The History of Antiquity (Vol. 1-6). Duncker Max

continues, "there was an iron image of Cronus, which held out the hands in a downward position, so that the victim placed upon them rolled into a cavity filled with fire."[527] The cries of the victims, Plutarch tells us, were drowned by the noise of drums and flutes; the mothers were compelled to stand by without lamentation or sighing. If a sigh or a tear escaped them, they were regarded as dishonoured; but the child was burnt just the same. A Roman poet gives an invocation to the "paternal gods" of Carthage, whose temples are cleansed by murder, and who rejoice in being worshipped by the agony of mothers.[528]

The inscriptions of Ramses II. mentioned Astarte as the goddess of the Hittites; the name of their city Astaroth we have already found in the form of Astartu in the inscriptions of Tuthmosis III. (p. 343). The Philistines worshipped Astarte; for the Sidonians, the "great Astarte" was the goddess of their city. "A virgin-goddess"[529] she ruled over the fortune of battle; she is the goddess of war, bringing death and destruction, the goddess of death. Coins of Sidon represent her with a spear in her hand. As the goddess of war she carried a spear in her temples in Cyprus and Cythera.[530] In her temple on the ancient fortress of Carthage, she was represented riding on a lion, with a spear in her hand. The Istar of the Babylonians and Assyrians carried the bow (p. 270). When the Philistines carried off the armour of Saul, king of Israel, they dedicated it in the house of Astarte. If Astarte, according to Philo, consecrates a star on the island of Tyre, we have already seen (p. 270) that Venus when rising was the star of Istar at Babylon. Yet the Astarte of the Syrians stood in a closer relation to the moon. Philo told us that she carried on her head the head of an ox. The monuments of Sethos display, beside the bull's image of Baal, a cow's head with a segment of the moon; and on Carthaginian stones we find the full moon between the horns of an ox. With the horns of the moon the goddess is known as Astaroth Karnaim, i.e. the horned Astarte. The priests of Astarte were pledged to continence and celibacy, and on the priestesses of the "heavenly maiden," the "maiden of the sky,"[531] virginity was imposed. No married woman could enter her temples. In her temples, as in those of Moloch, burned the eternal fire.[532] Like Moloch, Astarte also received human sacrifices. To the virgin-goddess the youthful were offered, and maidens and women were burned.[533] As in the worship of Ashera the Syrians attempted to transfuse themselves into the nature of the goddess, to sink and pass into her being, so also the worship of Astarte required that they should become like the goddess, and that lust should be killed in them. It was the highest and most acceptable sacrifice, if priests and laymen made themselves eunuchs in honour of the virgin-goddess. During the festival of Astarte it was the custom, while the congregated people were thrown into excitement and frenzy by the sound of cymbals, drums, and double pipes, for young men to spring forward, seize the ancient sword which lay on the altar of the goddess, and therewith to mutilate themselves.[534] At a later time there were thousands of eunuch-attendants in the temples of Astarte, while others went about through the land in female clothing, their faces painted after the manner of women, begging and mortifying their flesh. To the sound of drums and pipes they whirled round with wild movements and contortions of the body, and bent their heads to the ground, so that their hair trailed in the mire. At the same time they bit their arms and cut themselves with swords. The most frenzied began to moan and prophesy. At last he bewailed his sins, took up the knotted whip, and beat himself on the back till the blood ran down. When the dancing and the scourging was ended, the eunuchs collected subscriptions from the bystanders. Some gave money; others, milk, wine, cheese, and meal. These they hastily gathered together in order to compensate, by a hearty meal at evening in their retreat, for the torments of the day.[535]

These friendly and hostile, creative and destructive, natural and supernatural powers stood mutually opposed in the religious consciousness of the Syrians. Just as the Egyptians went forward, and saw in the myth of Osiris the beneficent deity as the conqueror of the evil god in the process of vegetative life and in the revolution of the year, so did the Semitic nations unite the beneficent and destructive powers of heaven in the same deities, who in turn dispensed blessing and destruction, and by themselves and in themselves overcame the destructive element. This combination is obvious in the form of Baal of Tyre, whom the Tyrians invoked as the king and protector of their city under the name of Melkarth, i.e. city-king.[536] The Greeks identified this god with their own Heracles; but as the protector of navigation and the god of the sea, they are acquainted with Melkarth, under his native name of Melicertes. Herodotus was astonished at the splendour of the ancient temple of this god at Tyre, at the richness and beauty of the votive offerings, and the two rectangular pillars in the temple, the one of pure gold, the other of emerald, and so large that it shone by night.[537] Hiram, king of Tyre, had dedicated the first about the year 1,000 B.C. to Melkarth. To the Phenicians Baal Melkarth was a labouring and conquering deity, who creates new life out of destruction, vanquishes the baneful signs in the zodiac, brings back the sun from perigee and apogee, from excessive heat and wintry cold, to beneficial operation, whose life is seen in the sun's course.[538] When the sun burned with the fiercest glow, and stood in the sign of the lion, then the good sun-god must vanquish the lion or symbol of fiery heat; he pressed the lion to his own breast, forced back into himself the fiery beams, and consumed himself in his own heat. The good sun-god must overcome the evil sun-god, or he must consume himself, so that with renewed youth he may again secure gentler warmth for the earth. When the sun appeared most remote from the earth, Baal of Tyre had gone on a journey or was asleep. In the Phenician colonies in the West, in Crete, Sicily, and at Gades, in the distant land of the setting sun, were pointed out the resting-places of the deity, from which he arose with the vernal sun to new activity and life. At the end of February or the beginning of March the festival of the awakening of the god took place;[539] and if the Greeks tell us that Iolaus awoke the god, Iolaus is merely a Grecised form of Jubal, i.e. the beauty of Baal, and therefore only a mythical expression for the god himself as re-awakening with the beautiful vernal sun.[540] From these ideas of strife and conquest Melkarth could become in the eyes of the Phenicians a warrior-hero, who was thought to have wandered over the earth, as the sun revolves round it, in order to set it free from hostile powers. With this conception may be connected the story that the procreative power was taken from Uranus and transferred to the springs and rivers, and that El's brother Atlas, i.e. Atel, a name which perhaps may be explained as meaning darkness, is overthrown and cast into the abyss. In the legends of the Phenicians it was Melkarth who reduced the barbarous tribes of the distant coasts, who founded the ancient colonies of the Phenicians on the western coasts of the Mediterranean, and set up, as the boundary stone of his wanderings, the two great pillars at the end of the earth, the rocks of Calpe and Abyle on the Straits of Gibraltar. As the restrainer of the burning heat, of the lion, and of giants, Melkarth is the Heracles of the Greeks; as a wandering god who gives order to the life of mankind, he bears, in Greece, the names Minos and Cadmus (the name Kadmon means, "the man of the East"), by which forms they expressed not the deity only, but the old supremacy of the Phenicians, and their settlements on their islands and coasts. The Hebrews tell us that once, when a great drought attacked the land, the priests of Baal assembled at Carmel and invoked the god to consume with his rays the bull which they placed as a sacrifice on the billets of the altar. But the god heard them not.