Chapter 31. Adonis in Cyprus.
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. 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. 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. Naturally the Semitic colonists brought their gods with
them from the mother-land. They worshipped Baal of the Lebanon,
who may well have been Adonis, and at Amathus on the south
coast they instituted the rites of Adonis and Aphrodite, or rather
Astarte. 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. 1
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. The
sanctuary of Aphrodite at Old Paphos (the modern Kuklia) was one
of the most celebrated shrines in the ancient world. According to
Herodotus, it was founded by Phoenician colonists from Ascalon;
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. In like manner, a cone was
the emblem of Astarte at Byblus, of the native goddess whom the
Greeks called Artemis at Perga in Pamphylia, and of the sun-god
Heliogabalus at Emesa in Syria. Conical stones, which apparently
served as idols, have also been found at Golgi in Cyprus, and in
the Phoenician temples of Malta; and cones of sandstone came to
light at the shrine of the "Mistress of Torquoise" among the barren
hills and frowning precipices of Sinai. 2
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. 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. 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. 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. "It was a law of the Amorites, that she who
was about to marry should sit in fornication seven days by the
gate." 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. A Greek inscription found at Tralles in Lydia 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. In Armenia the noblest families
dedicated their daughters to the service of the goddess Anaitis in
her temple of 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.
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. 3
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; 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. 4
At Paphos the custom of religious prostitution is said to have been
instituted by King Cinyras, 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. 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. 5
Among the stories which were told of Cinyras, the ancestor of the
priestly kings of Paphos 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. Similar cases of incest
with a daughter are reported of many ancient kings. 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. 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. 6
Cinyras is said to have been famed for his exquisite beauty and to
have been wooed by Aphrodite herself. Thus it would appear, as
scholars have already observed, 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, a
Phoenician king of Cyprus, who is said to have fallen in love with
an image of Aphrodite and taken it to his bed. 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 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, 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. 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 king of Tyre from whom his
sister Dido fled; 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. 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.
As the custom of religious prostitution at Paphos is said to have
been founded by king Cinyras and observed by his daughters, 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. 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 or be sacrificed in his stead whenever stress of
war or other grave junctures called, as they sometimes did, 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.
This interpretation is confirmed by a parallel Egyptian usage; for in
Egypt, where the kings were worshipped as divine, the queen was
called "the wife of the god" or "the mother of the god," and the title
"father of the god" was borne not only by the king's real father but
also by his father-in-law. 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." 7
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. 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; 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. 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.
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. 8
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, 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. 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. 9