Chapter V: The Predominance of the Goddess

{81}

The next clue that I propose to follow in our general comparison is the relative prominence of the goddess-cult in the areas that we are surveying. The subject is of importance and interest, partly because it may throw some light on the question of the interdependence of the adjacent religions, partly because it brings into view certain striking facts of religious psychology. A religion without a goddess is liable to differ markedly in tone and colour, and probably in ritual, from those that possess one. Wherever anthropomorphism is allowed free play, the same instinct which evolves the father-god will evolve the mother-goddess; and when the religion is one of the type which Tiele calls “Nature-religions,” one, that is, where ideas reflecting the forces of the natural world lie on the surface of the conception of the divine personality, some of these forces are so naturally regarded as feminine that the evolution of a goddess appears inevitable; and the only world-religions that have rejected this idea are the Judaic, the Islamic, and Protestant Christianity. Now goddess-cult is often found to exercise a powerful influence on the religious emotion; and the religious psychology of a people devoted to it will probably differ from those who eschew it; often it will be likely to engender a peculiar sentiment of tenderness, of sentimentality in {82} an otherwise austere and repellent religious system; and the clinging entreaty of the child is heard in the prayers or reflected in the ritual; and just as the mother frequently stands between the children and the father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world; such at times was Athena for the Athenians; such is the Virgin for Mediterranean Christendom.

Or the goddess may be more merciless than any god, more delighting in bloodshed, more savage in resisting progress: such often was Artemis for the Greeks, such is Kala at this moment in India, a dangerous and living force that threatens our rule. Again, the goddess may encourage purity in the sexual relations; this was the potential value of the ideal of Artemis in Greece, and perhaps the actual value of Mariolatry in the Middle Ages. Or the goddess-cult may be the source of what to us appears gross licentiousness, as was the case in Babylon and some parts of Asia Minor. This discordance in the character of goddess-cults may reflect the diversity of the masculine feeling towards women, and also to some extent the position of women at different stages of culture in the family and in the State. The whole subject has many fascinating aspects, which relevance prevents me presenting in detail. I have considered elsewhere the sociologic questions involved in goddess-cult;[82.1] and I must limit my attention here to its value as ethnic evidence.

In Mesopotamia the phenomenon presents itself at the very earliest period of which we have record. The {83} monument already described[83.1] on which the goddess Nini is presenting captives to the King Annabanini, attests the prevalence of goddess-cult in the third millennium; and Tiele supposes--without, I think, sufficient evidence--that it was stronger in the Sumerian than in the Semitic period. At all events, the conquering Semites may have found the cult of goddesses well developed in the land; and in all probability they brought at least one of their own with them, namely, Ishtar, whose name has its phonetic equivalents in Semitic Anatolia. Also at least by the second millennium B.C., the Babylonian pantheon was organised after the type of the human family to this extent, that each male divinity has his female consort; and it would not help us now to consider the theorem put out by Jeremias and others that the various Babylonian goddesses are all emanations and varieties of one original All-mother. Only the mighty Ishtar remains for the most part aloof from the marriage system, and her power transcends that of the other goddesses. Originally the chief goddess of the Sumerian Erech, she was raised by the Assyrians to the highest position next to their national god Asshur;[83.2] and for them she is the great divinity of war, who, armed with bow, quiver, and sword, orders the battle-ranks. In a famous hymn,[83.3] perhaps the most fervent and moving of all the Babylonian collection, she seems exalted to a supreme place above all other divinities; another[83.4] displays the same ecstasy in adoration of the goddess Belit, imputing omnipotence to her, as one to whom the very gods offer prayers. The same idea may be expressed in a difficult {84} phrase in a hymn to Nebo[84.1] which contains his dialogue with Assurbanipal: “Nebo, who has grasped the feet of the divine goddess, Queen of Nineveh,” the goddess who came to be regarded as Ishtar.

From such isolated indications we might conclude that the Babylonian-Assyrian religion was more devoted to the goddess than to the god. We should certainly be wrong, as a more critical and wider survey of the facts, so far as they are at present accessible, would convince us. These hymns imputing supreme omnipotence to the goddess, whether Ishtar or another, may be merely examples of that tendency very marked in the Babylonian liturgies, to exalt the particular divinity to whom worship is at that moment being paid above all others. The ecstatic poet is always contradicting himself. To the omnipotent Belit, in the last-mentioned hymn, a phrase is attached which Zimmern interprets as “she who carries out the commands of Bel,” as if after all she were only a vicegerent. In the beautiful prayer to Ishtar proffered by the Assyrian King Asurnasirabal (18th cent. B.C.) he implores her to intercede for him, “the Priest-King, thy favourite… with Thy beloved the Father of the gods.”[84.2] The beloved wife naturally plays the Madonna part of the intercessor; thus Sanherib prays that Ninlil “the consort of Ashur, the mother of the great gods, may daily speak a favourable word for Sanherib, the king of Assyria, before Ashur.”[84.3] But the intercessor is not supreme; and in spite of the great power of Ishtar and the fervent {85} devotion she aroused, the state-pantheon is predominantly masculine.

Nor can we, looking at the ancient records of the other Semitic peoples, which are often too scanty to dogmatise about, safely speak of the supremacy of the goddess in any Semitic community, except in Sidon. All that we find everywhere, except among the Israelites, is a goddess by the side of a god. According to Weber, in his treatise, “Arabien vor dem Islam,”[85.1] the aboriginal god of all the Semites when they were in the nomadic condition was the moon-god; and the male divinity is nowhere found to be displaced. He is prominent among the polytheistic Arabs under the name Athtar.[85.2] Some of the Arab deities in North Arabia are revealed to us in an inscription dating probably from the fifth century B.C., which mentions the gods Salm, Sangala, Asira, and of these Salm was evidently a war-god, as he is represented on a relief with a spear.[85.3]

The Aramaic inscriptions only reveal the goddess Ishtar by the side of many powerful gods such as Ramman, Adad the god of storms, Shamash the sun-god, Reshef the god of lightning and war, Baal-charran the Lord of Harran.[85.4] An eighth-century Aramaic inscription found at Sinjerli in North Syria, written in the reign of Tiglath-Pileser III., mentions no goddess, but regards the kings as under the protection of Hadad, Elreshef, and Shamash.[85.5] Even in Canaan and Phoenicia we have no reason to say that Astarte rose above Baal; such an epithet as “the Face of Baal” appears to maintain the supremacy of the God. In Moab we have {86} the evidence of the Mesha stone, which mentions the divine pair Ashtor-Chemosh, and in Numbers[86.1] the Moabites are called the people of Chemosh. But we have Phoenician inscriptions of the period of Persian supremacy in which the king of Byblos, Jachumelek, speaks of himself as raised to the kingdom by the Baalat, the queen-goddess of that state; and he prays to her that the queen may give him favour in the eyes of the gods and in the eyes of the people of his land.[86.2] Astarte was _par excellence_ the city-goddess of Sidon, and on the later Imperial coinage we see her image drawn in a car. Two representations of her have been found, in one of which she is seated in front of the king,[86.3] the other shows her embracing him.[86.4] King Tabnit of Sidon, whose sarcophagus is in the Museum of Constantinople, styles himself “priest of Astarte, King of the Sidonians.”[86.5] But in the other Phoenician settlements, such as Tyre, Cyprus, and Carthage, the memorials of the male divinity, whether Baal, Baal Samin, Baal Ammon, Reshef Mikal, Esmun-Melqart, are at least as conspicuous. It is likely that at certain places in the Mediterranean the Semites were touched by the influences of the aboriginal Aegean goddess’s cult; this may well have been the case at Sidon, and still more probably at Askalon, and it may have penetrated as far as Bambyke.

Speaking generally, however, we may conclude that among the early Semites the male divinity was dominant. And if we could believe that this is a reflection in their theology of the patriarchal system in society, let us observe that the earliest Babylonian {87} evidence proves that the patriarchal type of family was dominant in Babylonia in the third millennium.

Passing over to the non-Semitic group of Anatolian cults, and considering first the Hittite, we have ample evidence in the great relief of Boghaz-Keui of the importance of the goddess; and it may well be, as Dr. Frazer has conjectured, that that monument, on which we see the great god borne on the shoulders of his worshippers to meet the goddess on the lion, gives us the scene of a Holy marriage.[87.1] We find the male and female divinity united in a common worship on a relief found near Caesarea in the middle of Cappadocia, on the left side of which is depicted a warrior-god standing before a pillar-shaped altar, while a man in the guise of a warrior is pouring a libation before him; on the right is a similar scene, making libation before a seated goddess, on whose altar a bird is seated.[87.2] Besides this, we have another type of goddess shown us on a Hittite votive-relief, on which is carved a large seated female figure with a child on her knees; we may surely interpret this as a θεὰ κουροτρόφος.[87.3] Again, on two of the reliefs at Euzuk we find a seated goddess holding a goblet and approached with prayers, libations, and other offerings by priest and priestess,[87.4] and we may venture to add to this list of Hittite types the mysterious veiled goddess found by Von Oppenheim at Tel-Halaf in Mesopotamia on the Chabur, a branch of Euphrates, with an inscription containing the name Asshur, a work which, on the evidence of other cuneiform inscriptions found on the site, he would date near to {88} 900 B.C.[88.1] But this evidence in no way amounts to any proof or affords any suggestion of the predominance of the goddess--and the Tel-El-Amarna correspondence of the Hittite kings implies that the male and female divinity were linked in an equal union in the Hittite religion. The text of the treaty between Rameses II. and the Kheta (_circ._ 1290 B.C.) includes various sun-gods, Sutekh, the Egyptian name for the Hittite war-god, and Antheret (possibly a form of the name Astoret), and other goddesses called “the Queen of Heaven, the Mistress of the Soil, the Mistress of Mountains.”[88.2] Can we draw any conclusions from that extraordinary monument from Fassirlir[88.3] on the borders of Lycaonia and Pisidia, representing a young god in a high cap that suggests Hittite fashion, standing on the neck of a stooping goddess at whose side are two lions? This might seem a naïve indication of male supremacy; but the sex of the supporting figure does not seem clear.[88.4]

Coming now to the Asia-Minor shore, where in the first millennium B.C. the Hellenic colonisation and culture flourished, we find the traces of a great goddess-cult discoverable on every important site; though recorded only by later writers, as a rule, and interpreted to us by the later Greek names, such as Artemis, Leto, Aphrodite, more rarely Athena, we can still discern clearly that she belongs to a pre-Hellenic stock. The evidence of this can be gathered from many sources, and it is unnecessary {89} to detail it here. What is more important, and not so easy, is to detect clear proof of the predominance of the goddess over the god, a phenomenon that has not yet presented itself clearly in the Semitic communities, except at Sidon and perhaps Byblos. We find goddess-cult in Cilicia, where “Artemis Sarpedonia” is a name that trails with it Minoan associations;[89.1] but, as Dr. Frazer has pointed out,[89.2] at least at Tarsos and Olba it appears that the male deity was the dominant power. At the former city a long series of coins attests the supremacy of Baal-Tars and Sandon-Herakles. At Olba the ruling priesthood were called the Τευκρίδαι, and claim descent from Teukros and Aias, but Greek inscriptions giving such names as “Teukros” the priest, son of Tarkuaris, support the view that Teukros is a Hellenisation of the divine Hittite name Tarku. It is in Lycia where we ought, in accordance with a popular theory, to find the clearest proof of goddess-supremacy; for we know that the Lycians had the matrilinear family system, and this was supposed by Robertson Smith to lead logically to that religious product.[89.3] And recently we have heard Professor Wilamowitz[89.4] brilliantly expound the theory that Leto was the aboriginal mother-goddess of Lycia, called there in the Lycian tongue “Lada,” and worshipped as supreme with her son Apollo, both of whom the Hellenes found there, and while they transformed Lada “the Lady-goddess” into Leto, surnamed Apollo Λητοίδης, in obedience to the Lycian rule of calling a son after his mother. And where a son is worshipped merely as the son of his {90} mother, we may regard the mother-goddess as supreme. The theory about Apollo’s Lycian origin, which, I think, contradicts all the important facts, does not concern us here. It is his view that Leto is the aboriginal and paramount divinity of Lycia which we would wish to test. So far as it rests on the equation between Leto and Lada, its philology is bad; for, as Dr. Cowley has pointed out on the evidence of Lycian-Greek transcribed names, the Greeks would not have transcribed Lada as Leto. Furthermore, the geography of the Leto-cult gives no _vraisemblance_ to the theory of its Lycian origin; neither have we any proof at all of the cult of any goddess in Lycia at an early period, though no doubt it existed; the coin of Myra, showing a goddess emerging from the split trunk of a tree,[90.1] is of the Imperial period, but preserves an ancient legend and an archaic idol-type. But the earliest fact of Lycian religion recorded is the predominance of Apollo, and the Lycians maintained him as their chief divinity throughout their history and long after the very early influences of Hellenic colonisation had waned. The inscriptions of Lycia that mention Leto are all of the later period; her temple near Xanthos and her two holy groves on the coast that Strabo mentions[90.2] are just on the track along which the earliest Hellenic influence travelled: and the most tenable view is that the Hellenes introduced her. In Caria, at Labranda, and again in the vicinity of Stratonikeia, we have proof of the early supremacy of a great god whom the Hellenes called Zeus, attaching to him in the latter centre of cult the Carian name of Panamaros, and associating him with a native goddess called Hera or {91} Hekate, who did not claim to be the predominant partner.[91.1]

It is not till we come to the neighbourhood of Ephesos that we can speak positively of goddess-supremacy. Artemis, as the Greeks called her here, is admittedly πρωτοθρονία, the first in power and in place. Her brother Apollo himself served as the στεφανηφόρος of the Artemis of Magnesia, that is, as her officiating magistrate,[91.2] and Artemis of Magnesia we may take to be the same aboriginal goddess as the Ephesian. Certain features of her worship will be considered later in a comparative survey of ritual and cult-ideas. I will only indicate here the absence of any proof of the Semitic origins of the Ephesian Artemis,[91.3] and the associations that link her with the great mother-goddess of Phrygia. When we reach the area within which this latter cult and its cognate forms prevailed, we can posit the predominance of the goddess as a salient fact of the popular religion imprinting indelible traits upon the religious physiognomy of the people. The god Attis was dear to the aboriginal Phrygian as to the later generations, but he was only the boy-lover, the young son who died and rose again. The great goddess was supreme and eternal; and her power spread into Lydia, Cappadocia, Pontus, and Galatia, and far and wide in the later period across the sea. {92} Her counterpart in Cappadocia was Mā, the great goddess of Comana, in whose worship we hear nothing of the male divinity. In this wide area, governed by the religion of the Great Mother, we can trace a similar ritual and something of the same religious psychology in the various peoples: orgiastic liturgy and ecstatic passion, a craving for complete identification with the goddess that led to acts of sexual madness such as emasculation; also a marked tone of sorrow and tenderness in the legends and religious service. In following back to its fountain-head the origins of this cult, we are led inevitably to Minoan Crete.

There are many links revealed both by legend and cult that associate Crete with the country adjacent to the Troad, with Lydia and Caria. And we may tentatively hold to the dogma that Kybele-Rhea, Hipta of Lydia, who appears now as a virgin, now as a mother-goddess, Mā who appears in Caria, but whose chief historic centre was Comana of Cappadocia, were all descended from or specialised forms of an aboriginal Aegean or Anatolian goddess whose cult was also maintained by the Hittites. Of her nature and ritual I may speak later. I am only concerned here with the correctness of the view put forward by Sir Arthur Evans.[92.1] “It is probable that in the Mycenaean religion as in the later Phrygian, the female aspect of divinity predominated, fitting on, as it seems to have, down to the matriarchal system. The male divinity is not so much the consort as the son or the youthful favourite.” If we put aside the suggestion of a matriarchal theory here, the main idea in this judgment accords generally with the evidence that the author of it has himself done most to accumulate and to present to us. It is {93} not insignificant that the earliest type of Aegean idol in existence is that of a goddess, not a god; and in the more developed Minoan period the representations of the goddess are more frequent and more imposing than those of the god; while in the few scenes of cult where the male deity appears in her company, he appears in a subordinate position, either in a corner of the field or standing before her throne.[93.1] And a strong current of early Greek legend induces us to believe that when the earliest Hellenes reached Crete they found a powerful goddess-cult overshadowing the island, associated with the figure of a young or infant god: hence spread the Cretan worship of Rhea and the Μήτηρ τῶν θεῶν, and hence there came to a few places on the Hellenic mainland, where Minoan influence was strong, the cult and the cult-legend of the infant Zeus.[93.2] Yet we must not strain the evidence too far; besides the youthful or infant Cretan god, there may have been the powerful cult of a father-god as well. On three monuments we catch a glimpse of the armed deity of the sky.[93.3] What is more important is the prominence of the double-headed axe in the service of the Minoan palace; and this must be a fetichistic emblem mystically associated with the thunder-god, though occasionally the goddess might borrow it. The prominence and great vogue of this religious emblem detracts somewhat from the weight of the evidence as pointing to the supremacy of the female divine partner. It is Zeus, not Rhea, that inspired Minos, as Jahwé inspired Moses, and Shamash Hammurabbi. Yet the view is probably right on the whole that the mother-goddess was a more frequent figure in {94} the Minoan service, and was nearer and dearer to the people.

May we also regard her as the prototype of all the leading Hellenic goddesses? The consideration of this question will bring this particular line of inquiry to a close.

If we find goddess-supremacy among the early Hellenes, shall we interpret it as an Aryan-Hellenic tradition, or as an alien and borrowed trait in their composite religion? If borrowed, are they more likely to have derived it from the East or from their immediate predecessors in the regions of Aegean culture? The latter question, if it arises, we ought to be able to answer at last.

We might guard ourselves at the outset against the uncritical dogma which has been proclaimed at times that the goddesses in the various Aryan polytheisms were all alien, and borrowed from the pre-Aryan peoples in whose lands they settled. Any careful study of the Vedic and old-Germanic, Phrygo-Thracian religions can refute this wild statement: the wide prevalence in Europe of the worship of “Mother Earth,” which Professor Dieterich’s treatise establishes,[94.1] is sufficient evidence in itself. Nor could we believe that the early Aryans were unmoved by an anthropomorphic law of the religious imagination that is almost universally operative. The Hellenic Aryans, then, must be supposed to have brought certain of their own goddesses into Greece, and perhaps philology will be able one day to tell us who exactly they were. On linguistic and other grounds, Dione and Demeter may be accepted as provedly old Hellenic: on the same grounds, probably, Hera; also the name and cult of Hestia is certainly “Aryan,”[94.2] only we {95} dare not call her in the earliest, and scarcely at any period, a true personal goddess. Now, there is a further important induction that we may confidently make: at the period when the Aryan conquerors were pushing their way into Aegean lands and the Indo-Iranians into the Punjaub and Mesopotamia, they had a religious bias making for the supremacy of the Father-God and against the supremacy of the goddess. We can detect the same instinct also in the old Germanic pantheon.[95.1] Its operation is most visible when the Thrako-Phrygian stock, and their cousins the Bithynian, broke into the north of Asia Minor, and the regions on the south of the Black Sea. The god-cult they bring with them clashes with the aboriginal and--as it proved--invincible supremacy of the goddess linked to her divine boy: we hear of such strange cult-products as Attis-Παπαῖος, Father Attis, and one of the old Aryan titles of the High God appears in the Phrygian Zeus Βαγαῖος, Bagha in old Persian and Bog in Slavonic meaning deity. The Aryan hero-ancestor of the Phrygian stock, Manes, whom Sir William Ramsay believes to be identical with the god Men, becomes the father of Atys;[95.2] also we have later proof of the powerful cult of Zeus the Thunderer, Zeus the Leader of Hosts, in this region of the southern shore of the Black Sea. Another induction that I venture, perhaps incautiously, to make, is that in no Aryan polytheism is there to be found the worship of an isolated or virgin-goddess, keeping apart from relations with the male {96} deity: the goddesses in India, Germany, Ireland, Gaul,[96.1] Thrace, and Phrygia are usually associated temporarily or permanently with the male divinity, and are popularly regarded as maternal, if not as wedded. Trusting to the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this important conclusion concerning the earliest religious history of Hellas: namely, that where we find the powerful cult of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic population. The axiom applies at once and most forcibly to Artemis and Athena; the one dominant in certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. Their virginal character was probably a later idea arising from their isolation, their aversion to cult-partnership with the male deity.[96.2] The Aryan Hellenes were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people. As regards Hera, the question is more difficult: the excavations at the Heraeum have been supposed by Dr. Waldstein to prove the worship of a great goddess on that site, going back in time to the third millennium B.C.,[96.3] a period anterior to the advent of the god-worshipping Aryan Hellenes. And this goddess remained {97} dominant through all history at Argos and Samos. But we have no reason for supposing that her name was Hera in that earliest period. Phonetically, the word is best explained as “Aryan”: if it was originally the name brought by the Hellenes and designating the wife-goddess of the sky-god--and in spite of recent theories that contradict it I still incline to this view--the Hellenes could apply it to the great goddess of the Argolid, unless her aversion to matrimony was a dogma, or her religious isolation a privilege, too strong to infringe. This does not seem to have been the case. The goddess of Samian cult, a twin-institution with the Argive, was no virgin, but united with the sky-god in an old ἱερὸς γάμος. Nevertheless, throughout all history the goddess in Argos, and probably in Samos, is a more powerful cult-figure than the god.

As regards Aphrodite, few students of Greek religion would now assign her to the original Aryan-Hellenic polytheism. Most still regard her as coming to the Greek people from the Semitic area of the Astarte cult. And this was the view that I formerly developed in the second volume of my _Cults_. But at that time we were all ignorant of the facts of Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and some of us were deceived concerning the antiquity of the Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and Hellas. The recently discovered evidence points, I think, inevitably to the theory that Sir Arthur Evans supports; that the goddess of Cyprus, the island where the old Minoan culture lived longest, is one form of the great goddess of that gifted Aegean people, who had developed her into various manifestations through long centuries of undisturbed religious life. Let us finally observe that it is just these names, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, that have hitherto defied linguistic {98} explanation on either Aryan or Semitic phonetic principles. We do not yet know the language of King Minos.

A cursory and dogmatic answer may now be given to the two questions posed above. The Aryan Hellenes did not bring with them the supremacy of the goddess, for the idea was not natural to them: they did not borrow it from any Semitic people in the second millennium, for at that time it was not natural to the Semites: they found it on the soil of the Aegean lands, as a native growth of an old Mediterranean religion, a strong plant that may be buried under the deposits of alien creeds, but is always forcing its head up to the light again.

Therefore in tracing goddess-cult from the Euphrates valley to the western Aegean shores, as a test of the influence of the East on the West, we are brought up sharply at this point. The Western world is divided from the Eastern by this very phenomenon that the older scholars used to regard as proving a connection. And it may well have been the Western cult that influenced the western Semites.