Page:Myth, Ritual, and Religion (Volume 1).djvu/347

, the Semitic name for fetish-stones; Dagon, an old Biblical friend, and Atlas. Now the inconséquences of Heaven were numerous and fruitful, so that Earth became jealous, and would have shunned his society in her anger. As he persisted in his embraces, and tried to kill her children, Earth called in her offspring to her assistance. Then El (Cronus) declared war on his father. He himself had two daughters, Persephone and Athene. By the counsel of the former he forged an iron scimitar (harpê) and spear. Then his ally, Hermes, excited El by a magical incantation, and they assailed Heaven. Cronus or El was victor in the battle, and founded and fortified Byblos. His allies were called Elohim, deriving that name from El. Old Heaven, in exile, was still of good heart, especially as El kept cutting off the heads of his heirs and offspring, a policy hereditary in this truculent family. Heaven also invented animated stones, called Bætylia—fetish-stones, in short. Dagon invented agriculture, and was styled Zeus Arotrios by the Greeks. Finally, as the heavenly war dragged on its course, El lay in wait for Heaven, took him in an ambuscade, and treated him as cruelly as Tutenganahau used Rangi, or as Cronus mutilated Uranus. The place where all this occurred is still shown near Byblos. At a later date, El, during a famine, sacrificed his son to Heaven, and was circumcised with all his company, wherein he found no followers among the Greeks. Taût next invented for El, by way of symbols of his majesty, four eyes, two in front and two behind; and four wings, two raised, two in repose. It is needless to say that Cronus in Greek art has no attributes like these of El, his Phœnician counterpart.

All this drivel was allegorised, says the author, mixed with physical philosophy, and written out by the first Phœnician hierophant. The Greeks, he adds, borrowed, and decorated, and distorted the Phœnician cosmogonic traditions, and now the Greek myths, he complains, have superseded the old genuine traditions, "so that the truth seems raving folly, and the false story true."

It seems impossible to determine with certainty how much of this mythic Phœnician narrative is really antique, how much it contains of Greek traditions, or how much, if anything, Greek traditions here owe to Phœnician sources. If such a