Note 169.2 — Chapter IX · Purity a Divine Attribute.

Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we have noted the monumental evidence among the Hittites for the worship of a mother-goddess, who with her son figures in the procession on the reliefs at Boghaz-Keui. It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive relief as a large seated female with a child on her knees,169.2 a type which the Greeks would call κουροτρόφος. Her name may have been Umma; for this divine word is now given us among the names of Hittite divinities in cuneiform texts recently discovered, which have been published and interpreted by Professor Sayce in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society.169.3 He there connects the word with the Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hittite goddess as the ancestress both by name and nature of the Cappadocian goddess Mā, famous at Comana in the later period. Now the name Mā designates “the mother,” and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only with the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis. I believe the external inducement to this latter assimilation was the isolation of Mā in her cult, into which no god entered. From this late evidence it is too hazardous to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially as the processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with a ἱερὸς γάμος, the solemn union of a god and a goddess. As regards the great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, it has been somewhat hastily concluded that here and there her cult included the mystic idea of a virgin-mother. We have only some evidence from a late period, and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from it to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak. I have criticised it elsewhere, and I found it and still find it very frail.170.1 I have not been able to detect any clear consciousness of the idea in the cult and cult-legends of Kybele: we must not build much on the Pessinuntian story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance to the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of Kybele and Attis is inconsistent with any dogma of the goddess’s virginity, nor was she ever called Παρθένος in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with whom the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united in corporeal union.170.2