Note 113.1 — Chapter VI · The Deities as Nature-Powers.

Here, then, is another point at which the theory of early Babylonian influence in nascent Hellenic religion seriously breaks down. And in this comparison of Nature-cults it breaks down markedly at two others. The pantheon of Mesopotamia had early taken on an astral-character. The primitive Hellenes doubtless had, like other peoples, their star-myths; and their superstitions were aroused and superstitious practices evoked by celestial “teratology,” by striking phenomena, such as eclipses, comets, falling stars.113.1 But there is no record suggesting that they paid direct worship to the stars, or that their deities were astral personations, or were in the early period associated with the stars: such association, where it arose, is merely a sign of that wave of Oriental influence that moved westward in the later centuries. The only clear evidences of star-cult in Hellenic communities that I have been able to find do not disturb this induction: Lykophron and a late Byzantine author indicate a cult of Zeus Ἀστέριος in Crete, which cannot, even if real, be interpreted as direct star-worship:113.2 at Sinope, a city of Assyrian origin, named after the Babylonian moon-god, a stone with a late inscription suggests a cult of Seirios and the constellations;113.3 and an Attic inscription of the Roman Imperial epoch, mentions a priest of the φωσφόροι, whom we must interpret as stellar beings.113.4 What, then, must we say about the Dioskouroi, whom we are generally taught to regard as the personal forms of the morning- and the evening-star? Certainly, if the astral character of the great Twin-Brethren of the Hellenes were provedly their original one, the general statement just put forth would have to be seriously modified. But a careful study of their cult does not justify the conventional view; and the theory that Wide has insisted on113.5 appears to me the only reasonable account of them, namely, that originally they were heroic “chthonian” figures, to whom a celestial character came later to be attached: it is significant that the astral aspect of them is only presented in comparatively late documents and monuments, not in Homer or the Homeric hymn, and that their most ancient ritual includes a “lectisternium,” which properly belonged to heroes and personages of the lower world.