That conception of the Divine power was prompted and strengthened by the physical char- acter of the land. The great plateau, where the religion had its ancient home, was separated from the sea by broad and lofty mountain walls (and it is on the sea that the sense of personality and individual initiative are most encouraged) ; and its character tends to discourage the sense of personal power, and to impress on the mind the insignificance of man, and his absolute dependence on the Divine power.* But the Divine was kind, lavish of good gifts in rain and useful winds and fountains of water and everything that was needed ; but all those good things required skill and work and obedience to the divinely taught methods, in order to take advantage of them. Dis- obedience to the Divine commands meant ruin and unproductiveness. Obedience was the prime neces- sity. With patience and observance the children of the earth found that the Divine power was a protecting, watchful, and kind mother.
That character is permanently impressed on the history of the land and the people; not vigour and initiative, but receptivity and impressibility, swayed the spirit of the people, breathed through the atmosphere that surrounded them, and marks their fate throughout history ;+ and this spirit can be seen as a continuous force, barely percep- tible at any moment, yet powerful in the long-run, acting on every new people, and subtly influencing
*See the art. on ‘Geographical Conditions determining History and Religion in Asia Minor’ in the Geographical Jour- nal, Sept. 1902, where the subject is more fully treated.
+ See the art. in the Geographical Journal, as in previous note.
every new religion that came into the land. Thus, for example, the earliest trace of the high venera- tion of the Virgin Mary in the Christian religion is in a Phrygian inscription of the 2nd cent. ; and the earliest example of a holy place consecrated to the Mother of God as already almost a Divine per- sonality is at Ephesus, where her home among the mountains * is probably as old as the Council of Ephesus, A.D. 431.
In regard to the nature of the Goddess-Mother, it is unnecessary to repeat what has been*said in vol. i. p. 605 on the nature of Diana: that whole article may be assumed here,
(2) The growth of mythology as the story of the life of the Great Mother.—The Great Mother, evidently, was often imagined simply as the Divine guardian and protecting mother, without any distinctly sexual character being thought of. But her character as the mother could not be separated from the sexual idea in the popular mind; and, naturally, it is on this side that most of the mythology and dramatic action connected with the Divine story originates. The mystery of life, the succession of child to parent aad: of crop to seed, the growth of plant and tree and animal and man, lay deep in the minds of the primitive Anatolian people or peoples. They regarded all these phenomena as manifestations of the same ultimate Divine power. The custom of killing a human being in the field that his life may pass into the coming crop and make it grow well, is clearly implied in the legend of Lityerses at Cel- zene. Similarly, the life of the tree is the life of the Dryad or Nymph. Each form can pass into the others, if the suitable situation occurs.
The life of nature begins anew every spring. This process is the life of the Great Mother: her child is born every year. Sometimes this birth was imagined as originating through her own innate power; she combined, as it were, the male and the female principle in herself. In Caria and in Cyprus this took the grotesque form that the: supreme god was bisexual, and some repulsive legends were founded on this barbarous idea, These are probably not strictly Anatolian: they are distortions of the original thought, for a male deity imagined as endowed with some bisexual characteristics does not explain the continuance and perpetuation of the life of nature. They probably arose among immigrant peoples, like the Carians, whose national character substituted a god for a mother-goddess as the supreme concep- tion of Divinity.
Certainly, that bisexual idea was on the whole rejected in the development of Anatolian religious symbolism ; and little mythology was founded on it. More common is the idea that the Great Mother conceives through the influence of some flower or fruit, or in some other non-sexual way, as in the birth of Attis at Pessinus.+ Not un- related to this is the already mentioned idea that the god-serpent was the father of the Divine child.
But far more characteristic and widespread, and more simple and natural, is it to describe the Divine life more exactly according to the analogy of the natural world. The Divine nature is then imagined as divided between the two sexes; there is the god and the goddess, and the process of the Divine life evolves itself in the reciprocal action of the Divine pair and the birth of a new offspring : thus we find that the God-Father, the Goddess-
Mother, and the Son (Dionysos, Sabazios, ete.) or the Daughter (Kora, etc.), are all assumed as essential to the drama of Divine life in numerous cults and myths.
While we cannot penetrate, in the dearth of + Pausanias, vii. 17,