Note 112.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

Even more significant for our purpose is the comparison of the two regions from the point of view of lunar-cult. We have sufficiently noted already the prominence of the moon-god Sin in the Babylonian pantheon, an august figure of a great religion: and among all the Semitic peoples the moon was a male personality, as it appears to have been for the Vedic Indians and other Aryan peoples. The Hellenic imagination here presents to us this salient difference, that the personal moon is feminine, and she seems to have enjoyed the scantiest cult of all the great powers of Nature. Not that anywhere in Greece she was wholly without worship.112.1 She is mentioned in a vague record as one of the divinities to whom νηφάλια, “wineless offerings,” were consecrated in Athens: she had an ancient place in the aboriginal religion of Arcadia; of her worship in other places the records are usually late and insignificant. The great Minoan goddess may have attracted to herself some lunar significance, but this aspect of her was not pronounced.