The Deities as Nature-Powers.
{99}
So far as we have gone our main question must be still regarded as
an open one. We may now compare the particular conceptions concerning
divinity that prevailed at the period to which our search is limited,
in the valley of the Euphrates, and in the other communities that are
in our route of comparison. Many striking points of general similarity
will present themselves, upon which we must not lay too much weight
for our argument, since all polytheisms possess a certain family
likeness: of more importance will be certain strikingly dissimilar
features, if we find any.
First, in regard to the general concepts or characters of the
divinities, the same formula seems mainly applicable to the
Mesopotamian as to the Hellenic facts: the leading divinities have
usually some distinct association with the world of nature; but the
natural phenomenon or elemental fact that may be there in the
background of their personality, becomes overlaid and obscured by the
complex ethical and mental traits that are evolved. Therefore the mere
nature-fact rarely explains the fully-developed god, either of Babylon
or of Hellas. A few salient examples will make this clear. It is only
perhaps Shamash the sun-god of Sippar, and Sin the moon-god of Ur,
that retain their nature-significance rarely obscured. The hymn to Sin
in Dr. Langdon’s {100} collection reveals an intelligible lunar
imagery throughout; but in another published by Zimmern,[100.1] his
personality becomes more spiritual and mystical; he is at once “the
mother-body who bears all life, and the pitiful gracious father,” the
divinity who has created the land and founded temples; under the
Assyrian régime he seems to have become a god of war.[100.2] Shamash
even surpasses him in grandeur and religious value, so far as we can
judge from the documents; but his whole ethical and spiritual
character, clearly articulated as it is, can be logically evolved from
his solar. But in studying the characters of Marduk and Nergal, for
instance, we feel that the physical theories of their origin help us
but little, and are at times self-contradictory; and it might be well
for Assyriologists to take note of the confusion and darkness that
similar theories have spread in this domain of Hellenic study. Thus we
are told that the Sun in the old Sumerian-Babylonian system gave birth
to various special personalities, representing various aspects of him:
Marduk is the spring-sun, rejoicing in his strength, although his
connection with Shamash does not seem specially close; yet Jeremias,
who expresses this opinion,[100.3] believes also that Marduk is a
storm-god, because “his word can shake the sea.” Shall we say, then,
that Jahwé is a storm-god “because the voice of the Lord shaketh the
cedar-trees”? The phrase is quite innocent if we only mean by it that
any and every personal God could send a storm; it becomes of doubtful
value if it signifies here that Marduk is an impersonation of the
storm. The texts seem sometimes to contradict each other; Ninib, for
instance, {101} is regarded by Jeremias[101.1] as the rising sun, on
the ground of certain phrases in his hymn of praise; but the concept
of him as a storm-god is more salient in the oldest texts, and thus he
is pre-eminently a deity of destruction and death, and becomes
specially an Assyrian war-god. Does it help us if we imagine him
originally as the Storm-Sun, as Jensen would have us? or is it not
allowable to suspect that solar terms of religious description became
a later Babylonian convention, and that any deity might attract them?
Nergal, again, the god of Kutha, has been supposed to have had a solar
origin, as the god of the midday and destructive sun;[101.2] yet his
special realm is Hades, where he ruled by the side of the goddess
Allatu, and his name is doubtfully interpreted as the Lord of the
Great Habitation, and thus he is regarded as a god of disease and
death. This did not hinder him from becoming with Ninib the great
war-god of the Assyrians and their god of the chase, nor a pious
Babylonian poet from exalting him as “God of the little ones, he of
the benevolent visage.”[101.3] In one of the Tel-El-Amarna texts he
is designated by an ideogram, that almost certainly means “the god of
iron.”[101.4] This last fact, if correct, is an illustration of that
which a general survey of the Babylonian texts at last impresses upon
us: the physical origin of the deity, if he had one, does not often
shape and control his whole career; the high god grows into manifold
forms, dilates into a varied spiritual personality, progresses with
the life of his people, reflects new aspects of life, altogether
independently of any physical idea of him that may have originally
prevailed. Adad, the {102} god of storms, becomes a god of prophecy,
and is addressed as a god of mercy in the fragment of a hymn.[102.1]
Ea the god of waters becomes _par excellence_ the god of wisdom, not
because waters are wise, but probably because Eridu, the seat of his
cult, was an immemorial home of ancient wisdom, that is to say, magic.
As for the great Nebo of Borsippa, Jeremias,[102.2] who is otherwise
devoted to solar theories, has some good remarks on the absence of any
sign of his nature-origin: his ideogram designates “the prophet,” in
his earliest character he is the writer, his symbol is the “stilus” of
the scribe. Yet he does not confine himself to writing: he is
interested in vegetation, and eulogised in one hymn as “he who openeth
the springs and causeth the corn to sprout, he without whom the dykes
and canals would run dry.” Surely this interest comes to him, not from
the planet Mercury,[102.3] but from his wisdom and his concern with
Babylonian civilisation, which depended upon dykes and canals. We are
presented here with a progressive polytheism, that is, one of which
the divinities show the power of self-development parallel with the
self-development of the people.
The question we have just been considering, the physical character of
the Babylonian deities in relation to their whole personality,
suggests two last reflections. Their gods have a certain relation to
the planets, which is preserved even in our modern astronomy. That the
early Sumerians worshipped stars is probable,[102.4] as the Sumerian
sign for divinity is a star; but that the Sumerian-Babylonian high
gods were personal forms of the planets, is denied by leading modern
Assyriologists,[103.1] {103} except in the case of the sun and the
moon, Shamash and Sin. It was only the Chaldaean astronomic theory
that came to regard the various planets in their varying positions as
special manifestations of the powers of the different personal gods;
and the same planet might be a manifestation, according to its
different positions, of different gods: the “star Jupiter at one point
is Marduk, at another point Nebo”; this dogma is found on a
seventh-century tablet, which declares at the same time that “Mercury”
is Nebo.[103.2] This planetary association of the deities is well
illustrated by the memorial relief of Asarhaddon found at Sinjerli,
and the relief of Maltaija, showing stars crowning their
heads;[103.3] but both these are later than the period with which we
are here immediately concerned.
Lastly, we fail to observe in that domain of the old Babylonian
religion which may be called nature-worship, any clear worship of the
earth regarded as a personal and living being, as the Hellenes
regarded Gaia. The great goddesses, Ishtar, the goddess at once
warlike and luxurious, virgin and yet unchaste, terrible and merciful,
the bright virgin of the sky, Bau, the wife of Ninib, the “amorous
lady of heaven,” are certainly not of this character. Still less is
Allatu, the monstrous and grim Queen of Hell, at whose breast the
lions are suckled. It seems that if the early Sumerians conceived the
earth as a personal divinity at all, they imagined it as a male
divinity. For in the inscriptions of Nippur, Enlil or Bel appears as a
Lord of the underworld, {104} meaning our earth as distinct from the
heavens: he is hymned as the “lord of the harvest-lands, lord of the
grain-fields”[104.1]--he is the “husbandman who tends the fields”;
when Enlil is angry, “he sends hunger everywhere.” In another hymn he
is thus described: “The great Earth-Mountain is Enlil, the
mountain-storm is he, whose shoulders rival the heavens, whose
foundation is the bright abyss”;[104.2] and again, “Lord, who makest
to abound pure oil and nourishing milk;… in the earth Lord of life art
thou”; “to give life to the ground thou dost exist.”[104.3] It is
evident that Enlil is more than the personal earth regarded as a solid
substance; he is rather the god of all the forces and life that move
on and in the earth, hence he is “the lord of winds.”[104.4] He is
more, then, than the mere equivalent of Gaia. One might have expected
to find a Sumerian counterpart for this goddess in Ninlil or Belit,
the wife and female double of Enlil or Bel: but in an inscription that
is dated as early as 4000 B.C. she is styled “The Queen of Heaven and
Earth,”[104.5] and though in a hymn of lamentation addressed to
her[104.6] she is described as the goddess “who causeth plants to
come forth,” yet the ecstatic and mysticising Babylonian imagination
has veiled and clouded her nature-aspect.
This strange religious poetry which had been fermenting for thousands
of years, was likely enough to transform past recognition the simple
aboriginal fact. It is only the lesser deities, the “Sondergötter” of
the Sumerian pantheon, whose nature-functions might remain clear and
unchanged: for instance, such a corn-deity as we see on a cylinder,
with corn-ears in {105} his hand and corn-stalks springing from his
shoulders.[105.1] Even the simple form of Tammuz, the darling of the
Sumerian people, has been somewhat blurred by the poetry of passion
that for long ages was woven about him. As Zimmern has shown in a
recent treatise,[105.2] he was never the chief deity of any
Babylonian or Assyrian state, but nevertheless one of great antiquity
and power with the Sumerian people, and his cult and story were
doubtless spreading westward in the second millennium. In spite of all
accretions and the obscurity of his name, which is interpreted to mean
“real son of the water-deep,”[105.3] we can still recognise the form
of the young god of vegetation who dies in the heat of the summer
solstice and descends to the world below, leaving the earth barren
till he returns. This idea is expressed by some of his names, “the
Lord of the land’s fruitfulness, the Lord of the shepherd’s dwelling,
the Lord of the cattle-stall, the God of grain,”[105.4] and by many
an allusion to his legend in the hymns, which are the most beautiful
and pathetic in the old Sumerian psalmody: “in his manhood in the
submerged grain he lay”; “how long still shall the verdure be
imprisoned, how long shall the green things be held in
bondage?”[105.5] An interesting title found in some of the
incantation liturgies is that of “the shepherd,” and like some other
vegetation-powers he is at times regarded as the Healer. Though he was
not admitted {106} as the compeer of the high gods into the Babylonian
or Assyrian pantheon, he may be said to have survived them all, and
his name and myth became the inspiration of a great popular religion.
No other of that vast fraternity of corn-spirits or vegetation-spirits
into which Dr. Frazer has initiated us, has ever had such a career as
Tammuz. In one of his hymns he is invoked as “Lord of the world of
Death,” because for a time he descended into Hell.[106.1] If this
idea had been allowed to germinate and to develop its full
potentiality, it might have changed the aspect of Babylonian
eschatology. But, as we shall see, the ideas naturally attaching to
vegetation, to the kindly and fair life of seeds and plants, were
never in Babylonia properly harmonised with those that dominated
belief concerning the lower world of the dead. The study of the
Tammuz-rites I shall reserve for a later occasion.
We have now to consider the other Anatolian cults from the point of
view of nature-worship. The survey need not detain us long as our
evidence is less copious. As regards the western Semites, our
trustworthy records are in no way so ancient as those that enlighten
us concerning Mesopotamia. Philo of Byblos, the interpreter of the
Phoenician Sanchuniathon, presents us only with a late picture of the
Canaanite religion, that may be marred by their own symbolic
interpretations. Because we are told[106.2] that “the Phoenicians and
Egyptians were the first to worship the sun and the moon and the
stars,”[106.2] or “the first to deify the growths of the
earth,”[106.3] we cannot conclude that in the second millennium the
religion of the Phoenicians was purely solar or astral, or merely the
cult of vegetation-gods. {107} “Baalshamin” means the lord of the
heavens, an Aramaic and Phoenician god, and Sanchuniathon explained
him as the sun;[107.1] but Robertson Smith gives good reason for the
view that the earliest conception of the local Baal was of a deity of
the fertilising spring, a local divine owner of a well-watered plot,
hence the giver of all life to fruits and cattle.[107.2] Nor are we
sure what was the leading “nature-aspect” of the cult of Astarte. The
title “Meleket Ashamaim,” “the Queen of the Heavens,” which Ezekiel
attaches to her, does not inform us precisely concerning her earliest
and original character. From her close association with the Minoan
goddess of Cyprus, she was no doubt worshipped as the source of the
life of plants and animals and men. Also, it is of some value to bear
in mind the later records concerning the worship of Helios at Tyre in
the Roman Imperial period, and of Helios and the thunder-god at
Palmyra, where Adad-Rimmon, the storm-god who was in power among the
western Semites in the earliest period, may have survived till the
beginning of Christianity. We may conclude from all this that in the
oldest period of the western Semite societies the cult of special
nature-deities was a prominent feature of the religion. But even these
may already in the second millennium have acquired a complex of
personal attributes ethical and spiritual. In the later Carthaginian
religion, the personal deities are clearly distinguished from the mere
nature-powers, such as the sun, earth, and moon; and this important
distinction may have arisen long before the date of the document that
proves it.[107.3]
{108}
Of the Hittite gods we may say this much at least, that the monuments
enable us to recognise the thunder-god with the hammer or axe, and in
the striking relief at Ibreez we discern the form of the god of
vegetation and crops, holding corn and grapes. The winged disk, carved
with other doubtful fetich-emblems above the head of the god who is
clasping the priest or king on the Boghaz-Keui relief, is a solar
emblem, borrowed probably from Egyptian religious art. And the Hittite
sun-god was invoked in the Hittite treaty with Rameses II.[108.1]
Whether the mother-goddess was conceived as the personal form of Gaia
is doubtful; her clear affinity with Kybele would suggest this, and in
the Hittite treaty with Rameses II. mentioned above, the goddess
Tesker is called the Mistress of the Mountains, the express title of
the Phrygian Mother, and another “the Mistress of the Soil.”[108.2]
Yet evidently the Hittite religion is too complex to be regarded as
mere nature-worship: the great relief of Boghaz-Keui shows a solemn
and elaborate ritual to which doubtless some spiritual concepts were
attached.
As regards the original ideas underlying the cults of those other
Anatolian peoples who were nearer in geographical position and perhaps
in race to the Aegean peoples, we have no explicit ancient records
that help us to decide for the second millennium. For some of these
various communities the goddess was, as we have seen, the supreme
power. The great Phrygian goddess Kybele is the cult-figure of most
importance for our purpose, and it is possible to divine her original
character with fair certainty.[108.3] In her attributes, functions,
and form, we can discern nothing celestial, {109} solar or lunar; she
was, and remained to the end, a mother-goddess of the earth, a
personal source of and life of fruits, beasts, and man: her favourite
haunt was the mountains, and her earliest image that we know, that
which the Greeks called Niobe on Mount Sipylos, seems like a human
shape emerging from the mountain-side: she loved also the mountain
caverns, which were called after her κύβελα; and according to one
legend she emerged from the rock Agdos, and hence took the name
Agdestis. The myth of her beloved Attis is clear ritual-legend
associated with vegetation; and Greek poetry and Greek cult definitely
linked her with the Greek Gaia. We gather also from the legend of
Attis and other facts that her power descended to the underworld, and
the spirits of the dead were gathered to her;[109.1] hence the snake
appears as her symbol, carved as an akroterion above her sepulchral
shrine, where she is sculptured with her two lions at Arslan
Kaya--“the Lion Rock in Phrygia”;[109.2] and her counterpart, the
Lydian Mother Hipta, is addressed as χθονίη.[109.3]
In all her aspect and functions she is the double of the great Minoan
mother-goddess described already, whose familiar animals are the lion
and the serpent, who claims worship from the mountain-top, and whose
character is wholly that of a great earth goddess with power doubtless
reaching down to the lower world of the dead. Only from Crete we have
evidence which is lacking in pre-Aryan Phrygia of the presence of a
thunder or sky-god by her side.[109.4]
{110}
Turning our attention now to the early Hellenic world, and to that
part of its religion which we may call Nature-worship, we discern
certain general traits that place it on the same plane in some
respects with the Mesopotamian. Certain of the higher deities show
their power in certain elemental spheres, Poseidon mainly in the
water, Demeter in the land, Zeus in the air. But of none of these is
the power wholly limited to that element: and each has acquired, like
the high gods of Assyria and Babylon and Jahwé of Israel, a complex
anthropomorphic character that cannot be derived, though the old
generation of scholars wearily attempted to derive it, from the
elemental nature-phenomenon. Again, other leading divinities, such as
Apollo, Artemis, Athena, are already in the pre-Homeric period, as far
as we can discern, pure real personalities like Nebo and Asshur,
having no discoverable nature-significance at all. Besides these
higher cults, we discern a vast number of popular local cults of
winds, springs, rivers, at first animistically and then
anthropomorphically imagined. So in Mesopotamia we find direct worship
of canals and the river. Finally, we discern in early Hellas a
multitude of special “functional” divinities or heroes,
“Sondergötter,” like Eunostos, the hero of the harvest: and it may be
possible to find their counterparts in the valley of the
Euphrates.[110.1] We have also the nameless groups of divine
potencies in Hellas, such as the Πραξιδίκαι, Μειλίχιοι, these being
more frequent in the Hellenic than in the Mesopotamian religion, which
presents such parallels as the Annunaki and the Igigi, nameless
daimones of the lower and upper world: and {111} these in both regions
may be regarded as products of animism not yet developed into theism.
But such general traits of resemblance in two developed polytheisms
deceive no trained inquirer; and it would be childish to base a theory
of borrowing on them. What is far more important are the marked
differences in the nature-side of the Greek polytheism, as compared
with the Sumerian-Babylonian. In the latter, the solar-element was
very strong, though perhaps not so omnipresent as some Assyriologists
assure us. On the contrary, in the proto-Hellenic system it was
strikingly weak, so far as we can interpret the evidence. The earliest
Hellenes certainly regarded the Sun as a personal animate being,
though the word Helios did not necessarily connote for them an
anthropomorphic god. But the insignificance of his figure in the
Homeric poems agrees well with the facts of actual cult. As I have
pointed out in the last volume of my _Cults_,[111.1] it was only at
Rhodes that Helios was a great personal god, appealing to the faith
and affections of the people, revered as their ancestor and the author
of their civilisation, and descending, we may believe, from the period
of the Minoan culture[111.2] with which Rhodes was closely associated
in legend. And it appears from the evidence of legend and Minoan art
that sun-worship was of some power in the pre-Hellenic Aegean
civilisation. In the Mycenaean epoch he may have had power in Corinth,
but his cult faded there in the historic age before that of Athena and
Poseidon. The developed Hellene preferred the more personal {112}
deity, whose name did not so obviously suggest a special phenomenon of
nature. And if he inherited or adopted certain solar personages, as
some think he adopted a sun-god Ares from Thrace, he seems to have
transformed them by some mental process so as to obliterate the traces
of the original nature-perception.
Even more significant for our purpose is the comparison of the two
regions from the point of view of lunar-cult. We have sufficiently
noted already the prominence of the moon-god Sin in the Babylonian
pantheon, an august figure of a great religion: and among all the
Semitic peoples the moon was a male personality, as it appears to have
been for the Vedic Indians and other Aryan peoples. The Hellenic
imagination here presents to us this salient difference, that the
personal moon is feminine, and she seems to have enjoyed the scantiest
cult of all the great powers of Nature. Not that anywhere in Greece
she was wholly without worship.[112.1] She is mentioned in a vague
record as one of the divinities to whom νηφάλια, “wineless offerings,”
were consecrated in Athens: she had an ancient place in the aboriginal
religion of Arcadia; of her worship in other places the records are
usually late and insignificant. The great Minoan goddess may have
attracted to herself some lunar significance, but this aspect of her
was not pronounced.
Here, then, is another point at which the theory of early Babylonian
influence in nascent Hellenic religion seriously breaks down. And in
this comparison of Nature-cults it breaks down markedly at two others.
The pantheon of Mesopotamia had early taken on an astral-character.
The primitive Hellenes doubtless had, like other peoples, their
star-myths; and their {113} superstitions were aroused and
superstitious practices evoked by celestial “teratology,” by striking
phenomena, such as eclipses, comets, falling stars.[113.1] But there
is no record suggesting that they paid direct worship to the stars, or
that their deities were astral personations, or were in the early
period associated with the stars: such association, where it arose, is
merely a sign of that wave of Oriental influence that moved westward
in the later centuries. The only clear evidences of star-cult in
Hellenic communities that I have been able to find do not disturb this
induction: Lykophron and a late Byzantine author indicate a cult of
Zeus Ἀστέριος in Crete, which cannot, even if real, be interpreted as
direct star-worship:[113.2] at Sinope, a city of Assyrian origin,
named after the Babylonian moon-god, a stone with a late inscription
suggests a cult of Seirios and the constellations;[113.3] and an
Attic inscription of the Roman Imperial epoch, mentions a priest of
the φωσφόροι, whom we must interpret as stellar beings.[113.4] What,
then, must we say about the Dioskouroi, whom we are generally taught
to regard as the personal forms of the morning- and the evening-star?
Certainly, if the astral character of the great Twin-Brethren of the
Hellenes were provedly their original one, the general statement just
put forth would have to be seriously modified. But a careful study of
their cult does not justify the conventional view; and the theory that
Wide has insisted on[113.5] appears to me the only reasonable account
{114} of them, namely, that originally they were heroic “chthonian”
figures, to whom a celestial character came later to be attached: it
is significant that the astral aspect of them is only presented in
comparatively late documents and monuments, not in Homer or the
Homeric hymn, and that their most ancient ritual includes a
“lectisternium,” which properly belonged to heroes and personages of
the lower world.
Lastly, the nature-worship of the Hellenes was pre-eminently concerned
with Mother-earth--with Ge-meter, and this divine power in its varied
personal forms was perhaps of all others the nearest and dearest to
the popular heart: so much of their ritual was concerned directly with
her. And some scholars have supposed, erroneously, I think, but not
unnaturally, that all the leading Hellenic goddesses arose from this
aboriginal animistic idea. We may at least believe this of Demeter and
Kore, the most winning personalities of the higher Hellenic religion.
And even Athena and Artemis, whatever, if any, was their original
nature-significance, show in many of their aspects and much of their
ritual a close affinity to the earth-goddess. But, as I have indicated
above, it is impossible to find in the early Mesopotamian religion a
parallel figure to Ge: though Ishtar was naturally possessed of
vegetative functions--so that, when she disappears below the world,
all vegetation languishes--yet it would be hazardous to say that she
was a personal form of earth: we may rather suspect that by the time
the Semites brought her to Mesopotamia from the West, she had lost all
direct nature-significance, and was wholly a personal individual.
Finally, the cleavage between the two groups of peoples in their
attitude towards the powers of nature is still further marked in the
evolution of certain moral and {115} eschatologic ideas. The concept
of a Ge-Themis, of Earth as the source of righteousness, and of
Mother-earth as the kindly welcomer of the souls of the dead, appears
to have been alien to Mesopotamian imagination, for which, Allatu, the
Queen of the lower world, is a figure wholly terrible.