(M22) The island of Cyprus lies but one day’s sail from the coast of
Syria. Indeed, on fine summer evenings its mountains may be descried
looming low and dark against the red fires of sunset.(85) With its rich
mines of copper and its forests of firs and stately cedars, the island
naturally attracted a commercial and maritime people like the Phoenicians;
while the abundance of its corn, its wine, and its oil must have rendered
it in their eyes a Land of Promise by comparison with the niggardly nature
of their own rugged coast, hemmed in between the mountains and the
sea.(86) Accordingly they settled in Cyprus at a very early date and
remained there long after the Greeks had also established themselves on
its shores; for we know from inscriptions and coins that Phoenician kings
reigned at Citium, the Chittim of the Hebrews, down to the time of
Alexander the Great.(87) Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their
gods with them from the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the
Lebanon,(88) who may well have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south
coast they instituted the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather
Astarte.(89) Here, as at Byblus, these rites resembled the Egyptian
worship of Osiris so closely that some people even identified the Adonis
of Amathus with Osiris.(90) The Tyrian Melcarth or Moloch was also
worshipped at Amathus,(91) and the tombs discovered in the neighbourhood
prove that the city remained Phoenician to a late period.(92)
(M23) But the great seat of the worship of Aphrodite and Adonis in Cyprus
was Paphos on the south-western side of the island. Among the petty
kingdoms into which Cyprus was divided from the earliest times until the
end of the fourth century before our era Paphos must have ranked with the
best. It is a land of hills and billowy ridges, diversified by fields and
vineyards and intersected by rivers, which in the course of ages have
carved for themselves beds of such tremendous depth that travelling in the
interior is difficult and tedious. The lofty range of Mount Olympus (the
modern Troodos), capped with snow the greater part of the year, screens
Paphos from the northerly and easterly winds and cuts it off from the rest
of the island. On the slopes of the range the last pine-woods of Cyprus
linger, sheltering here and there monasteries in scenery not unworthy of
the Apennines. The old city of Paphos occupied the summit of a hill about
a mile from the sea; the newer city sprang up at the harbour some ten
miles off.(93) The sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern
Kuklia) was one of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world. From
the earliest to the latest times it would seem to have preserved its
essential features unchanged. For the sanctuary is represented on coins of
the Imperial age,(94) and these representations agree closely with little
golden models of a shrine which were found in two of the royal graves at
Mycenae.(95) Both on the coins and in the models we see a façade
surmounted by a pair of doves and divided into three compartments or
chapels, of which the central one is crowned by a lofty superstructure. In
the golden models each chapel contains a pillar standing in a pair of
horns: the central superstructure is crowned by two pairs of horns, one
within the other; and the two side chapels are in like manner crowned each
with a pair of horns and a single dove perched on the outer horn of each
pair. On the coins each of the side chapels contains a pillar or
candelabra-like object: the central chapel contains a cone and is flanked
by two high columns, each terminating in a pair of ball-topped pinnacles,
with a star and crescent appearing between the tops of the columns. The
doves are doubtless the sacred doves of Aphrodite or Astarte,(96) and the
horns and pillars remind us of the similar religious emblems which have
been found in the great prehistoric palace of Cnossus in Crete, as well as
on many monuments of the Mycenaean or Minoan age of Greece.(97) If
antiquaries are right in regarding the golden models as copies of the
Paphian shrine, that shrine must have suffered little outward change for
more than a thousand years; for the royal graves at Mycenae, in which the
models were found, can hardly be of later date than the twelfth century
before our era.
(M24) Thus the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Paphos was apparently of great
antiquity.(98) According to Herodotus, it was founded by Phoenician
colonists from Ascalon;(99) but it is possible that a native goddess of
fertility was worshipped on the spot before the arrival of the
Phoenicians, and that the newcomers identified her with their own Baalath
or Astarte, whom she may have closely resembled. If two deities were thus
fused in one, we may suppose that they were both varieties of that great
goddess of motherhood and fertility whose worship appears to have been
spread all over Western Asia from a very early time. The supposition is
confirmed as well by the archaic shape of her image as by the licentious
character of her rites; for both that shape and those rites were shared by
her with other Asiatic deities. Her image was simply a white cone or
pyramid.(100) In like manner, a cone was the emblem of Astarte at
Byblus,(101) of the native goddess whom the Greeks called Artemis at Perga
in Pamphylia,(102) and of the sun-god Heliogabalus at Emesa in Syria.(103)
Conical stones, which apparently served as idols, have also been found at
Golgi in Cyprus, and in the Phoenician temples of Malta;(104) and cones of
sandstone came to light at the shrine of the “Mistress of Torquoise” among
the barren hills and frowning precipices of Sinai.(105) The precise
significance of such an emblem remains as obscure as it was in the time of
Tacitus.(106) It appears to have been customary to anoint the sacred cone
with olive oil at a solemn festival, in which people from Lycia and Caria
participated.(107) The custom of anointing a holy stone has been observed
in many parts of the world; for example, in the sanctuary of Apollo at
Delphi.(108) To this day the old custom appears to survive at Paphos, for
“in honour of the Maid of Bethlehem the peasants of Kuklia anointed
lately, and probably still anoint each year, the great corner-stones of
the ruined Temple of the Paphian Goddess. As Aphrodite was supplicated
once with cryptic rites, so is Mary entreated still by Moslems as well as
Christians, with incantations and passings through perforated stones, to
remove the curse of barrenness from Cypriote women, or increase the
manhood of Cypriote men.”(109) Thus the ancient worship of the goddess of
fertility is continued under a different name. Even the name of the old
goddess is retained in some parts of the island; for in more than one
chapel the Cypriote peasants adore the mother of Christ under the title
Panaghia Aphroditessa.(110)
(M25) In Cyprus it appears that before marriage all women were formerly
obliged by custom to prostitute themselves to strangers at the sanctuary
of the goddess, whether she went by the name of Aphrodite, Astarte, or
what not.(111) Similar customs prevailed in many parts of Western Asia.
Whatever its motive, the practice was clearly regarded, not as an orgy of
lust, but as a solemn religious duty performed in the service of that
great Mother Goddess of Western Asia whose name varied, while her type
remained constant, from place to place. Thus at Babylon every woman,
whether rich or poor, had once in her life to submit to the embraces of a
stranger at the temple of Mylitta, that is, of Ishtar or Astarte, and to
dedicate to the goddess the wages earned by this sanctified harlotry. The
sacred precinct was crowded with women waiting to observe the custom. Some
of them had to wait there for years.(112) At Heliopolis or Baalbec in
Syria, famous for the imposing grandeur of its ruined temples, the custom
of the country required that every maiden should prostitute herself to a
stranger at the temple of Astarte, and matrons as well as maids testified
their devotion to the goddess in the same manner. The emperor Constantine
abolished the custom, destroyed the temple, and built a church in its
stead.(113) In Phoenician temples women prostituted themselves for hire in
the service of religion, believing that by this conduct they propitiated
the goddess and won her favour.(114) “It was a law of the Amorites, that
she who was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the
gate.”(115) At Byblus the people shaved their heads in the annual mourning
for Adonis. Women who refused to sacrifice their hair had to give
themselves up to strangers on a certain day of the festival, and the money
which they thus earned was devoted to the goddess.(116) This custom may
have been a mitigation of an older rule which at Byblus as elsewhere
formerly compelled every woman without exception to sacrifice her virtue
in the service of religion. I have already suggested a reason why the
offering of a woman’s hair was accepted as an equivalent for the surrender
of her person.(117) We are told that in Lydia all girls were obliged to
prostitute themselves in order to earn a dowry;(118) but we may suspect
that the real motive of the custom was devotion rather than economy. The
suspicion is confirmed by a Greek inscription found at Tralles in Lydia,
which proves that the practice of religious prostitution survived in that
country as late as the second century of our era. It records of a certain
woman, Aurelia Aemilia by name, not only that she herself served the god
in the capacity of a harlot at his express command, but that her mother
and other female ancestors had done the same before her; and the publicity
of the record, engraved on a marble column which supported a votive
offering, shows that no stain attached to such a life and such a
parentage.(119) In Armenia the noblest families dedicated their daughters
to the service of the goddess Anaitis in her temple at Acilisena, where
the damsels acted as prostitutes for a long time before they were given in
marriage. Nobody scrupled to take one of these girls to wife when her
period of service was over.(120) Again, the goddess Ma was served by a
multitude of sacred harlots at Comana in Pontus, and crowds of men and
women flocked to her sanctuary from the neighbouring cities and country to
attend the biennial festivals or to pay their vows to the goddess.(121)
(M26) If we survey the whole of the evidence on this subject, some of
which has still to be laid before the reader, we may conclude that a great
Mother Goddess, the personification of all the reproductive energies of
nature, was worshipped under different names but with a substantial
similarity of myth and ritual by many peoples of Western Asia; that
associated with her was a lover, or rather series of lovers, divine yet
mortal, with whom she mated year by year, their commerce being deemed
essential to the propagation of animals and plants, each in their several
kind;(122) and further, that the fabulous union of the divine pair was
simulated and, as it were, multiplied on earth by the real, though
temporary, union of the human sexes at the sanctuary of the goddess for
the sake of thereby ensuring the fruitfulness of the ground and the
increase of man and beast.(123) And if the conception of such a Mother
Goddess dates, as seems probable, from a time when the institution of
marriage was either unknown or at most barely tolerated as an immoral
infringement of old communal rights, we can understand both why the
goddess herself was regularly supposed to be at once unmarried and
unchaste, and why her worshippers were obliged to imitate her more or less
completely in these respects. For had she been a divine wife united to a
divine husband, the natural counterpart of their union would have been the
lawful marriage of men and women, and there would have been no need to
resort to a system of prostitution or promiscuity in order to effect those
purposes which, on the principles of homoeopathic magic, might in that
case have been as well or better attained by the legitimate intercourse of
the sexes in matrimony. Formerly, perhaps, every woman was obliged to
submit at least once in her life to the exercise of those marital rights
which at a still earlier period had theoretically belonged in permanence
to all the males of the tribe. But in course of time, as the institution
of individual marriage grew in favour, and the old communism fell more and
more into discredit, the revival of the ancient practice even for a single
occasion in a woman’s life became ever more repugnant to the moral sense
of the people, and accordingly they resorted to various expedients for
evading in practice the obligation which they still acknowledged in
theory. One of these evasions was to let the woman offer her hair instead
of her person; another apparently was to substitute an obscene symbol for
the obscene act.(124) But while the majority of women thus contrived to
observe the forms of religion without sacrificing their virtue, it was
still thought necessary to the general welfare that a certain number of
them should discharge the old obligation in the old way. These became
prostitutes either for life or for a term of years at one of the temples:
dedicated to the service of religion, they were invested with a sacred
character,(125) and their vocation, far from being deemed infamous, was
probably long regarded by the laity as an exercise of more than common
virtue, and rewarded with a tribute of mixed wonder, reverence, and pity,
not unlike that which in some parts of the world is still paid to women
who seek to honour their Creator in a different way by renouncing the
natural functions of their sex and the tenderest relations of humanity. It
is thus that the folly of mankind finds vent in opposite extremes alike
harmful and deplorable.
(M27) At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been
instituted by King Cinyras,(126) and to have been practised by his
daughters, the sisters of Adonis, who, having incurred the wrath of
Aphrodite, mated with strangers and ended their days in Egypt.(127) In
this form of the tradition the wrath of Aphrodite is probably a feature
added by a later authority, who could only regard conduct which shocked
his own moral sense as a punishment inflicted by the goddess instead of as
a sacrifice regularly enjoined by her on all her devotees. At all events
the story indicates that the princesses of Paphos had to conform to the
custom as well as women of humble birth.
(M28) The legendary history of the royal and priestly family of the
Cinyrads is instructive. We are told that a Syrian man, by name Sandacus,
migrated to Cilicia, married Pharnace, daughter of Megassares, king of
Hyria, and founded the city of Celenderis. His wife bore him a son,
Cinyras, who in time crossed the sea with a company of people to Cyprus,
wedded Metharme, daughter of Pygmalion, king of the island, and founded
Paphos.(128) These legends seem to contain reminiscences of kingdoms in
Cilicia and Cyprus which passed in the female line, and were held by men,
sometimes foreigners, who married the hereditary princesses. There are
some indications that Cinyras was not in fact the founder of the temple at
Paphos. An older tradition ascribed the foundation to a certain Aerias,
whom some regarded as a king, and others as the goddess herself.(129)
Moreover, Cinyras or his descendants at Paphos had to reckon with rivals.
These were the Tamirads, a family of diviners who traced their descent
from Tamiras, a Cilician augur. At first it was arranged that both
families should preside at the ceremonies, but afterwards the Tamirads
gave way to the Cinyrads.(130) Many tales were told of Cinyras, the
founder of the dynasty. He was a priest of Aphrodite as well as a
king,(131) and his riches passed into a proverb.(132) To his descendants,
the Cinyrads, he appears to have bequeathed his wealth and his dignities;
at all events, they reigned as kings of Paphos and served the goddess as
priests. Their dead bodies, with that of Cinyras himself, were buried in
the sanctuary.(133) But by the fourth century before our era the family
had declined and become nearly extinct. When Alexander the Great expelled
a king of Paphos for injustice and wickedness, his envoys made search for
a member of the ancient house to set on the throne of his fathers. At last
they found one of them living in obscurity and earning his bread as a
market gardener. He was in the very act of watering his beds when the
king’s messengers carried him off, much to his astonishment, to receive
the crown at the hands of their master.(134) Yet if the dynasty decayed,
the shrine of the goddess, enriched by the offerings of kings and private
persons, maintained its reputation for wealth down to Roman times.(135)
When Ptolemy Auletes, king of Egypt, was expelled by his people in 57
B.C., Cato offered him the priesthood of Paphos as a sufficient
consolation in money and dignity for the loss of a throne.(136)
(M29) Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of these
priestly kings and the father of Adonis, there are some that deserve our
attention. In the first place, he is said to have begotten his son Adonis
in incestuous intercourse with his daughter Myrrha at a festival of the
corn-goddess, at which women robed in white were wont to offer
corn-wreaths as first-fruits of the harvest and to observe strict chastity
for nine days.(137) Similar cases of incest with a daughter are reported
of many ancient kings.(138) It seems unlikely that such reports are
without foundation, and perhaps equally improbable that they refer to mere
fortuitous outbursts of unnatural lust. We may suspect that they are based
on a practice actually observed for a definite reason in certain special
circumstances. Now in countries where the royal blood was traced through
women only, and where consequently the king held office merely in virtue
of his marriage with an hereditary princess, who was the real sovereign,
it appears to have often happened that a prince married his own sister,
the princess royal, in order to obtain with her hand the crown which
otherwise would have gone to another man, perhaps to a stranger.(139) May
not the same rule of descent have furnished a motive for incest with a
daughter? For it seems a natural corollary from such a rule that the king
was bound to vacate the throne on the death of his wife, the queen, since
he occupied it only by virtue of his marriage with her. When that marriage
terminated, his right to the throne terminated with it and passed at once
to his daughter’s husband. Hence if the king desired to reign after his
wife’s death, the only way in which he could legitimately continue to do
so was by marrying his daughter, and thus prolonging through her the title
which had formerly been his through her mother.
(M30) In this connexion it is worth while to remember that at Rome the
Flamen Dialis was bound to vacate his priesthood on the death of his wife,
the Flaminica.(140) The rule would be intelligible if the Flaminica had
originally been the more important functionary of the two, and if the
Flamen held office only by virtue of his marriage with her.(141) Elsewhere
I have shown reason to suppose that he and his wife represented an old
line of priestly kings and queens, who played the parts of Jupiter and
Juno, or perhaps rather Dianus and Diana, respectively.(142) If the
supposition is correct, the custom which obliged him to resign his
priesthood on the death of his wife seems to prove that of the two deities
whom they personated, the goddess, whether named Juno or Diana, was indeed
the better half. But at Rome the goddess Juno always played an
insignificant part; whereas at Nemi her old double, Diana, was
all-powerful, casting her mate, Dianus or Virbius, into deep shadow. Thus
a rule which points to the superiority of the Flaminica over the Flamen,
appears to indicate that the divine originals of the two were Dianus and
Diana rather than Jupiter and Juno; and further, that if Jupiter and Juno
at Rome stood for the principle of father-kin, or the predominance of the
husband over the wife, Dianus and Diana at Nemi stood for the older
principle of mother-kin, or the predominance of the wife in matters of
inheritance over the husband. If, then, I am right in holding that the
kingship at Rome was originally a plebeian institution and descended
through women,(143) we must conclude that the people who founded the
sanctuary of Diana at Nemi were of the same plebeian stock as the Roman
kings, that they traced descent in the female line, and that they
worshipped a great Mother Goddess, not a great Father God. That goddess
was Diana; her maternal functions are abundantly proved by the votive
offerings found at her ancient shrine among the wooded hills.(144) On the
other hand, the patricians, who afterwards invaded the country, brought
with them father-kin in its strictest form, and consistently enough paid
their devotions rather to Father Jove than to Mother Juno.
(M31) A parallel to what I conjecture to have been the original relation
of the Flaminica to her husband the Flamen may to a certain extent be
found among the Khasis of Assam, who preserve to this day the ancient
system of mother-kin in matters of inheritance and religion. For among
these people the propitiation of deceased ancestors is deemed essential to
the welfare of the community, and of all their ancestors they revere most
the primaeval ancestress of the clan. Accordingly in every sacrifice a
priest must be assisted by a priestess; indeed, we are told that he merely
acts as her deputy, and that she “is without doubt a survival of the time
when, under the matriarchate, the priestess was the agent for the
performance of all religious ceremonies.” It does not appear that the
priest need be the husband of the priestess; but in the Khyrim State,
where each division has its own goddess to whom sacrifices are offered,
the priestess is the mother, sister, niece, or other maternal relation of
the priest. It is her duty to prepare all the sacrificial articles, and
without her assistance the sacrifice cannot take place.(145) Here, then,
as among the ancient Romans on my hypothesis, we have the superiority of
the priestess over the priest based on a corresponding superiority of the
goddess or divine ancestress over the god or divine ancestor; and here, as
at Rome, a priest would clearly have to vacate office if he had no woman
of the proper relationship to assist him in the performance of his sacred
duties.
(M32) Further, I have conjectured that as representatives of Jupiter and
Juno respectively the Flamen and Flaminica at Rome may have annually
celebrated a Sacred Marriage for the purpose of ensuring the fertility of
the powers of nature.(146) This conjecture also may be supported by an
analogous custom which is still observed in India. We have seen how among
the Oraons, a primitive hill-tribe of Bengal, the marriage of the Sun and
the Earth is annually celebrated by a priest and priestess who personate
respectively the god of the Sun and the goddess of the Earth.(147) The
ceremony of the Sacred Marriage has been described more fully by a Jesuit
missionary, who was intimately acquainted with the people and their native
religion. The rite is celebrated in the month of May, when the _sal_ tree
is in bloom, and the festival takes its native name (_khaddi_) from the
flower of the tree. It is the greatest festival of the year. “The object
of this feast is to celebrate the mystical marriage of the Sun-god
(_Bhagawan_) with the Goddess-earth (_Dharti-mai_), to induce them to be
fruitful and give good crops.” At the same time all the minor deities or
demons of the village are propitiated, in order that they may not hinder
the beneficent activity of the Sun God and the Earth Goddess. On the eve
of the appointed day no man may plough his fields, and the priest,
accompanied by some of the villagers, repairs to the sacred grove, where
he beats a drum and invites all the invisible guests to the great feast
that will await them on the morrow. Next morning very early, before
cock-crow, an acolyte steals out as quietly as possible to the sacred
spring to fetch water in a new earthen pot. This holy water is full of all
kinds of blessings for the crops. The priest has prepared a place for it
in the middle of his house surrounded by cotton threads of diverse
colours. So sacred is the water that it would be defiled and lose all its
virtue, were any profane eye to fall on it before it entered the priest’s
house. During the morning the acolyte and the priest’s deputy go round
from house to house collecting victims for the sacrifice. In the afternoon
the people all gather at the sacred grove, and the priest proceeds to
consummate the sacrifice. The first victims to be immolated are a white
cock for the Sun God and a black hen for the Earth Goddess; and as the
feast is the marriage of these great deities the marriage service is
performed over the two fowls before they are hurried into eternity.
Amongst other things both birds are marked with vermilion just as a bride
and bridegroom are marked at a human marriage; and the earth is also
smeared with vermilion, as if it were a real bride, on the spot where the
sacrifice is offered. Sacrifices of fowls or goats to the minor deities or
demons follow. The bodies of the victims are collected by the village
boys, who cook them on the spot; all the heads go to the sacrificers. The
gods take what they can get and are more or less thankful. Meantime the
acolyte has collected flowers of the _sal_ tree and set them round the
place of sacrifice, and he has also fetched the holy water from the
priest’s house. A procession is now formed and the priest is carried in
triumph to his own abode. There his wife has been watching for him, and on
his arrival the two go through the marriage ceremony, applying vermilion
to each other in the usual way “to symbolise the mystical marriage of the
Sun-god with the Earth-goddess.” Meantime all the women of the village are
standing on the thresholds of their houses each with a winnowing-fan in
her hand. In the fan are two cups, one empty to receive the holy water,
and the other full of rice-beer for the consumption of the holy man. As he
arrives at each house, he distributes flowers and holy water to the happy
women, and enriches them with a shower of blessings, saying, “May your
rooms and granary be filled with rice, that the priest’s name may be
great.” The holy water which he leaves at each house is sprinkled on the
seeds that have been kept to sow next year’s crop. Having thus imparted
his benediction to the household the priest swigs the beer; and as he
repeats his benediction and his potation at every house he is naturally
dead-drunk by the time he gets to the end of the village. “By that time
every one has taken copious libations of rice-beer, and all the devils of
the village seem to be let loose, and there follows a scene of debauchery
baffling description—all these to induce the Sun and the Earth to be
fruitful.”(148)
Thus the people of Cyprus and Western Asia in antiquity were by no means
singular in their belief that the profligacy of the human sexes served to
quicken the fruits of the earth.(149)
(M33) Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty(150) and
to have been wooed by Aphrodite herself.(151) Thus it would appear, as
scholars have already observed,(152) that Cinyras was in a sense a
duplicate of his handsome son Adonis, to whom the inflammable goddess also
lost her heart. Further, these stories of the love of Aphrodite for two
members of the royal house of Paphos can hardly be dissociated from the
corresponding legend told of Pygmalion, the Phoenician king of Cyprus, who
is said to have fallen in love with an image of Aphrodite and taken it to
his bed.(153) When we consider that Pygmalion was the father-in-law of
Cinyras, that the son of Cinyras was Adonis, and that all three, in
successive generations, are said to have been concerned in a love-intrigue
with Aphrodite, we can hardly help concluding that the early Phoenician
kings of Paphos, or their sons, regularly claimed to be not merely the
priests of the goddess(154) but also her lovers, in other words, that in
their official capacity they personated Adonis. At all events Adonis is
said to have reigned in Cyprus,(155) and it appears to be certain that the
title of Adonis was regularly borne by the sons of all the Phoenician
kings of the island.(156) It is true that the title strictly signified no
more than “lord”; yet the legends which connect these Cyprian princes with
the goddess of love make it probable that they claimed the divine nature
as well as the human dignity of Adonis. The story of Pygmalion points to a
ceremony of a sacred marriage in which the king wedded the image of
Aphrodite, or rather of Astarte. If that was so, the tale was in a sense
true, not of a single man only, but of a whole series of men, and it would
be all the more likely to be told of Pygmalion, if that was a common name
of Semitic kings in general, and of Cyprian kings in particular.
Pygmalion, at all events, is known as the name of the famous king of Tyre
from whom his sister Dido fled;(157) and a king of Citium and Idalium in
Cyprus, who reigned in the time of Alexander the Great, was also called
Pygmalion, or rather Pumiyathon, the Phoenician name which the Greeks
corrupted into Pygmalion.(158) Further, it deserves to be noted that the
names Pygmalion and Astarte occur together in a Punic inscription on a
gold medallion which was found in a grave at Carthage; the characters of
the inscription are of the earliest type.(159) As the custom of religious
prostitution at Paphos is said to have been founded by King Cinyras and
observed by his daughters,(160) we may surmise that the kings of Paphos
played the part of the divine bridegroom in a less innocent rite than the
form of marriage with a statue; in fact, that at certain festivals each of
them had to mate with one or more of the sacred harlots of the temple, who
played Astarte to his Adonis. If that was so, there is more truth than has
commonly been supposed in the reproach cast by the Christian fathers that
the Aphrodite worshipped by Cinyras was a common whore.(161) The fruit of
their union would rank as sons and daughters of the deity, and would in
time become the parents of gods and goddesses, like their fathers and
mothers before them. In this manner Paphos, and perhaps all sanctuaries of
the great Asiatic goddess where sacred prostitution was practised, might
be well stocked with human deities, the offspring of the divine king by
his wives, concubines, and temple harlots. Any one of these might probably
succeed his father on the throne(162) or be sacrificed in his stead
whenever stress of war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes
did,(163) for the death of a royal victim. Such a tax, levied occasionally
on the king’s numerous progeny for the good of the country, would neither
extinguish the divine stock nor break the father’s heart, who divided his
paternal affection among so many. At all events, if, as there seems reason
to believe, Semitic kings were often regarded at the same time as
hereditary deities, it is easy to understand the frequency of Semitic
personal names which imply that the bearers of them were the sons or
daughters, the brothers or sisters, the fathers or mothers of a god, and
we need not resort to the shifts employed by some scholars to evade the
plain sense of the words.(164) This interpretation is confirmed by a
parallel Egyptian usage; for in Egypt, where the kings were worshipped as
divine,(165) the queen was called “the wife of the god” or “the mother of
the god,”(166) and the title “father of the god” was borne not only by the
king’s real father but also by his father-in-law.(167) Similarly, perhaps,
among the Semites any man who sent his daughter to swell the royal harem
may have been allowed to call himself “the father of the god.”
(M34) If we may judge by his name, the Semitic king who bore the name of
Cinyras was, like King David, a harper; for the name of Cinyras is clearly
connected with the Greek _cinyra_, “a lyre,” which in its turn comes from
the Semitic _kinnor_, “a lyre,” the very word applied to the instrument on
which David played before Saul.(168) We shall probably not err in assuming
that at Paphos as at Jerusalem the music of the lyre or harp was not a
mere pastime designed to while away an idle hour, but formed part of the
service of religion, the moving influence of its melodies being perhaps
set down, like the effect of wine, to the direct inspiration of a deity.
Certainly at Jerusalem the regular clergy of the temple prophesied to the
music of harps, of psalteries, and of cymbals;(169) and it appears that
the irregular clergy also, as we may call the prophets, depended on some
such stimulus for inducing the ecstatic state which they took for
immediate converse with the divinity.(170) Thus we read of a band of
prophets coming down from a high place with a psaltery, a timbrel, a pipe,
and a harp before them, and prophesying as they went.(171) Again, when the
united forces of Judah and Ephraim were traversing the wilderness of Moab
in pursuit of the enemy, they could find no water for three days, and were
like to die of thirst, they and the beasts of burden. In this emergency
the prophet Elisha, who was with the army, called for a minstrel and bade
him play. Under the influence of the music he ordered the soldiers to dig
trenches in the sandy bed of the waterless waddy through which lay the
line of march. They did so, and next morning the trenches were full of the
water that had drained down into them underground from the desolate,
forbidding mountains on either hand. The prophet’s success in striking
water in the wilderness resembles the reported success of modern dowsers,
though his mode of procedure was different. Incidentally he rendered
another service to his countrymen. For the skulking Moabites from their
lairs among the rocks saw the red sun of the desert reflected in the
water, and taking it for the blood, or perhaps rather for an omen of the
blood, of their enemies, they plucked up heart to attack the camp and were
defeated with great slaughter.(172)
(M35) Again, just as the cloud of melancholy which from time to time
darkened the moody mind of Saul was viewed as an evil spirit from the Lord
vexing him, so on the other hand the solemn strains of the harp, which
soothed and composed his troubled thoughts,(173) may well have seemed to
the hag-ridden king the very voice of God or of his good angel whispering
peace. Even in our own day a great religious writer, himself deeply
sensitive to the witchery of music, has said that musical notes, with all
their power to fire the blood and melt the heart, cannot be mere empty
sounds and nothing more; no, they have escaped from some higher sphere,
they are outpourings of eternal harmony, the voice of angels, the
Magnificat of saints.(174) It is thus that the rude imaginings of
primitive man are transfigured and his feeble lispings echoed with a
rolling reverberation in the musical prose of Newman. Indeed the influence
of music on the development of religion is a subject which would repay a
sympathetic study. For we cannot doubt that this, the most intimate and
affecting of all the arts, has done much to create as well as to express
the religious emotions, thus modifying more or less deeply the fabric of
belief to which at first sight it seems only to minister. The musician has
done his part as well as the prophet and the thinker in the making of
religion. Every faith has its appropriate music, and the difference
between the creeds might almost be expressed in musical notation. The
interval, for example, which divides the wild revels of Cybele from the
stately ritual of the Catholic Church is measured by the gulf which severs
the dissonant clash of cymbals and tambourines from the grave harmonies of
Palestrina and Handel. A different spirit breathes in the difference of
the music.(175)
(M36) The legend which made Apollo the friend of Cinyras(176) may be based
on a belief in their common devotion to the lyre. But what function, we
may ask, did string music perform in the Greek and the Semitic ritual? Did
it serve to rouse the human mouthpiece of the god to prophetic ecstasy? or
did it merely ban goblins and demons from the holy places and the holy
service, drawing as it were around the worshippers a magic circle within
which no evil thing might intrude? In short, did it aim at summoning good
or banishing evil spirits? was its object inspiration or exorcism? The
examples drawn from the lives or legends of Elisha and David prove that
with the Hebrews the music of the lyre might be used for either purpose;
for while Elisha employed it to tune himself to the prophetic pitch, David
resorted to it for the sake of exorcising the foul fiend from Saul. With
the Greeks, on the other hand, in historical times, it does not appear
that string music served as a means of inducing the condition of trance or
ecstasy in the human mouthpieces of Apollo and the other oracular gods; on
the contrary, its sobering and composing influence, as contrasted with the
exciting influence of flute music, is the aspect which chiefly impressed
the Greek mind.(177) The religious or, at all events, the superstitious
man might naturally ascribe the mental composure wrought by grave, sweet
music to a riddance of evil spirits, in short to exorcism; and in harmony
with this view, Pindar, speaking of the lyre, says that all things hateful
to Zeus in earth and sea tremble at the sound of music.(178) Yet the
association of the lyre with the legendary prophet Orpheus as well as with
the oracular god Apollo seems to hint that in early days its strains may
have been employed by the Greeks, as they certainly were by the Hebrews,
to bring on that state of mental exaltation in which the thick-coming
fancies of the visionary are regarded as divine communications.(179) Which
of these two functions of music, the positive or the negative, the
inspiring or the protective, predominated in the religion of Adonis we
cannot say; perhaps the two were not clearly distinguished in the minds of
his worshippers.
(M37) A constant feature in the myth of Adonis was his premature and
violent death. If, then, the kings of Paphos regularly personated Adonis,
we must ask whether they imitated their divine prototype in death as in
life. Tradition varied as to the end of Cinyras. Some thought that he slew
himself on discovering his incest with his daughter;(180) others alleged
that, like Marsyas, he was defeated by Apollo in a musical contest and put
to death by the victor.(181) Yet he cannot strictly be said to have
perished in the flower of his youth if he lived, as Anacreon averred, to
the ripe age of one hundred and sixty.(182) If we must choose between the
two stories, it is perhaps more likely that he died a violent death than
that he survived to an age which surpassed that of Thomas Parr by eight
years,(183) though it fell far short of the antediluvian standard. The
life of eminent men in remote ages is exceedingly elastic and may be
lengthened or shortened, in the interests of history, at the taste and
fancy of the historian.