Purity a Divine Attribute.
{163}
We may next consider the attribute of purity as a divine
characteristic, to see whether in this respect the East differed
markedly from the West. As regards ritual-law, all the religions of
the old world agree in demanding ritual-purity: the worshipper who
approaches the deities must be free from physical taint and impurity:
this idea is so world-wide and so deeply embedded in primitive
thought, that the mere presence of it is of no service for proving the
interdependence of any religions in the historic period. From this
ritual-law the concept naturally arises of “pure gods,” deities who
themselves are believed to be pure because they insist on purity in
their worshippers. Marduk is called “the purifier” in one of the
incantation-texts, in allusion to his power of exorcising the evil
demon of sickness by cleansing processes.[163.1] The cathartic rules
that the law of ritual prescribes will differ according to the
instincts and prejudices of different societies. But the Babylonian
service demanded more than mere ritual-purity; for instance, in a
fragment of a striking text published by Delitsch, we find this
injunction: “In the sight of thy God thou shalt be pure of heart, for
that is the distinction of the Godhead.”[163.2]
{164}
As regards the moral and spiritual sense of purity, the sense in which
we speak of “purity of heart,” we should naturally include purity in
respect of sexual indulgence. But in applying this test to the
Mesopotamian religion we are confronted with a singular difficulty. In
the first place, the mythology is strikingly pure in our modern sense
of the word, so far as the materials have as yet been put before us.
It agrees in this respect with the Hebraic, and differs markedly from
the Hellenic; the gods live in monogamic marriage with their
respective goddesses, and we have as yet found no licentious stories
of their intrigues. It may be that generally the Babylonian
imagination was restrained by an austerity and shy reverence that did
not control the more reckless and lighter spirit of the Hellene; or it
may be that the priestly and royal scribes, to whom we owe the whole
of the Babylonian religious literature that has come down to us,
deliberately excluded any element of licentiousness that they may have
found in the lower folklore. But there is one curious exception. In
the Epic of Gilgamesh the hero repulses the proffered love of Ishtar,
and taunts her with her cruel amours, giving a long list of her lovers
whom she had ruined: one of these is Tammuz, “the spouse of thy
youth,” upon whom “thou didst lay affliction every year”: then he
mentions her other lovers who suffered at her hands--a singular list:
a bird, a lion, a horse, a shepherd of the flock, some Babylonian
Paris or Anchises, whom Ishtar treated as Artemis treated Aktaion. We
must suppose these allusions are drawn from Babylonian folklore, of
which nothing else has survived, concerning the amorous adventures of
the goddess. Hence modern accounts are apt to impute a licentious
character to Ishtar, as a goddess of violent {165} and lawless
passion, and to connect with this aspect of her the institution in her
temple at Erech of the service of sacred prostitutes, attested by
certain cuneiform texts. In comparing the ritual of East and West, I
shall give some consideration to this phenomenal practice. But this
view of Ishtar is utterly contrary to that presented of her in the
hymns and liturgies. Not only are certain hymns to Ishtar
transcendently noble and spiritual in tone, surpassing most of the
greatest works of Babylonian religious poetry, but certain phrases
specially exalt her as the virgin-goddess. In one of the lamentations
we read, “Virgin, virgin, in the temple of my riches, am I.”[165.1]
“The spirit-maid, glory of Heaven: the Maiden Ishtar, glory of
Heaven.”[165.2] In a psalm to Nana, one of the by-names of Ishtar,
she is called “Virgin-goddess of Heaven”;[165.3] in another she
speaks of herself, “she of the pure heart, she without fear was
I.”[165.4] This virgin-character of hers must then be regarded as
fixed by such epithets and phrases, of which more examples might no
doubt be found. Therefore the phrase attached to her in the Epic of
Gilgamesh,[165.5] “Kadisti Ilani,” must not be translated as Dhorme
would translate it,[165.6] “the courtesan of the Gods,” merely on the
ground that the same word is applied to her temple-harlots: for the
word properly means “pure” from stain, hence “holy,”[165.7] and in
this latter sense it could be applied to her consecrated votaries, in
spite of their service, which seems to us {166} impure: the same word
“Kedesh” is used for the votaries of the same ritual in Phoenicia and
Syria. This apparent contradiction in the conception of Ishtar’s
character is sometimes explained[166.1] by the suggestion that she
was really a combination of two distinct goddesses, a voluptuous and
effeminate goddess of Erech, and a pure and warlike Assyrian goddess
of Nineveh. But there is no real contradiction; for in Babylonian
religious and liturgical literature the lower view of Ishtar is never
presented at all. She is always worshipped as pure and holy; the
licentiousness of folklore, if there was any such in vogue, was not
allowed to intrude into the temple-service. Therefore Ishtar is no
real exception to the rule that purity, even in our sense, is a
prevailing characteristic of Babylonian divinity, as it was of the
Hebraic.
But now another phenomenon claims our interest: while being a
virgin-goddess, she is sometimes addressed as a mother. In the
inscription of Sargon (722-705 B.C.) she is described as “the Lady of
the Heavenly Crown, the Mother of the Gods”;[166.2] and in some of
the older hymns, which have already been quoted, she speaks of herself
at one time as mother and at another as maid: “Mother who knows
lamentation,” and “I am the Virgin-Goddess.”[166.3] Similarly, in the
hymn to Nana she is called in one place “the Virgin-Goddess of
Heaven”; in another, “Mother of the faithful breasts.”[166.4] Another
goddess, Bau, who is eminently the mother or the wife-goddess, the
spouse of Ningirsu or Ninib, is characterised in a hymn to the latter
god as “thy spouse, the maid, the Lady of Nippur.”[166.5]
{167}
From these phrases, then, seems to emerge the conception of a
virgin-mother. Only we must not press it too far, or suppose at all
that it crystallised into a dogma. It is characteristic of the
ecstatic Babylonian imagination that in the swoon of rapture the
intellect does not sharply hold contradictions apart, and the mystic
enthusiasm reconciles contrary ideas as fused in one divine
personality. Thus even a divinity naturally and properly male, might
be mystically addressed as Father-Mother, for the worshipper craves
that the godhead should be all in all to him. Thus motherhood is the
natural function and interest of the goddess; therefore the Babylonian
supplicated his goddess as mother, even as mother of the gods, without
thinking of any divine offspring or of any literal genealogy or
theogony. Virginity is also beautiful, and a source of divine power
and virtue. Therefore the mother Bau might rejoice to be addressed
occasionally as maid. As for Ishtar, she was aboriginally, perhaps, a
maid, in the sense that no god entered into her worship; and this idea
shaped the early spiritual conception of her. But as a great goddess
she must show her power in the propagation of life; therefore she must
be recognised in prayer and supplication as a mother; the adorer
wishing to give her the virtue of both states, probably without
dogmatising or feeling the contradiction. This explanation appears
more likely, when we consider the psychologic temper of the Babylonian
poetry, its often incoherent rapture, than the other obvious one that
Ishtar the virgin happened in many places to appropriate to herself
the cult of a mother-goddess, though this might easily happen.
As regards the other polytheistic Semitic races, we can infer that the
same religious ideas concerning ritual-purity {168} were in vogue; but
our scanty records do not enable us to determine whether and how far
they were quickened by spiritual significance.[168.1] But we can
trace through Asia Minor the double concept of mother and virgin in
the personality of the goddesses; though it is difficult to decide
whether they ever coincided, and with what degree of definiteness, in
the same personage. Astarte must have been imagined generally as a
mother-goddess, and she appears conspicuously as the female consort of
Baal; thus her Hellenic equivalent is often given as Aphrodite; yet in
another aspect of her worship she must have appeared as virginal, for
she is also often identified with Artemis, just as a similar goddess
Anath in Cyprus was identified with Athena.[168.2] The goddess
Atargatis of Hierapolis, described by Lucian, was evidently a
mother-goddess, bearing, according to him, a marked resemblance to
Rhea, and placed in the temple by the side of her husband, Bel or
Zeus. Among the Sabaean inscriptions of South Arabia, we find a
dedication by some parents in behalf of their children to the goddess
Umm-Attar, a name that signifies “Mother-Attar” (or “Mother
Astarte”[168.3]; and a late record, too late to serve as witness for
the early period we are considering, speaks of a virgin-mother among
the Arabs.[168.4] Finally, the earliest Carthaginian inscriptions
record the cult of the great goddess Tanit, addressed usually as the
“Lady Tanit, the Face of Baal,” and called in one dedication “The
Great Mother.”[168.5] If she is the same as the divinity whom
Augustine describes as the Virgo Caelestis, the {169} Heavenly
Virgin,[169.1] then either the dual concept was mystically combined
in the same personage, or the Carthaginian goddess was worshipped at
different times and at different seasons as the mother and then as the
maid. But the evidence is quite uncertain, and we must not combine too
rashly the records of different ages.
Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we have noted the
monumental evidence among the Hittites for the worship of a
mother-goddess, who with her son figures in the procession on the
reliefs at Boghaz-Keui. It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive
relief as a large seated female with a child on her knees,[169.2] a
type which the Greeks would call κουροτρόφος. Her name may have been
Umma; for this divine word is now given us among the names of Hittite
divinities in cuneiform texts recently discovered, which have been
published and interpreted by Professor Sayce in the _Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society_.[169.3] He there connects the word with the
Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hittite goddess as the
ancestress both by name and nature of the Cappadocian goddess Mā,
famous at Comana in the later period. Now the name Mā designates “the
mother,” and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only with
the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis. I believe the
external inducement to this latter assimilation was the isolation of
Mā in her cult, into which no god entered. From this late evidence it
is too hazardous to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially
as the processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with a
ἱερὸς γάμος, the solemn union of a god and a goddess. As regards the
great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, it {170} has been somewhat
hastily concluded that here and there her cult included the mystic
idea of a virgin-mother. We have only some evidence from a late
period, and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from it
to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak. I have criticised
it elsewhere, and I found it and still find it very frail.[170.1] I
have not been able to detect any clear consciousness of the idea in
the cult and cult-legends of Kybele: we must not build much on the
Pessinuntian story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance to
the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of Kybele and Attis
is inconsistent with any dogma of the goddess’s virginity, nor was she
ever called Παρθένος in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with
whom the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united in
corporeal union.[170.2]
If we search the other parts of the Asia-Minor littoral, neither in
the prehistoric nor in the later periods before Christianity is the
concept we are seeking clearly to be traced. I cannot find the
Leto-Artemis, the goddess who was at once essentially a virgin and a
mother. What we discern in Crete is a great mother-goddess and a
virgin, Ἀφαία or Britomartis, “the Sweet Maid.” That the prehistoric
or later Cretans mystically combined {171} the two concepts in one
personality we do not know. When we examine legends and ritual,
usually dateless, of early Hellas, we are aware that a goddess who was
worshipped as a Maid in one locality might be worshipped as a Mother
in another; or the same goddess at different times of the year might
be worshipped now under one aspect, now under another. Hera of Argos
yearly renews her divinity by bathing in a certain stream. Kore, the
young earth-goddess, was probably an early emanation from Demeter. How
powerful in pre-Hellenic days was the appeal of the virginal aspect of
certain goddesses, is shown by the antiquity and the tenacity of the
dogma concerning the virginity of Artemis and Athena. Yet the latter
was called Μήτηρ at Elis[171.1]. But it would be very rash to declare
that here at last the Virgin-Mother is found in old Greece. Athena has
no offspring; there is neither loss nor miraculous preservation of her
virginity. Only the Elean women, wishing themselves to be mothers,
pray to the Virgin-goddess for offspring, and strengthen their prayer
by applying a word to Athena of such powerful spell-efficacy as
“Mother.” It would be a misinterpretation of the method of ancient
hieratic speech to suppose that Athena Μήτηρ was mystically imagined
as herself both Virgin and Mother.[171.2]
The ritualistic value of purity was probably a postulate of the
religious feeling of early Hellas, though Homer gives us only faint
glimpses of the idea. Φοῖβος was an old cult-title of Apollo, and its
root-significance may well have been “Pure.” We hear of Hagné, “the
pure goddess,” probably a reverential {172} name for Kore at the
Messenian Andania:[172.1] and on the hilltop above the Arcadian
Pallantion, Pausanias records the cult of a nameless group of
divinities called οἱ καθαροὶ θεοί,[172.2] a cult which, according
to his account of it, appears to have descended from very ancient
times. The question of purity in Greek ritual may be reserved for a
later stage in our comparative study. I will only remark here on the
fact that Greek worship, early and late, was in marked antagonism in
this respect to Greek mythology, the former being on the whole solemn
and beautiful, the latter often singularly impure. In fact, both in
the Phrygian and Hellenic popular imagination we detect an
extraordinary vein of grossness, that seems to mark off these Aryan
peoples sharply from the Mesopotamians, and equally, as far as we can
see, from the other Semites.