Orpheus Author:Salomon Reinach Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: ATERGATIS AND KEMOSCH 43 This assimilation, as I have already pointed out, is the essential object of primitive worship; if its legends humanised the gods, it... more »s rites tended to deify men. 12. The worship of the Syrian goddess spread into Greece and Italy, where it was propagated by itinerant priests and beggars, by soldiers, merchants and artisans, who founded confraternities as far as Gaul. Together with the Syrian goddess, other gods of her country found devotees, especially the Baalim or Jupiters of Heliopolis and Doliche (in Commagene). In the third century these forms of worship were favoured at Rome by the Syrian empresses, and the Emperor Heliogabalus, priest of the black stone of Emesa, introduced the worship of this fetich even in the palace of the Caesars. 13. At Ascalon, in Philistia, Atergatis was worshipped under the form of a woman with a fish's tail; her husband Dagon was represented in a similar form. These fish-gods recall the Babylonian Cannes and the legend of Jonah. Gaza, also in Philistia, had a temple of Marna (" our Lord "), a god to whom supplications for rain were especially addressed, and who was traditionally identified with Zeus, " born in Crete "; this is one of the arguments adduced to establish the Cretan origin of the Philistines. 14. In the famous inscription of Mesa, king of Moab, discovered near Dhiban in 1868 and now in the Louvre, this prince (circa 860 B.c.) who is mentioned in the Bible, boasts of having vanquished the Israelites by the help of his god Kemosch, of whom he speaks in the same manner as the Hebrews speak of their Jahve (Jehovah); his god is an only god, on whom his happiness or his misery depends. Thus we see that the war-god of a robber tribe may prepare the way for monotheism, of which monolatry, or the adoration of...« less