CHAPTER XI—RELIGION

Strength of the religious sentiment among the Phoenicians—

Proofs—First stage of the religion, monotheistic—Second

stage, a polytheism within narrow limits—Worship of Baal—

of Ashtoreth—of El or Kronos—of Melkarth—of Dagon—of

Hadad—of Adonis—of Sydyk—of Esmun—of the Cabeiri—of

Onca—of Tanith—of Beltis—Third stage marked by

introduction of foreign deities—Character of the Phoenician

worship—Altars and sacrifice—Hymns of praise, temples, and

votive offerings—Wide prevalence of human sacrifice and of

licentious orgies—Institution of the Galli—Extreme

corruption of the later religion—Views held on the subject

of a future life—Piety of the great mass of the people

earnest, though mistaken.

There can be no doubt that the Phoenicians were a people in whose minds religion and religious ideas occupied a very prominent place. Religiousness has been said to be one of the leading characteristics of the Semitic race;0111 and it is certainly remarkable that with that race originated the three principal religions, two of which are the only progressive religions, of the modern world. Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism all arose in Western Asia within a restricted area, and from nations whose Semitic origin is unmistakable. The subject of ethnic affinities and differences, of the transmission of qualities and characteristics, is exceedingly obscure; but, if the theory of heredity be allowed any weight at all, there should be no difficulty in accepting the view that particular races of mankind have special leanings and aptitudes.

Still, the religiousness of the Phoenicians does not rest on any à priori arguments, or considerations of what is likely to have been. Here was a nation among whom, in every city, the temple was the centre of attraction, and where the piety of the citizens adorned every temple with abundant and costly offerings. The monarchs who were at the head of the various states showed the greatest zeal in continually maintaining the honour of the gods, repaired and beautified the sacred buildings, and occasionally added to their kingly dignity the highly esteemed office of High Priest.0112 The coinage of the country bore religious emblems,0113 and proclaimed the fact that the cities regarded themselves as under the protection of this or that deity. Both the kings and their subjects bore commonly religious names—names which designated them as the worshippers or placed them under the tutelage of some god or goddess. Abd-alonim, Abdastartus, Abd-osiris, Abdemon (which is properly Abd-Esmun), Abdi-milkut, were names of the former kind, Abi-baal (= “Baal is my father”), Itho-bal (= “with him is Baal”), Baleazar or Baal-azur (= “Baal protects”), names of the latter.

The Phoenician ships carried images of the gods0114 in the place of figure-heads. Wherever the Phoenicians went, they bore with them their religion and their worship; in each colony they planted a temple or temples, and everywhere throughout their wide dominion the same gods were worshipped with the same rites and with the same observances.

In considering the nature of the Phoenician religion, we must distinguish between its different stages. There is sufficient reason to believe that originally, either when they first occupied their settlements upon the Mediterranean or before they moved from their primitive seats upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Phoenicians were Monotheists. We must not look for information on this subject to the pretentious work which Philo of Byblus, in the first or second century of our era, put forth with respect to the “Origines” of his countrymen, and attributed to Sanchoniatho;0115 we must rather look to the evidence of language and fact, records which may indeed be misread, but which cannot well be forged or falsified. These will show us that in the earliest times the religious sentiment of the Phoenicians acknowledged only a single deity—a single mighty power, which was supreme over the whole universe. The names by which they designated him were El, “great;” Ram or Rimmon, “high;” Baal, “Lord;” Melek or Molech, “King;” Eliun, “Supreme;” Adonai, “My Lord;” Bel-samin, “Lord of Heaven,” and the like.

0116 Distinct deities could no more be intended by such names as these than by those under which God is spoken of in the Hebrew Scriptures, several of them identical with the Phoenician names—El or Elohim, “great;” Jehovah, “existing;” Adonai, “my Lord;” Shaddai, “strong;” El Eliun,0117 “the supreme Great One.” How far the Phoenicians actually realised all that their names properly imply, whether they went so far as to divest God wholly of a material nature, whether they viewed Him as the Creator, as well as the Lord, of the world, are problems which it is impossible, with the means at present at our disposal, to solve. But they certainly viewed Him as “the Lord of Heaven,"0118 and, if so, no doubt also as the Lord of earth; they believed Him to be “supreme” or “the Most High;” and they realised his personal relation to each one of his worshippers, who were privileged severally to address Him as Adonai—“my Lord.

” It may be presumed that at this early stage of the religion there was no idolatry; when One God alone is acknowledged and recognised, the feeling is naturally that expressed in the Egyptian hymn of praise—“He is not graven in marble; He is not beheld; His abode is unknown; there is no building that can contain Him; unknown is his name in heaven; He doth not manifest his forms; vain are all representations."0119

But this happy state of things did not—perhaps we may say, could not—in the early condition of the human intelligence, last long. Fallen man, left to himself, very soon corrupts his way upon the earth; his hands deal with wickedness; and, in a little while, “every imagination of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually."1110 When he becomes conscious to himself of sin, he ceases to be able to endure the thought of One Perfect Infinite Being, omnipotent, ever-present, who reads his heart, who is “about his path, and about his bed, and spies out all his ways."1111 He instinctively catches at anything whereby he may be relieved from the intolerable burden of such a thought; and here the imperfection of language comes to his aid. As he has found it impossible to express in any one word all that is contained in his idea of the Divine Being, he has been forced to give Him many names, each of them originally expressive of some one of that Being’s attributes. But in course of time these words have lost their force—their meaning has been forgotten—and they have come to be mere proper names, designative but not significative. Here is material for the perverted imagination to work upon.

A separate being is imagined answering to each of the names; and so the nomina become numina.1112 Many gods are substituted for one; and the idea of God is instantly lowered. The gods have different spheres. No god is infinite; none is omnipotent, none omnipresent; therefore none omniscient. The aweful, terrible nature of God is got rid of, and a company of angelic beings takes its place, none of them very alarming to the conscience.

In its second stage the religion of Phoenicia was a polytheism, less multitudinous than most others, and one in which the several divinities were not distinguished from one another by very marked or striking features. At the head of the Pantheon stood a god and a goddess—Baal and Ashtoreth. Baal, “the Lord,” or Baal-samin,1113 “the Lord of Heaven,” was compared by the Greeks to their Zeus, and by the Romans to their Jupiter. Mythologically, he was only one among many gods, but practically he stood alone; he was the chief of the gods, the main object of worship, and the great ruler and protector of the Phoenician people. Sometimes, but not always, he had a solar character, and was represented with his head encircled by rays.1114 Baalbek, which was dedicated to him, was properly “the city of the Sun,” and was called by the Greeks Heliopolis. The solar character of Baal is, however, far from predominant, and as early as the time of Josiah we find the Sun worshipped separately from him,1115 no doubt under a different name. Baal is, to a considerable extent, a city god. Tyre especially was dedicated to him; and we hear of the “Baal of Tyre"1116 and again of the “Baal of Tarsus.

"1117 Essentially, he was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature—“the god of the creative power, bringing all things to life everywhere."1118 Hence, “his statue rode upon bulls, for the bull was the symbol of generative power; and he was also represented with bunches of grapes and pomegranates in his hand,"1119 emblems of productivity. The sacred conical stones and pillars dedicated in his temples1120 may have had their origin in a similar symbolism. As polytheistic systems had always a tendency to enlarge themselves, Baal had no sooner become a separate god, distinct from El, and Rimmon, and Molech, and Adonai, than he proceeded to multiply himself, and from Baal became Baalim,1121 either because the local Baals—Baal-Tzur, Baal-Sidon, Baal-Tars, Baal-Libnan, Baal-Hermon—were conceived of as separate deities, or because the aspects of Baal—Baal as Sun-God, Baal as Lord of Heaven, Baal as lord of flies,1122, &c.—were so viewed, and grew to be distinct objects of worship. In later times he was identified with the Egyptian Ammon, and worshipped as Baal-Hammon.

Baal is known to have had temples at Baalbek, at Tyre, at Tarsus, at Agadir1123 (Gades), in Sardinia,1124 at Carthage, and at Ekron. Though not at first worshipped under a visible form, he came to have statues dedicated to him,1125 which received the usual honours. Sometimes, as already observed, his head was encircled with a representation of the solar rays; sometimes his form was assimilated to that under which the Egyptians of later times worshipped their Ammon. Seated upon a throne and wrapped in a long robe, he presented the appearance of a man in the flower of his age, bearded, and of solemn aspect, with the carved horn of a ram on either side of his forehead. Figures of rams also supported the arms of his throne on either side, and on the heads of these two supports his hands rested.1126

The female deity whose place corresponded to that of Baal in the Phoenician Pantheon, and who was in a certain sense his companion and counterpart, was Ashtoreth or Astarte. As Baal was the embodiment of the generative principle in nature, so was Ashtoreth of the receptive and productive principle. She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman’s fecundity.1127 Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.1128 Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named after her, Ashtoreth-Karnaim,1129 or “Astarte of the two horns.” Her images are of many forms. Most commonly she appears as a naked female, with long hair, sometimes gathered into tresses, and with her two hands supporting her two breasts.1130 Occasionally she is a mother, seated in a comfortable chair, and nursing her babe.1131 Now and then she is draped, and holds a dove to her breast, or else she takes an attitude of command, with the right hand raised, as if to bespeak attention.

Sometimes, on the contrary, her figure has that modest and retiring attitude which has caused it to be described by a distinguished archæologist1132 as “the Phoenician prototype of the Venus de Medici.” The Greeks and Romans, who identified Baal determinately with their Zeus or Jupiter, found it very much more difficult to fix on any single goddess in their Pantheon as the correspondent of Astarte. Now they made her Hera or Juno, now Aphrodite or Venus, now Athene, now Artemis, now Selene, now Rhea or Cybele. But her aphrodisiac character was certainly the one in which she most frequently appeared. She was the goddess of the sexual passion, rarely, however, represented with the chaste and modest attributes of the Grecian Aphrodite-Urania, far more commonly with those coarser and more repulsive ones which characterise Aphrodite Pandemos.1133 Her temples were numerous, though perhaps not quite so numerous as those of Baal. The most famous were those at Sidon, Aphaca, Ashtoreth-Karnaim, Paphos, Pessinus, and Carthage. At Sidon the kings were sometimes her high-priests;1134 and her name is found as a frequent element in Phoenician personal names, royal and other: e.g.

—Astartus, Abdastartus, Delæastartus, Am-ashtoreth, Bodoster, Bostor, &c.

The other principal Phoenician deities were El, Melkarth, Dagon, Hadad, Adonis, Sydyk, Eshmun, the Cabeiri, Onca, Tanith, Tanata, or Anaitis, and Baalith, Baaltis, or Beltis. El, or Il, originally a name of the Supreme God, became in the later Phoenician mythology a separate and subordinate divinity, whom the Greeks compared to their Kronos1135 and the Romans to their Saturn. El was the special god of Gebal or Byblus,1136 and was worshipped also with peculiar rites at Carthage.1137 He was reckoned the son of Uranus and the father of Beltis, to whom he delivered over as her especial charge the city of Byblus.1138 Numerous tales were told of him. While reigning on earth as king of Byblus, or king of Phoenicia, he had fallen in love with a nymph of the country, called Anobret, by whom he had a son named Ieoud. This son, much as he loved him, when great dangers from war threatened the land, he first invested with the emblems of royalty, and then sacrificed.1139 Uranus (Heaven) married his sister Ge (Earth), and Il or Kronos was the issue of this marriage, as also were Dagon, Bætylus, and Atlas.

Ge, being dissatisfied with the conduct of her husband, induced her son Kronos to make war upon him, and Kronos, with the assistance of Hermes, overcame Uranus, and having driven him from his kingdom succeeded to the imperial power. Besides sacrificing Ieoud, Kronos murdered another of his sons called Sadid, and also a daughter whose name is not given. Among his wives were Astarte, Rhea, Dioné, Eimarmené, and Hora, of whom the first three were his sisters.1140 There is no need to pursue this mythological tangle. If it meant anything to the initiated, the meaning is wholly lost; and the stories, gravely as they are related by the ancient historian, to the modern, who has no key to them, are almost wholly valueless.

Originally, Melkarth would seem to have been a mere epithet, representing one aspect of Baal. The word is formed from the two roots melek and kartha1141 (= Heb.kiriath, “city”), and means “King of the City,” or “City King,” which Baal was considered to be. But the two names in course of time drifted apart, and Melicertes, in Philo Byblius, has no connection at all with Baal-samin.1142 The Greeks, who identified Baal with their Zeus, viewed Melkarth as corresponding to their Heracles, or Hercules; and the later Phoenicians, catching at this identification, represented Melkarth under the form of a huge muscular man, with a lion’s skin and sometimes with a club.1143 Melkarth was especially worshipped at Tyre, of which city he was the tutelary deity, at Thasos, and at Gades. Herodotus describes the temple of Hercules at Tyre, and attributes to it an antiquity of 2,300 years before his own time.1144 He also visited a temple dedicated to the same god at Thasos.1145 With Gades were connected the myths of Hercules’ expedition to the west, of his erection of the pillars, his defeat of Chrysaor of the golden sword, and his successful foray upon the flocks and herds of the triple Geryon.

1146 Whether these legends were Greek or Phoenician in origin is uncertain; but the Phoenicians, at any rate, adopted them, and here have been lately found on Phoenician sites representations both of Geryon himself,1147 and the carrying off by Hercules of his cattle.1148 The temple of Heracles at Gades is mentioned by Strabo1149 and others. It was on the eastern side of the island, where the strait between the island and the continent was narrowest. Founded about B. C.1100, it continued to stand to the time of Silius Italicus, and, according to the tradition, had never needed repair.1150 An unextinguished fire had burnt upon its altar for thirteen hundred years; and the worship had remained unchanged—no image profaned the Holy of Holies, where the god dwelt, waited on by bare-footed priests with heads shaved, clothed in white linen robes, and vowed to celibacy.1151 The name of the god occurs as an element in a certain small number of Phoenician names of men—e.g. Bomilcar, Himilcar, Abd-Melkarth, and the like.

Dagon appears in scripture only as a Philistine god,1152 which would not prove him to have been acknowledged by the Phoenicians; but as Philo of Byblus admits him among the primary Phoenician deities, making him a son of Uranus, and a brother of Il or Kronis,1153 it is perhaps right that he should be allowed a place in the Phoenician list. According to Philo, he was the god of agriculture, the discoverer of wheat, and the inventor of the plough.1154 Whether he was really represented, as is commonly supposed,1155 in the form of a fish, or as half man and half fish, is extremely doubtful. In the Hebrew account of the fall of Dagon’s image before the Ark of the Covenant at Ashdod there is no mention made of any “fishy part;” nor is there anything in the Assyrian remains to connect the name Dagon, which occurs in them, with the remarkable figure of a fish-god so frequent in the bas-reliefs. That figure would seem rather to represent, or symbolise, either Hea or Nin. The notion of Dagon’s fishy form seems to rest entirely on an etymological basis—on the fact, i.e.that dag means “fish,” in Hebrew.

In Assyrian, however, kha is “fish,” and not dag; while in Hebrew, though dag is “fish,” dagan is “corn.” It may be noted also that the Phoenician remains contain no representation of a fish deity. On the whole, it is perhaps best to be content with the account of Philo, and to regard the Phoenician Dagon as a “Zeus Arotrios”—a god presiding over agriculture and especially worshipped by husbandmen. The name, however, does not occur in the Phoenician remains which have come down to us.

Hadad, like Dagon, obtains his right to be included in the list of Phoenician deities solely from the place assigned to him by Philo. Otherwise he would naturally be viewed as an Aramean god, worshipped especially in Aram-Zobah, and in Syria of Damascus.1156 In Syria, he was identified with the sun;1157 and it is possible that in the Phoenician religion he was the Sun-God, worshipped (as we have seen) sometimes independently of Baal. His image was represented with the solar rays streaming down from it towards the earth, so as to indicate that the earth received from him all that made it fruitful and abundant.1158 Macrobius connects his name with the Hebrew chad, “one;” but this derivation is improbable.1159 Philo gives him the title of “King of Gods,” and says that he reigned conjointly with Astarte and Demaroüs,1160 but this does not throw much light on the real Phoenician conception of him. The local name, Hadad-rimmon,1161 may seem to connect him with the god Rimmon, likewise a Syrian deity,1162 and it is quite conceivable that the two words may have been alternative names of the same god, just as Phoebus and Apollo were with the Greeks.

We may conjecture that the Sun was worshipped under both names in Syria, while in Phoenicia Hadad was alone made use of. The worship of Baal as the Sun, which tended to prevail ever more and more, ousted Hadad from his place, and caused him to pass into oblivion.

Adonis was probably, like Hadad, originally a sun-god; but the myths connected with him gave him, at any rate in the late Phoenician times, a very distinct and definite personality. He was made the son of Cinryas, a mythic king of Byblus,1163 and the husband of Astarte or Ashtoreth. One day, as he chased the wild boar in Lebanon, near the sources of the river of Byblus, the animal which he was hunting turned upon him, and so gored his thigh that he died of the wound. Henceforth he was mourned annually. At the turn of the summer solstice, the anniversary of his death, all the women of Byblus went in a wild procession to Aphaca, in the Lebanon, where his temple stood, and wept and wailed on account of his death. The river, which his blood had once actually stained, turned red to show its sympathy with the mourners, and was thought to flow with his blood afresh. After the “weeping for Tammuz"1164 had continued for a definite time, the mourning terminated with the burial of an image of the god in the sacred precinct. Next day Adonis was supposed to return to life; his image was disinterred and carried back to the temple with music and dances, and every circumstance of rejoicing.

1165 Wild orgies followed, and Aphaca became notorious for scenes to which it will be necessary to recur hereafter. The Adonis myth is generally explained as representing either the perpetually recurrent decay and recovery of nature, or the declension of the Sun as he moves from the summer to the winter constellations, and his subsequent return and reappearance in all his strength. But myths obtained a powerful hold on ancient imaginations, and the worshippers of Adonis probably in most cases forgot the symbolical character of his cult, and looked on him as a divine or heroic personage, who had actually gone through all the adventures ascribed to him in the legend. Hence the peculiarly local character of his worship, of which we find traces only at Byblus and at Jerusalem.

Sydyk, “Justice,” or, the “Just One,"1166 whose name corresponds to the Hebrew Zadok or Zedek, appears in the Phoenician mythology especially as the father of Esmun and the Cabeiri. Otherwise he is only known as the son of Magus (!) and the discoverer of salt.1167 It is perhaps his name which forms the final element in Melchizedek, Adoni-zedek,1168 and the like. We have no evidence that he was really worshipped by the Phoenicians.

Esmun, on the other hand, the son of Sydyk, would seem to have been an object of worship almost as much as any other deity. He was the special god of Berytus,1169 but was honoured also in Cyprus, at Sidon, at Carthage, in Sardinia, and elsewhere.1170 His name forms a frequent element in Phoenician names, royal and other:—e.g. Esmun-azar, Esmun-nathan, Han-Esmun, Netsib-Esmun, Abd-Esmun, &c. According to Damascius,1171 he was the eighth son of Sydyk, whence his name, and the chief of the Cabeiri. Whereas they were dwarfish and misshapen, he was a youth of most beautiful appearance, truly worthy of admiration. Like Adonis, he was fond of hunting in the woods that clothe the flanks of Lebanon, and there he was seen by Astronoë, the Phoenician goddess, the mother of the gods (in whom we cannot fail to recognise Astarte), who persecuted him with her attentions to such an extent that to escape her he was driven to the desperate resource of self-emasculation. Upon this the goddess, greatly grieved, called him Pæan, and by means of quickening warmth brought him back to life, and changed him from a man into a god, which he thenceforth remained.

The Phoenicians called him Esmun, “the eighth,” but the Greeks worshipped him as Asclepius, the god of healing, who gave life and health to mankind. Some of the later Phoenicians regarded him as identical with the atmosphere, which, they said, was the chief source of health to man.1172 But it is not altogether clear that the earlier Phoenicians attached to him any healing character.1173

The seven other Cabeiri, or “Great Ones,” equally with Esmun the sons of Sydyk, were dwarfish gods who presided over navigation,1174 and were the patrons of sailors and ships. The special seat of their worship in Phoenicia Proper was Berytus, but they were recognised also in several of the Phoenician settlements, as especially in Lemnos, Imbrus, and Samothrace.1175 Ships were regarded as their invention,1176 and a sculptured image of some one or other of them was always placed on every Phoenician war-galley, either at the stern or stem of the vessel.1177 They were also viewed as presiding over metals and metallurgy,1178 having thus some points of resemblance to the Greek Hephæstus and the Latin Vulcan. Pigmy and misshapen gods belong to that fetishism which has always had charms for the Hamitic nations; and it may be suspected that the Phoenicians adopted the Cabeiri from their Canaanite predecessors, who were of the race of Ham.1179 The connection between these pigmy deities and the Egyptian Phthah, or rather Phthah-Sokari, is unmistakable, and was perceived by Herodotus.

1180 Clay pigmy figurines found on Phoenician sites1181 very closely resemble the Egyptian images of that god; and the coins attributed to Cossura exhibit a similar dwarfish form, generally carrying a hammer in the right hand.1182 An astral character has been attached by some writers to the Cabeiri,1183 but chiefly on account of their number, which is scarcely a sufficient proof.

Several Greek writers speak of a Phoenician goddess corresponding to the Grecian Athene,1184 and some of them say that she was named Onga or Onca.1185 The Phoenician remains give us no such name; but as Philo Byblius has an “Athene” among his Phoenician deities, whom he makes the daughter of Il, or Kronos, and the queen of Attica,1186 it is perhaps best to allow Onca to retain her place in the Phoenician Pantheon. Philo says that Kronos by her advice shaped for himself out of iron a sword and a spear; we may therefore presume that she was a war-goddess (as was Pallas-Athene among the Greeks), whence she naturally presided over the gates of towns,1187 which were built and fortified for warlike purposes.

The worship of a goddess, called Tanath or Tanith, by the later Phoenicians, is certain, since, besides the evidence furnished by the name Abd-Tanith, i.e. “Servant of Tanith,"1188 the name Tanith itself is distinctly read on a number of votive tablets brought from Carthage, in a connection which clearly implies her recognition, not only as a goddess, but as a great goddess, the principal object of Carthaginian worship. The form of inscription on the tablets is, ordinarily, as follows:—1189