The History of the Ancient Civilizations. Duncker Max

      CHAPTER VI.

      THE RELIGIOUS RITES OF THE CANAANITES.

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      Our knowledge of the religious conceptions of the Canaanites consists of scattered and meagre statements. Yet these statements are enough to show with certainty that the ideas of the Syrians about the powers of Heaven rested on the same basis as the worship of the Babylonians. But the sensual and lascivious side of this worship, no less than the cruel and bloody side, is more strongly and broadly developed in Syria than in Babylonia, while, on the other hand, the complete development of the star-worship, as we found it on the lower Euphrates, is unknown in Syria. The gods who were regarded as alien and hostile to natural life were worshipped by the Canaanites with severe abstinence and harsh asceticism, with self-mutilation and human sacrifices; while the deities of procreation and birth, who were considered favourable to life, were worshipped with the most shameless prostitution and the most unbridled debauchery. Indeed these rites, distinguished by sensual excess and bloody asceticism, were united by that mysterious link which in the human breast brings debauchery and pain into close connection; and hence this worship is a true copy of the Semitic mode of feeling, which wavers between luxurious enjoyment and fanatical destruction, between cringing servility and stiff-necked obstinacy, between effeminate retirement in the harem, and bold achievements in the battle-field.

The Phenicians are said to have possessed sacred scriptures of very great antiquity. In Babylonia we found a city to which the sacred scriptures were specially allotted, Sepharvaim on the Euphrates; in Canaan, Debir, in the neighbourhood of Hebron, was at one time called Kiriath Sepher, i.e. "city of scriptures." The scriptures of the Phenicians are said to be derived from Esmun one of their gods, or from a series of hierophants, Thabion, Isiris, Sanchuniathon and Mochus. According to the evidence of Poseidonius, Mochus lived before the Trojan war.[497] Sanchuniathon also, a Sidonian according to some, according to others a Syrian, and to others a Berytean, is said to have lived before or during the time of the Trojan war. He is said to have collected his writings from the archives of the Phenician cities, from the records in the temples, and a document of Hierombal which had been placed by the latter before Abelbaal, king of Berytus, and had met with approval, and it is maintained from the catalogue of the Phenician kings that Hierombal and Sanchuniathon lived before the Trojan war.[498] Of the writings of Sanchuniathon, Philo of Byblus, who wrote in the first half of the second century, B.C., is said to have given a Greek translation in his History of the Phenicians. Of this supposed translation of a supposed original, discovered after much research by Philo, besides which he pretended to have made use of the sacred scriptures of the Egyptians, the Books of Thoth, some excerpts and fragments have come down to us. Scanty and unconnected as these are, they show us at once that Philo, whatever his original may have been, was far removed from any mere repetition of old religious views, that the syncretistic culture of his time had exercised a strong influence on his own ideas, and that his whole point of view belongs to that kind of enlightenment which pretended to find in the gods a number of deified kings, who had once ruled over the land in ancient days. Yet Philo also allowed that, over and above these, the sun, moon, planets, and certain elements were worshipped as gods.[499]

Following the cosmogonic systems, as they may have been drawn out with greater definiteness after the Hellenistic period, Philo assumes as the beginning of all things an obscure and moving atmosphere, and a dark and melancholy chaos. When the wind of his Beginning felt the yearning of love, a mixture took place, and this combination was named Desire. Desire is the beginning of all things. From the union of the wind with itself arose Mot, which some explain as mud, others as putrefaction of a watery mixture. Out of this arose the seeds of all and the origin of all things. Mot was fashioned after the form of an egg. "And then shone forth the sun and moon, and the great constellations. As the air now sent forth a fiery glow, winds and clouds arose from the kindling of the sea and the earth, and vast tempests of rain streamed down; and when all this dashed together, there followed thunderings and lightning, by which the creatures were awaked, and on the