This section deals with the Greek gods and notes discrepancies between the writings of Homer and Hesiod as to the Greek pantheon. Complicating matters further, prior to these writings there was no fixed number to the Greek deities44 and foreign divinities could easily be integrated and worshipped among the greater Greek gods. Local deities, too, were soon assimilated, hence the many epithets under which some Greek deities were worshipped.
This section traces the most Oriental goddess Aphrodite and her companion god, and then describes Near Eastern traits seen in the worship of other Greek gods and goddesses. It continues with a description of practices where comparisons and identifications can be made, and finishes with a summary of these practices as seen by the Greeks.
Aphrodite:45 Aphrodite’s un-Hellenic character is ascribed to the Phoenicians and thus she is the easiest to identify with her Eastern counterparts. The fully formed goddess was probably a relatively late arrival to the Greek pantheon. She is the Greek version of the Near Eastern Great Love Goddess who can be identified with the following: Anaea, Anaitis, Anath,46 Aneitis, Ashera, Ashtart,47 Ashtoret, Ashtorith, Astarte, Atargatis, Hathor, 48Innana, Ishtar, Kilili,49 Kybele, Nanaea and Tanais.50 In these forms, she was worshipped in Armenia, Assyria, Cappadocia, Egypt, the Levant and Persia. Not all the goddesses bore direct comparison and there were blendings with the worship of Artemis, Demeter, Rhea and Cybele. Anaitis was identified with Artemis’ fertility aspect and Anataea is found as a surname of Demeter, Rhea and Cybele. An early cult site to Aphrodite was Paphos,51 which also at some point in its history was a cult site to Astarte. The identification of the two goddesses allowed the cult site to be taken over by different peoples who merely changed the name of the goddess to whom they offered worship. There was a further similarity between the cults of Aphrodite and Astarte in the sacrifice of doves to both goddesses. Aphrodite’s Greek cult appears on Cyprus52 and she is called the ‘Cyprian’.53 One myth sees her washed up in the foam on the shores near Paphos, while one of her epithets is aphrogena ‘foam born’. Aphrodite was also known as Ourania 54‘queen of heaven’ or ‘Heavenly One’; this is a title of Ishtar, the Heavenly One being an all-encompassing goddess of the population. As an all-embracing goddess, Aphrodite was worshipped under the name of pandemus.55. The title Ourania also associates her with Uranus, the emasculated god of heaven who in one of her birth myths is seen as her father. This myth has her born from semen from the castrated member Uranus from when it hits the sea and there is a depiction of a bearded Aphrodite emerging from a scrotal sac.56 This leads to a connection with another of her titles, Philomedes, meaning genital-loving, appropriate to a deity of sexual union. There is also a bearded Ishtar and Astarte, and the goddesses have an androgynous aspect. Homer took on board the Eastern mythology of Anu and his wife as being parents of the Love Goddess, making Zeus and Dione the parents of Aphrodite, where Dione is the feminine form of Zeus. A further myth makes Persephone a sister of Aphrodite by this same parentage. Zeus was worshipped together with a goddess Dione at Dodona.57 In the Iliad,58 Aphrodite supports the Trojans and she is the mother of Aeneas. In order to save his life she even takes the battlefield, as would Ishtar or Inanna. Homer, though, has little respect for Aphrodite’s fighting prowess and she cuts a poor fighting figure who as a result is wounded by Diomedes.59 The Greeks condensed the love and war goddess into one goddess of love, with the aspects of love accentuated and those of war diminished. Needless to say, an armed60 Aphrodite may still bestow victory, as may Ishtar. Disasters inevitably befell the mortal and immortal lovers of the Love Goddess, and Aphrodite’s lovers, such as Anchises, were no exception. In Near Eastern myth, this is why Gilgamesh refuses the love of Ishtar, who complains to her father. Ishtar’s companion god is Dumuzi, while Inanna has Tammuz; Kybele, Attis; and Aphrodite, Adonis. Death and rebirth are associated with these gods, who often have vegetation aspects to their characters. In Greece, the major vegetation fertility rites were held to Demeter, Persephone and to a lesser extent, Dionysus/Zagreus. Demeter takes the role of the Eastern fertility/earth61 goddesses Ishtar and Inanna, who are usually equated with Aphrodite, while the role of the companion god is taken by Persephone. Another variant on myth has Ishtar descending to hell to supplant her sister Erishkegal as queen of the dead, equating with the previously mentioned Zeus Dione parentage of Persephone and Aphrodite.
Adonis: Adonis is a young fertility god who represents death and rebirth in an oriental vegetation cult; he parallels the Eastern companion god62 Dumuzi/Tammuz and the Hittite Telipinu. He is a Semitic immigrant to the Greek pantheon and is therefore not counted among the greater gods. His cult was established in Greece by 600 BC and his worship was known to Sappho and her circle.63 Adon is the Semitic word for master or ‘lord’ and i means ‘my’, therefore Adonis translates as ‘my lord’; similarly the meaning of Baal, with whom he shares traits, is also ‘lord’ or ‘master’.64 Adonis has two origins: Cyprus and Byblos. On Cyprus,65 his father is either Cinyras of Paphos or Pygmalion. At Byblos, it is Phoinix, father of the Phoenicians. Paphos sees him linked to the goddess Aphrodite, with whom a tie has already been established. The worship of Adonis, a cult especially popular with women, was celebrated on flat roof tops by the planting of plants and the offering of incenses. It also involved lamentations for the dead god. The incense and wailing of women are identical practices to those found in Baal worship. In Greece, much of his role is fulfilled by the goddess Persephone. In Phoenicia, his worship supplanted that of Aleyin,66 a vegetation god and son of Baal, who was killed by Mot.
Dionysus: A later arrival to the Greek pantheon, whose cult is connected with that of Adrastus, another Eastern deity. Dionysus is a male fertility god, linked with the house of Kadmus, whose Phoenician connections have already been established. Like Adonis, Dionysus can also be linked to the god Tammuz, by his association with wailing women. Dionysiac religion shows an increasing Osirian presence after 660 BC, reinforcing the Eastern connection.
Hephaistos: The fire and volcano god Hephaestos was the Greek divine smith, a Lemnian67 version of the Asiatic craftsmen. He parallels the Phoenician god Chursor,68 who was credited as the inventor of iron. In the East, early metalwork and religion were connected, bringing about the rise of the god of metalcrafts. In Anatolia in the late second millennium, the Hittite priest kings were also smiths.69 The worship of the later smith god spread with the use of iron, yet this also lessened his importance because the smiths’ craft became more accessible. In Greece, he was a popular god of the people who maintained his position among the twelve Olympians, yet his worship was unknown on the island of Crete. He does, though, have a connection with Cyprus and in particular with the cult of Aphrodite. Hephaistos and Aphrodite were linked in the Odyssey70 by Homer, as were Aphrodite and Ares. A strengthening of the former relationship occurs on Cyprus where, in the 12th century, two divinities connected with metalcrafts71 were worshipped; this pairing of deities would have helped to lead to the later association of Hephaistos and Aphrodite.
Artemis: The virgin goddess Artemis, who is probably identifiable from Linear B, has stronger Anatolian connections than Levantine. Her cults,72 especially that of Taurian Artemis, display certain traits that are also seen in the worship of Phoenician gods. Primarily she is associated with human sacrifice, making her a mistress of cruel and bloody rites. She is sometimes identified with the Phoenician warrior goddess Anat, though her major associations are with the goddess Kybele, mistress of animals. Anat, the goddess daughter of Baal, was likewise a virgin. She revelled in battle, paralleling the Egyptian lioness goddess Sekhmet, and was a female Ares rather than an Athena. The Sekhmet connection is further enhanced by depictions of Artemis with Eastern lions in her train. In the Iliad Artemis, like Aphrodite, retains Eastern warrior goddess origins, but Homer73 reduces this aspect of her and when she is beaten by Hera, she flees to father Zeus.74 There is a connection between Artemis and Aphrodite that can be seen in the cult of the Ephesian Artemis, who was a motherly Eastern fertility goddess.
Hecate: Another goddess of Near Eastern75 origin, known to Hesiod76 as a daughter of the Titans. She was later identified with Artemis and became lunar-aspected around the same time. Her cult of Laguda77 in Caria had eunuchs.
Athena: The goddess Athena has minimal Near Eastern connections, though from the 8th century in line with other Oriental influences seen at Corinth, she was worshipped with the title Phoinike.78
Apollo: Artemis’ brother also has Semitic Eastern connections, as shown previously in mythology and through his cult sites on Cyprus. Apollo Kereates was the Mycenaean Horned God of the temple of Enkomi79 and was identified with the Semitic god Reshef or Rešep, god of lightning. The identification between the two gods is made because both Rešep and Apollo’s areas of influence are healing and plagues; furthermore both are archers: Apollo shoots arrows80 and Rešep firebrands. From this and other evidence it is safe to say that the influences seen in the cult of Apollo are a mix of Cretan, Greek and Syro-Hittite.
This is broken into two parts; individual followers and general practice. Individuals may devote themselves to particular gods and this section deals with three different types of followers, two of whom - transvestites and eunuchs - are often closely connected. This section picks out those followers whose practices can be regarded as being particularly Eastern or where there is Greek practice with a strong parallel with those in the Phoenician world. The state role of Phoenician kings in cult is also discussed, as is who fulfils this function in Greece. Festivals, offerings, fire rituals and human sacrifice are discussed under the heading General Practices.
Prostitutes: The cult of Aphrodite numbered prostitutes among its followers,81 a direct copy of the Eastern practice in the worship of the Goddess. In the Near East, the act of prostitution was sacred and the priestesses of the cult of Ishtar were also prostitutes. In the Bible, we have a picture of Jezebel, a follower of Astarte, in a window. She has "painted her eyes and dressed her hair" in an attempt to save herself from Jehu.82 This is reminiscent of the scene depicted on ivories83 found at Nimrud which allude to the prostitutes of Astarte. The goddess in Persia had slaves who were her attendants and the female slaves were temple prostitutes. Later Egyptian temples also had prostitutes; temple servants who brought in money for the temple.
Transvestites: A small number of the followers of Aphrodite and Astarte were transvestites84 and some depictions of the sometimes androgynous goddess show her bearded.85 In Dionysiac myth, Pentheus dressed in women’s clothes to spy on the god’s followers and on the island of Kos a sacrifice was made to Heracles by a priest in woman’s clothing.86
Eunuchs: The followers of Aphrodite/Astarte sometimes attempted to copy the androgynous state in a more dramatic way and during the height of an orgiastic rite, emasculated themselves. Castration was also known in the cults of other Oriental deities,87 though it remained an uncommon practice in Greece.
Kings: Phoenician kings were also high priests and were responsible for building temples to the Phoenician gods; King Hiram built three major temples to the Phoenician gods Melqart, Astarte and Baal Shamen; and Abibal built a temple to Melqart on the isle of Tyre. The number of kings in Greece declined in the first millennium, but in places where they were maintained, like Sparta, they also held religious authority. Where kings had been overthrown, like Athens, there was a yearly elected office that gave a man the religious authority of a king. Phoenician religion was further organised in that it had a priestly caste and priestly colleges; these are paralleled in Egypt, Persia and Israel88 though not in Greece. In the East, spiritual and temporal power were combined, the king often being the head priest of the most powerful deity; Greek religion never gained this level of organisation.
Festivals and processions: These two are intimately linked as festivals often involved a procession where a god or goddess was brought out from their sanctuary, as in the Near East or Egypt.89 Most of the year the statue was kept in a part of the sanctuary, to which often only a priest was allowed access. Sacred duties often involved changing the statue’s clothes and making offerings of food. These actions could only take place once the Greeks had anthropomorphised their gods and created statues in their image. The celebration to Adonis, the Adonia a 2-8 day festival, occurred in June/July - the same month that Tammuz was worshipped in the East. This was an important Near Eastern festival that was also celebrated in Egypt and corresponded to the Athenian New Year’s festival. Festivals could only be celebrated by the populace during a slack time in the agricultural year. In the 8th century, the Corinthians celebrated the month of Phoinikaios.90 Another Athenian festival, the Thargelia alludes to human sacrifice in mainland Greece in the middle of the first millennium; on the sixth day of the festival a human scapegoat is either driven out of the city or killed in order to bring about purification.91 Plutarch, writing on Isis and Osiris mentions human holocausts in Egypt and Hebrew scriptures mention a goat being driven out into the desert.
Offerings: There are two types of offerings: votives92 and sacrifices. The former includes animal sacrifice, which was usually accompanied with first fruit offerings,93 and common in Semitic ritual.
Fire Rituals: This is an area of Greek practice where some Phoenician and Semitic practices are evidenced. Offerings were often made to a god by burning them and the air at religious ceremonies must often have had a pungent or aromatic scent. Incense such as frankincense, first mentioned by Sappho, and myrrh, used for fire rituals, are likely to have only been imported to Greece from the Near East from just before the middle of the first millennium. Incense offerings were particularly common in the cults of Aphrodite and Adonis. The actual fire cult, rather than hearth cult, may have reached Greece through the island of Cyprus, though fire is also important in the cult of Hephaistos. Holocausts, the consummation of the offering by fire, are characteristic of the Semitic religion,94 that of the West Semites, the Jews and the Phoenicians. The Greeks used holocausts in connection with their cults of the dead; to the Chthonic god Zeus Polieus a piglet was first burnt, then a bull slaughtered, a sequence familiar among the Semites. Fire and purity were very closely linked in Semitic practice and borrowings can be detected in myths associated with Isis and Demeter, both of whom attempted to immolate a king’s children to bestow immortality.
Human Sacrifice: As the first millennium progressed, this practice would appear to have gone into decline in the Phoenician homeland, but was still carried out by the Carthaginians in the time of the Punic wars. The most demanding of the gods was the bull-headed Moloch, into whose fiery arms children were given. Moloch with his bull associations was a god who may have been known to the Cretans,95 and thus also the early Greeks. If this is true, he may be linked with the minotaur96 of Greek myth, defeated by the hero Theseus. Bronze Age Greeks may have practised human sacrifice, as it is alluded to in Homer, as seen in Agamemnon’s sacrifice of Iphigeneia to Artemis and the substitution of a deer at the last minute. It would appear that the Greeks therefore normally used an animal substitute rather than a human sacrifice. There is a parallel as in Jewish Scripture, Abraham was commanded by god to sacrifice his son Isaac and at the last minute a ram was substituted. Human sacrifice is evidenced in the cult of Hera Akraia with reference to Medea and was identified as being influenced by the Phoenicians.97
In summing up this and the previous section, it must be stated that there was a tendency among the Greeks to link Eastern origins to Phoenicia, and in particular to the house of Kadmus.98 In actuality, myths were more likely to have developed through the mixing of cultures and identifications made between similar gods in different regions. The intermingling of myths means that direct translations did not always come through and that the story as adapted for a Greek god may have aspects to it that contradict locally held beliefs. The mixing of cultures also saw some old festivals celebrated in the name of new deities and the introduction of new cult practices.