The Great Goddess, the protecting and guarding mother of her people, had her attendant women. These were armed as warriors, and were called Amazons in Greek legend, where fantastic char- acteristics are assigned to them.{ But that a real foundation lies under those fanciful tales is certain. We can dimly desery in primitive history the Amazons, the servants of the native Anatolian goddess, contending, on the banks of the Sangarios, against the immigrant Phryges from Europe, among whom Priam fought as a young leader of the Western tribe.§
The women servants of the goddess are to be considered as resembling her in part of her char- acter as her active and armed ministre. In Ephesus they were the melissat or working bees, while the
* See Ramsay, Church in Rom. Emp. p. 397£.; Hist. Com. on Galatians, pp. 40, 201.
+ The present writer formerly erred in considering it to be a relic of the primitive stage in Anatolian religion ; the orderly analysis of that religion, above given, shows that it belongs to its degradation. Marriage was the original rule, though with barbarous usages: promiscuity belongs to the stage of deterioration.
tItis an interesting illustration of the view stated in § III (7) and § VI (8), that the modern discoverer of the sex of the working bees, Dr. Warder, called them ‘true Amazons.’
§ Iliad, iii. 184-190.
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goddess was the queen bee. The sexual side of the melissai, alike in the bee and the priestess, is not developed : the ministre therefore must have been young, and their term of service was part of their education. Evidence has perished as regards the women servants of the goddess; but in all probability at the conclusion of their term of ser- vice they passed into ordinary society, and in the ceremonial of marriage went through the ceremonies above described, imitating the actions and fate of the goddess. The opinion stated by the present writer, that a number of those armed servants of the goddess are portrayed on the wall of the rock- sanctuary at Boghaz-Keui,* has not been adopted by recent scholars ; but the argument against it— the failure of any indication of the female form in the breast—has no force in view of the character of the ministre as active guards, in whom the sexual type is so slightly developed as to be imperceptible in their fully draped and armed forms.
In the primitive Anatolian period the women ministre must be taken to have been real guardians of the goddess and agents of her government (which she exercised through her priest-king), true Amazons or armed warriors. But history changed: the plateau became a subject land ; society, manners, and needs altered, and the ministre necessarily lost their original character. During this change we may believe that their development into the slaves of the sanctuary, as we see them in the more de- veloped period, occurred. There was an element in the old ministre, hinted at in legend, which could be intensified and systematized so as to transform them into the later hierodouloi; but the primitive element was essentially different from the organized savagery of the time of the degradation, (2).
(4) Self-mutilation. —The most remarkable ex- ample of the way in which the individual man imitated in his acts the life of the Deity, was in the practice of mutilation. The fate of the god, the consort of the Great Goddess, had hallowed the act ; and it was familiar to all as part of the treat- ment prescribed by the Divine regulations for domesticated animals. Not merely was it prac- tised on occasion of great religious festivals as a part of the ritual, not merely was it almost cer- tainly the prescribed and necessary condition, originally, for the priest who represented the god in the ritual; it was also often performed on themselves by individuals in a state of religious excitement, induced by some crisis of their own life or of the country in which they lived. On the origin of this ceremony, see § III (7). :
This act was alien to the character of Hellenic civilization and religion ; and was always regarded with horror and contempt by the Greek spirit as the crowning proof of the barbarity and vulgarity of Anatolian superstition, as in the Aétis of Catullus (which follows a Greek model).
(5) Burial.—In a religion which taught, ex- plicitly or implicitly, that men are children of the Goddess-Mother, and at death return to the mother who bore them, it is natural that great sanctity should be attached to graves and sepulchral rites. In fact the religion of the grave is the religion of the household, and lies at the foundation of re- ligion in general. The dead man, as heroized or deified, was represented under the form of the Deity, and one of the commonest later types was the Horseman-god, § III (5). ;
This is an exceedingly wide subject ; and more can be learned about it than about any other department of Anatolian religion. The principal points may here be briefly stated. See also § 1X (1).
The grave was conceived as the house or home of
* Journal of R. Asiatic Society, 1883, p. 14f.: the relief is reproduced by Perrot, Histoire del’ Art, iv. p. 643.
the deceased ; and the word oixos is sometimes applied to it in epitaphs. But, inasmuch as the dead man is now part of the Divine nature, more frequently the grave is conceived as his temple. His right to the sole possession of it was guarded with jealous care, for, if any unauthorized corpse gains entrance, this intruder will share in the offerings and honours of the temple, and thus in the godhead of the deceased (for the dead man’s godhead consists practically in the cultus and offerings paid to him; a god unworshipped is a dead god). It is noteworthy that the sepulchral inscriptions guard far more carefully against in- trusion than against mere injury done to the tomb: injury can readily be repaired, but intru- sion, if once successful, is hardly reparable.*