A FEW SEMITIC MYTHS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2983, 17 May 1911, Page 85

A FEW SEMITIC MYTHS.

By Jessie Mackat.

V.-THE MYSTIC NUMBER. Has the sacred number seven a conception lingering among ourselves in a score of expressions, come down to us from the same Semitic source that gave us eo many of out elementary emblems and standards, or is it a world-idea? We read of the Seven Rishis of the Vedas, the Islam has the seven heavens explored by Mahomet, seven Champions of Christendom, and among the Celts, at least, the seventh son of a seventh son is possessed of magic power. Much has been written on, this problem of primitive superstition j but the most we can assert here is that nowhere has the number seven been invested with deeper significance than among the Semitic nations.

The Phoenicians, as we have seen, left few records of either their travels or their gods. Wholly swallowed up in greed of gain and pleasure, the barrenness of their few inscriptions is unredeemed by the poetic beauty and the religious fervour which elevate so many portions of the Babylonian monuments. It is from the Roman conquerors of Carthage, exact and precise in their methods of recording wlmt passed within their empire, that we gain our -clearest idea of the. similar religion of the mother cities, Tyre and Sidon. When the Phoenician migrants first set up their kingdoms in the lovely but narrow strip of country between Lebanon and the Levant no one knows; but when the Hebrews reached the Land of Promise the Canaanite was there before them. The coarse and cruel cult of Baal, fallen infinitely below the generally majestic conception of the earlier Bel of Babylon, is the constant burden of prophetic denunciation in the Bible. Bel and Baal are but names of the one Sun god, common to Semitic heathenism; but in the temples of Tyre there is discerned little of solar beneficence and much of solar destructiveness, especially at the horrible shrines of Baal-Moloch, infamous for their child-sac. rifioes. By the time the' Phoenicians emerge into the light of history, the relative conceptions of sun and moon had changed radically from the older Chaldean myth, which ascribed the chief glory to Sin, the Moon god. Ashtoreth (Astarte of the Greeks) was the Mcon gcddess, crescented like her ancient fellow deity, Isis of Egypt. The dualism which marked every Semitic religion but that of the. Hebrews was predominant here as in Babylonia, Syria, and Arabia. Baal was the husband of Ashtoreth, whose degraded worship in the "groves" was the constant snare of the more enlightened Israelites. Yet even the unlovely .and ungentle myths of the Phoenicians included one higher conception, and it clung round the sacred number. Their patriotism revered godship under the formula of the Kaberim (Mighty Ones). These were Ashtoreth and Melkarth (a Syrian name of Baal), as well as five other powers, seemingly planetary. Their laws, their arts, their national glory, and the beginning of their records, the Phoenicians ascribed to this divine heptarchy, which, oddly enough, developed an eighth brother, the beneficent - Eshmun, who was fabled to combine in himself the essential qualities of the other seven. All these personages were called the children of Sydyth the Just, a being as intangible as the Vedic goddess Aditi, and who probably signified Justice in the abstract. Early Babylonian myth is clouded by the sinister shadow of the Seven Demons, a survival of the old animism of Turanian Chaldea. Not that the melancholy men of, the Great River confined their fears to the malevolence of those seven; every spot of earth and every crisis of life was haunted with its malignant spirit. < But foremost in evil were the seven wicked wind spirits who brought strife and rebellion into the wide wastes of heaven where reigned the mighty Ami, first of the ancient Babylonian triad of Anu, Ea, and Bel. This celestial war forms the subiect of a strange, beautiful, and, alas! hopelessly mutilated poem, one of the earliest translated by George Smith. The quarrel is taken up by Bel, who seems here to personify the active poor of good, as Anu seems to personify the passive power. Boh goes to ask counsel of Ea, "the noble sage of heaven." It then appears that Bel decides to restore order in the wide expanse by setting up the heavenly bodies, for immediately Sin, the Mcon god, Sha.mash, the Sun ?od, and Ishtar, the goddess of the Evening Star, take their appointed places as-the shining children of Bel. Chief of these appears to be the Moon god—a fact which stamps the poem as immeasurably ancient, as ■ the lunar myth dominated the minds of men in their earliest stage of abstract conception—the worship of the gentle, friendly, time-measuring moon, _ whose very changes ran in sacred multiples of seven. But the Seven Demons were strong in their wickedness.

" Before the light of Sin fiercely they came." The danger of the Moon god is noted with fatherly concern by Bel, who again applies to Ea, this time by the agency of the messenger god, Nusku: "The' news of my child Sin, who in heaven.is greatly troubled, to the god Ea in the ocean repeat." Ea addresses his son in these words: *' Go, my son M&rodach, enter unto the shining Sin, who in heaven is greatly troubled; his trouble from heaven ex-

pel." The powers of light and darkness range themselves to battle: The evil gods like a flood descend, and sweep over the earth. To the eairth like a storm they cam© down. The noble Shamash and Yal the warrior to their side they turned. Here, the mutilated record abruptly ends, just as the nameless Milton of old Chaldea was ■ fairly launched on his primeval epic of celestial warfare. George Smith here offers the comment that the Seven Demons were probably the original of the Titans of Hellenic myth, who also warred on the heavenly host. He also comments on the sanctity of the moon in old Babylonia, where pious kings were said to be "like the glorious moon which sustains the life of the country."

One curious analogy remains to be noted in connection with the Moon god's name. It is considered to have formed the root of "Sinai." For Sdnai, ages before the time of Moses, was a sacred mountain, not only to the surrounding Semites but to the Egyptians, and its holiness may well date even from this supremacy of Sin, the old " lord of law," which may have been at its height 5000 years ego. One cannot but quote the spirited description of the iSeven Demons as rendered in Mr H S. Robertson's "Voices of the Past " : Seven are they! Seven are they! In the hollow of the abysmal deep seven are they! Plashing gleams in the sky are they, In the hollow of the abysmal deep, in the under-ooean have they grown up. Male they are not, female they are not. "Wife they possess not, unto them no child is born. Compassion and beneficence they know not. HorEes they are that have grown up in tho mountain. Foes are they of Ea .... Fiends, fiends axe they! Seven are they, seven are they, seven twice, said are they! O, Spirit of Heaven, conjure (exorcise) ! O, Spirit of Earth, conjure!

The dread and sanctity of the number seven, though probably at first borrowed from the Turanian Accads, permeated Semitic thought generally, and reveals itself again and again in the religious conceptions of the Hebrews. The Seven Demons in the loftier Jewish thought found their radiant opposites in the Seven Angels, who fulfil the Divine Commands throughout the universe. Four at least of this arohangelic band are known familiarly to us by name. These are Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Azrael. (To be continued.)