Note 59.3 — Chapter IV · Anthropomorphism and Theriomorphism in Asia Minor and the Mediterranean.

The close approximation of the goddess to the god is more clearly discernible in the Canaanite religion. On the Moabite Mesha stone, Ashtar-Chemosh appears as a double divinity; and one of the earlier Carthaginian inscriptions refers to a temple of Moloch-Astarte.59.3 Again Astarte, in the inscription on the sarcophagus of Eshmounazar of Sidon, is called Astart-Shem-Baal, which signifies Astarte the Face of Baal; and in the Carthaginian inscriptions the same designation occurs for Tanit. Renan has interpreted the phrase as expressing the dogma that the goddess is an emanation of the god, but Dr. Langdon would explain it as arising from the close opposition of the two statues face to face, Astart-Shem-Baal merely meaning, then, “She who fronts Baal.” Whichever interpretation be correct, such close assimilation of the pair might evolve here and there the concept of a bisexual divinity. Unless the evidence of the classical writers is false, it did so at a later period under Phoenician influences in Cyprus. Macrobius tells us that there was in that island a statue of a bearded deity in female dress, regarded as bisexual, and he quotes Philochoros as witness to the fact, and to the curious phenomenon in the ritual in which the men wore female dress and the women male. This explains Catullus’ phrase “duplex Amathusia” of the bisexual goddess. Servius and the Christian fathers repeat the statement, and Joannes Lydus asserts that the Pamphylians at one time worshipped a bearded Aphrodite;60.1 if we trust his authority, we might explain the fact as due to late Semitic influence, which is somewhat attested by inscriptions on the coinage of Pamphylia under the Persian domination.60.2 But, at the most, we can only regard this cult as a late phenomenon, a local eccentricity, and a morbid development of a certain vague idea that was working sporadically in the old Semitic religion. We have no right to assert, as some have occasionally ventured, that the Semitic peoples generally accepted the dogma of a bisexual divinity.