Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/381

Rh Aryan world. ^ The history of the Semitic tribes was essentially the CHAP. same. The names which they had used at first simply as titles of ' ' God underwent no process of phonetic decay like that which con- verted the name of the glistening ether into the Vedic Dyaus and the Greek Zeus. The Semitic epithets for the Divine Being had never been simple names for natural phenomena ; they were mostly general terms, expressing the greatness, the power, and the glory of God. But though El and Baal, Moloch and Milcom, never lost their meaning, the idea which their teachers may have intended to convey by these terms was none the less overlaid and put out of sight. Each epithet now became a special name for a definite deity, and the people generally sank into a worship of many gods as effectually as any of the Aryan tribes, and clung to it more obstinately.

The recognition of beings powerful enough to injure, and perhaps placable enough to benefit, the children of men, involved the the vivify-necessity of a worship or cultus. They were all of them gods of life j^^namre^ and death, of reproduction and decay, of the great mystery which forced itself upon the thoughts of men from infancy to old age. If the language of poets in general describes the phenomena of nature under metaphors suggested by the processes of reproduction and multiplication in the animal and vegetable world, the form which the idea would take among rude tribes with a merely sensuous speech is sufficiently obvious. The words in which ^schylos and Shelley speak of the marriage of the heaven and the earth do but throw a veil of poetry over an idea which might easily become coarse and repulsive, while they point unmistakeably to the crude sensuousness which adored the principle of life under the signs of the organs of reproduction in the world of animals and vegetables. The male and female powers of nature were denoted respectively by an upright and an oval emblem, and the conjunction of the two furnished at once the altar and the ashera, or grove, against which the Hebrew prophets lifted up their voice in earnest protest. It is clear that such a cultus as this would carry with it a constantly increasing danger, until the original character of the emblem should be as thoroughly disguised as the names of some of the Vedic deities when transferred to Hellenic soil. But they have never been so disguised in India as amongst the ancient Semitic tribes ; ^ and in the kingdoms both of

' Max Miiller, "Semitic Mono- tragen durften (Thucyd. vi. 56; Suid. theism," Chips, ii. 369. s.v. 'A^^r]cpopla) und des Phalhis Ver-

' "Wie wenig das Alterthum den ehrung selbst von den Vcstalischen Begriff der Unzucht mit diesem Bilde Jungfrauen (Plin. xxviii. 4, 7)." — Nork, verband, beweist, dass in den Elcusi- Jieal-lVdrterbuch, s.v. Phalhiscuh, 52. nien nur die Jungfrauen die d7rd/5^rjTa Even when the emblems still retain