Chapter V · The Predominance of the Goddess.
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The next clue that I propose to follow in our general comparison is the relative prominence of the goddess-cult in the areas that we are surveying. The subject is of importance and interest, partly because it may throw some light on the question of the interdependence of the adjacent religions, partly because it brings into view certain striking facts of religious psychology. A religion without a goddess is liable to differ markedly in tone and colour, and probably in ritual, from those that possess one. Wherever anthropomorphism is allowed free play, the same instinct which evolves the father-god will evolve the mother-goddess; and when the religion is one of the type which Tiele calls “Nature-religions,” one, that is, where ideas reflecting the forces of the natural world lie on the surface of the conception of the divine personality, some of these forces are so naturally regarded as feminine that the evolution of a goddess appears inevitable; and the only world-religions that have rejected this idea are the Judaic, the Islamic, and Protestant Christianity. Now goddess-cult is often found to exercise a powerful influence on the religious emotion; and the religious psychology of a people devoted to it will probably differ from those who eschew it; often it will be likely to engender a peculiar sentiment of tenderness, of sentimentality in an otherwise austere and repellent religious system; and the clinging entreaty of the child is heard in the prayers or reflected in the ritual; and just as the mother frequently stands between the children and the father as the mild intercessor, so the goddess often becomes the mediator of mercy to whom the sinners turn as their intercessor with the offended god. Such was Isis for the Graeco-Roman world; such at times was Athena for the Athenians; such is the Virgin for Mediterranean Christendom.
Speaking generally, however, we may conclude that among the early Semites the male divinity was dominant. And if we could believe that this is a reflection in their theology of the patriarchal system in society, let us observe that the earliest Babylonian evidence proves that the patriarchal type of family was dominant in Babylonia in the third millennium.
May we also regard her as the prototype of all the leading Hellenic goddesses? The consideration of this question will bring this particular line of inquiry to a close.
If we find goddess-supremacy among the early Hellenes, shall we interpret it as an Aryan-Hellenic tradition, or as an alien and borrowed trait in their composite religion? If borrowed, are they more likely to have derived it from the East or from their immediate predecessors in the regions of Aegean culture? The latter question, if it arises, we ought to be able to answer at last.
As regards Aphrodite, few students of Greek religion would now assign her to the original Aryan-Hellenic polytheism. Most still regard her as coming to the Greek people from the Semitic area of the Astarte cult. And this was the view that I formerly developed in the second volume of my Cults. But at that time we were all ignorant of the facts of Minoan-Mycenaean religion, and some of us were deceived concerning the antiquity of the Phoenician settlements in Cyprus and Hellas. The recently discovered evidence points, I think, inevitably to the theory that Sir Arthur Evans supports; that the goddess of Cyprus, the island where the old Minoan culture lived longest, is one form of the great goddess of that gifted Aegean people, who had developed her into various manifestations through long centuries of undisturbed religious life. Let us finally observe that it is just these names, Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, that have hitherto defied linguistic explanation on either Aryan or Semitic phonetic principles. We do not yet know the language of King Minos.
A cursory and dogmatic answer may now be given to the two questions posed above. The Aryan Hellenes did not bring with them the supremacy of the goddess, for the idea was not natural to them: they did not borrow it from any Semitic people in the second millennium, for at that time it was not natural to the Semites: they found it on the soil of the Aegean lands, as a native growth of an old Mediterranean religion, a strong plant that may be buried under the deposits of alien creeds, but is always forcing its head up to the light again.
Therefore in tracing goddess-cult from the Euphrates valley to the western Aegean shores, as a test of the influence of the East on the West, we are brought up sharply at this point. The Western world is divided from the Eastern by this very phenomenon that the older scholars used to regard as proving a connection. And it may well have been the Western cult that influenced the western Semites.