Probably two goddesses originally lamented for Tammuz, as the Egyptian sisters, Isis and Nepthys, lamented for Osiris, their brother. Ishtar is referred to as "my mother". Isis figures alternately in the Egyptian chants as mother, wife, sister, and daughter of Osiris. She cries, "Come thou to thy wife in peace; her heart fluttereth for thy love", . "I am thy wife, made as thou art, the elder sister, soul of her brother".

"Come thou to us as a babe". "Lo, thou art as the Bull of the two goddesses--come thou, child growing in peace, our lord! ". "Lo! the Bull, begotten of the two cows, Isis and Nepthys".

"Come thou to the two widowed goddesses". "Oh child, lord, first maker of the body". "Father Osiris.

As Ishtar and Belit-sheri weep for Tammuz, so do Isis and Nepthys weep for Osiris.

Isis is also identified with Hathor (Ishtar) the Cow.... "The cow weepeth for thee with her voice."[127]

There is another phase, however, to the character of the mother goddess which explains the references to the desertion and slaying of Tammuz by Ishtar. "She is", says Jastrow, "the goddess of the human instinct, or passion which accompanies human love. Gilgamesh . reproaches her with abandoning the objects of her passion after a brief period of union. " At Ishtar's temple "public maidens accepted temporary partners, assigned to them by Ishtar".

[128] The worship of all mother goddesses in ancient times was accompanied by revolting unmoral rites which are referred to in condemnatory terms in various passages in the Old Testament, especially in connection with the worship of Ashtoreth, who was identical with Ishtar and the Egyptian Hathor.

Ishtar in the process of time overshadowed all the other female deities of Babylonia, as did Isis in Egypt. Her name, indeed, which is Semitic, became in the plural, Ishtaráte, a designation for goddesses in general. But although she was referred to as the daughter of the sky, Anu, or the daughter of the moon, Sin or Nannar, she still retained traces of her ancient character. Originally she was a great mother goddess, who was worshipped by those who believed that life and the universe had a female origin in contrast to those who believed in the theory of male origin. Ishtar is identical with Nina, the fish goddess, a creature who gave her name to the Sumerian city of Nina and the Assyrian city of Nineveh.

Other forms of the Creatrix included Mama, or Mami, or Ama, "mother", Aruru, Bau, Gula, and Zerpanitum. These were all "Preservers" and healers. At the same time they were "Destroyers", like Nin-sun and the Queen of Hades, Eresh-ki-gal or Allatu. They were accompanied by shadowy male forms ere they became wives of strongly individualized gods, or by child gods, their sons, who might be regarded as "brothers" or "husbands of their mothers", to use the paradoxical Egyptian term. Similarly Great Father deities had vaguely defined wives.

The "Semitic" Baal, "the lord", was accompanied by a female reflection of himself--Beltu, "the lady". Shamash, the sun god, had for wife the shadowy Aa.

As has been shown, Ishtar is referred to in a Tammuz hymn as the mother of the child god of fertility. In an Egyptian hymn the sky goddess Nut, "the mother" of Osiris, is stated to have "built up life from her own body".[129] Sri or Lakshmi, the Indian goddess, who became the wife of Vishnu, as the mother goddess Saraswati, a tribal deity, became the wife of Brahma, was, according to a Purana commentator, "the mother of the world ... eternal and undecaying".[130]

The gods, on the other hand, might die annually: the goddesses alone were immortal. Indra was supposed to perish of old age, but his wife, Indrani, remained ever young. There were fourteen Indras in every "day of Brahma", a reference apparently to the ancient conception of Indra among the Great-Mother-worshipping sections of the Aryo-Indians. [131] In the Mahabharata the god Shiva, as Mahadeva, commands Indra on "one of the peaks of Himavat", where they met, to lift up a stone and join the Indras who had been before him. "And Indra on removing that stone beheld a cave on the breast of that king of mountains in which were four others resembling himself.

" Indra exclaimed in his grief, "Shall I be even like these? " These five Indras, like the "Seven Sleepers", awaited the time when they would be called forth. They were ultimately reborn as the five Pandava warriors.

The ferocious, black-faced Scottish mother goddess, Cailleach Bheur, who appears to be identical with Mala Lith, "Grey Eyebrows" of Fingalian story, and the English "Black Annis", figures in Irish song and legend as "The Old Woman of Beare". This "old woman" (Cailleach) "had", says Professor Kuno Meyer, "seven periods of youth one after another, so that every man who had lived with her came to die of old age, and her grandsons and great-grandsons were tribes and races". When old age at length came upon her she sang her "swan song", from which the following lines are extracted:

Freyja, the Germanic mother goddess, whose car was drawn by cats, had similarly many lovers. In the Icelandic poem "Lokasenna", Loki taunts her, saying:

Idun, the keeper of the apples of immortal youth, which prevent the gods growing old, is similarly addressed:

Frigg, wife of Odin, is satirized as well:

The goddesses of classic mythology had similar reputations. Aphrodite (Venus) had many divine and mortal lovers. She links closely with Astarte and Ashtoreth (Ishtar), and reference has already been made to her relations with Adonis (Tammuz). These love deities were all as cruel as they were wayward. When Ishtar wooed the Babylonian hero, Gilgamesh, he spurned her advances, as has been indicated, saying:

He likewise charged her with deceiving the lion and the horse, making reference to obscure myths:

These goddesses were ever prone to afflict human beings who might offend them or of whom they wearied. Demeter (Ceres) changed Ascalaphus into an owl and Stellio into a lizard. Rhea (Ops) resembled

the wanton who loved Attis (Adonis). Artemis (Diana) slew her lover Orion, changed Actaeon into a stag, which was torn to pieces by his own dogs, and caused numerous deaths by sending a boar to ravage the fields of Oeneus, king of Calydon. Human sacrifices were frequently offered to the bloodthirsty "mothers". The most famous victim of Artemis was the daughter of Agamemnon, "divinely tall and most divinely fair". [136] Agamemnon had slain a sacred stag, and the goddess punished him by sending a calm when the war fleet was about to sail for Troy, with the result that his daughter had to be sacrificed.

Artemis thus sold breezes like the northern wind hags and witches.

It used to be customary to account for the similarities manifested by the various mother goddesses by assuming that there was constant cultural contact between separate nationalities, and, as a result, a not inconsiderable amount of "religious borrowing". Greece was supposed to have received its great goddesses from the western Semites, who had come under the spell of Babylonian religion. Archaeological evidence, however, tends to disprove this theory. "The most recent researches into Mesopotamian history", writes Dr. Farnell, "establish with certainty the conclusion that there was no direct political contact possible between the powers in the valley of the Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean in the second millennium B.

C. In fact, between the nascent Hellas and the great world of Mesopotamia there were powerful and possibly independent strata of cultures interposing.

The real connection appears to be the racial one. Among the Mediterranean Neolithic tribes of Sumeria, Arabia, and Europe, the goddess cult appears to have been influential. Mother worship was the predominant characteristic of their religious systems, so that the Greek goddesses were probably of pre-Hellenic origin, the Celtic of Iberian, the Egyptian of proto-Egyptian, and the Babylonian of Sumerian. The northern hillmen, on the other hand, who may be identified with the "Aryans" of the philologists, were father worshippers. The Vedic Aryo-Indians worshipped father gods,[138] as did also the Germanic peoples and certain tribes in the "Hittite confederacy".

Earth spirits were males, like the Teutonic elves, the Aryo-Indian Ribhus, and the Burkans, "masters", of the present-day Buriats, a Mongolian people. When the father-worshipping peoples invaded the dominions of the mother-worshipping peoples, they introduced their strongly individualized gods, but they did not displace the mother goddesses. "The Aryan Hellenes", says Dr. Farnell, "were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people. "[139] As in Egypt, the beliefs of the father worshippers, represented by the self-created Ptah, were fused with the beliefs of the mother worshippers, who adored Isis, Mut, Neith, and others.

In Babylonia this process of racial and religious fusion was well advanced before the dawn of history. Ea, who had already assumed manifold forms, may have originally been the son or child lover of Damkina, "Lady of the Deep", as was Tammuz of Ishtar. As the fish, Ea was the offspring of the mother river.

The mother worshippers recognized male as well as female deities, but regarded the great goddess as the First Cause. Although the primeval spirits were grouped in four pairs in Egypt, and apparently in Babylonia also, the female in the first pair was more strongly individualized than the male. The Egyptian Nu is vaguer than his consort Nut, and the Babylonian Apsu than his consort Tiamat. Indeed, in the narrative of the Creation Tablets of Babylon, which will receive full treatment in a later chapter, Tiamat, the great mother, is the controlling spirit. She is more powerful and ferocious than Apsu, and lives longer.

After Apsu's death she elevates one of her brood, named Kingu, to be her consort, a fact which suggests that in the Ishtar-Tammuz myth survives the influence of exceedingly ancient modes of thought. Like Tiamat, Ishtar is also a great battle heroine, and in this capacity she was addressed as "the lady of majestic rank exalted over all gods". This was no idle flattery on the part of worshippers, but a memory of her ancient supremacy.

Reference has been made to the introduction of Tammuz worship into Jerusalem. Ishtar, as Queen of Heaven, was also adored by the backsliding Israelites as a deity of battle and harvest. When Jeremiah censured the people for burning incense and serving gods "whom they knew not", he said, "neither they, ye, nor your fathers", they made answer: "Since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and the famine". The women took a leading part in these practices, but refused to accept all the blame, saying, "When we burned incense to the queen of heaven, and poured out drink offerings unto her, did we make our cakes and pour out drink offerings unto her without our men?"[140] That the husbands, and the children even, assisted at the ceremony is made evident in another reference to goddess worship: "The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven".[141]

CYLINDER-SEAL IMPRESSIONS.�(British Museum)

Figure�V.2.�Female figure in adoration before a goddess

Figure�V.3.�The winged Ishtar above the rising sun god, the river god, and other deities

Figure�V.4.�Gilgamesh in conflict with bulls (see page 176)

Figure�V.5.�PLAQUE OF UR-NINA

In Limestone. From the original in the Louvre, Paris. (See pages 117, 118)