Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/33

Rh priests clothed in black made an offering to Saturn In his black six-sided temple. Similar offerings were made to the planets Mars and Jupiter on the third and fifth days of the week. But although these specialities of planetary worship appeared in the religious systems of most of the Semitic tribes, these nations were always ready to fall back on the general worship of the Sun and the Moon, the latter being also regarded as the goddess of the Earth ; and while the former presided over all the modifications of the rites sacred to Baal or Moloch, the latter appears as his correlative in all that was either savage or lascivious in his peculiar worship.

As a malignant deity, or more specifically as Moloch, the sun-god is tauriform and is appeased by the offering of human victims. In the same capacity his sister deity, whether representing the Moon or the Earth, has the head of a cow, and is always connected, in the oldest forms of her worship, with the same horrid rites. It is very interesting to trace this Semitic development of the idea that the Divine Being is wroth with man and is best appeased with the blood of his noblest creature, as it spreads itself along the Mediterranean till it is checked every where by the purer humanity and juster sentiments of the Greeks. Both in Palestine and at Carthage Moloch was represented by a metal figure either human with a bull's head or entirely bovine, in which the human victims, generally children, were burnt alive. There can be no doubt that the brazen bull of Phalaris at Agrigentum was a remnant of Carthaginian or Phoenician worship established there and that the burning of human victims, inaugurated by Perillus, was due rather to the Semitic worship than to the arbitrary cruelty of a tyrant, whose name, though treated with living