Messenian Andania:[172.1] and on the hilltop above the Arcadian Pallantion, Pausanias records the cult of a nameless group of divinities called οἱ καθαροὶ θεοί,[172.2] a cult which, according to his account of it, appears to have descended from very ancient times. The question of purity in Greek ritual may be reserved for a later stage in our comparative study. I will only remark here on the fact that Greek worship, early and late, was in marked antagonism in this respect to Greek mythology, the former being on the whole solemn and beautiful, the latter often singularly impure. In fact, both in the Phrygian and Hellenic popular imagination we detect an extraordinary vein of grossness, that seems to mark off these Aryan peoples sharply from the Mesopotamians, and equally, as far as we can see, from the other Semites.