Chapter III. Adonis in Cyprus.

(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.