Page:The Mythology of the Aryan Nations.djvu/387

Rh CHAP. II. possessing in greater or less degree a talismanic power, but all manifesting the presence of the essential idea of boundless fertility which the symbol was specially adopted to denote. The Argo itself is divine. In was the work of a being akin to, if not identical with, Argos Panoptes, the all-seeing, who guards the heifer 16. In its prow Athene, the dawn-goddess, herself places a piece of wood^ from the speaking oaks of Dodona, and the ship is thus endowed with the power of warning and guiding the chieftains who form its crew. This mystic vessel reappears in the shell of Aphrodite, and in the ship borne in solemn procession to the Parthenon on the great Panathenaic festival,^ as the phallos was carried before the god in the great feasts of Dionysos. Over this ship floated the saffron- coloured robe woven for it by the hands of Athenian maidens, as the women in the temple of Jerusalem wove hangings for the Ashera of Baal. This ship again is the bark or boat- shaped vessel of which Tacitus speaks as the symbol employed by the Suevi in the worship of Isis. Whether this goddess is to be identified with the Teutonic Ziza worshipped in the countrj' about Augsburg is an indifferent matter. It is more likely that the name is given from a resemblance of attributes, as he calls Wuotan Mercury and Thor Mars. But it is strange that Tacitus should have satisfied himself with the remark that the sign pointed simply to a foreign cultus brought across the sea, when not only was the same symbol used in the Athenian processions of his own day, but the voyage of Isis was marked in the Roman rustic calendar on the 5th of March. ^ This ship of Isis was, however, nothing more nor less than the vehicle of the earth-goddess Herth or Aerth, whose sacred island Tacitus mentions in the same treatise.* Here too, as with the Ashera at Jerusalem and the ship of

^ Seemingly the Phallos, which gave her title of Pallas. In the issue this piece of wood, or pole, is as fatal to lason as the Stauros to Osiris, or the Mistletoe to Baldur. with the Phallic emblem is brought out, as we might expect, with great promi- nence in the Phrygian or Eastern my- thology. " Nun erziihlt Arnobius, Cybele habe mit ihrem Kleide den abge- schnittenen Phallus des Attes bedeckt, ein Gebrauch, welcher in den Mysterien der Isis gleichfalls vorkam, denn zu Byblos wurde im Tempel der Baaltis (Gottermutter) das heilige Holz ((pas, palus) von der Isis mit Leinwand be- deckt. — F/ut. de Is. c. 16. Nun wird auch die Bibelstelle (Ezech. xvi. 17) klar."— Nork, s.v. "Attes." • The parallelism of these myths was pointed out with singular accuracy by >Ir. Richard Price in his introduction to Warton's History of English Poetry. It is impossible for any student of comparative mythology to read this remarkable treatise, written some fifty years ago, without feeling that, here as elsewhere, other men have laboured, and we enter into their labours. passage from Appuleius in which the goddess says, that yearly her priests dedicate to her a new ship laden with the firstfruits of spring, adds that the carrj'ing in procession of ships, in which the Virgin Mary takes the place of Aphrodite or Astarte, has not yet wholly gone out of use, and notices the prohibitions issued at different times
 * The connexion of the robe or veil
 * Mr. Gould having quoted the