The 12th Planet (12 page)

In the thirteenth century
B.C.
, under the pressure of vast migrations and invasions (including the Israelite thrust from Egypt to Canaan), the
H
urrians retreated to the northeastern portion of their kingdom. Establishing their new capital near Lake Van, they called their kingdom Urartu ("Ararat"). There they worshiped a pantheon headed by Tesheba (Teshub), depicting him as a vigorous god wearing a horned cap and standing upon his cult symbol, the bull. (Fig. 34) They called their main shrine Bitanu Chouse of Anu") and dedicated themselves to making their kingdom "the fortress of the valley of Anu."

And Anu, as we shall see, was the Sumerian Father of the Gods.

•

What about the other avenue by which the tales and worship of the gods reached Greece—from the eastern shares of the Mediterranean, via Crete and Cyprus?

The lands that are today Israel, Lebanon, and southern Syria—which formed the southwestern band of the ancient Fertile Crescent—were then the habitat of peoples that can be grouped together as the Canaanites. Once again, all that was known of them until rather recently appeared in references (mostly adverse) in the Old Testament and scattered Phoenician inscriptions. Archaeologists were only beginning to understand the Canaanites when two discoveries came to light: certain Egyptian texts at Luxor and Saqqara, and, much more important, historical, literary, and religious texts unearthed at a major Canaanite center. The place, now called Ras Shamra, on the Syrian coast, was the ancient city of Ugarit.

Fig. 34

The language of the Ugarit inscriptions, the Canaanite language, was what scholars call West Semitic, a branch of the group of languages that also includes the earliest Akkadian and present-day Hebrew. Indeed, anyone who knows Hebrew well can follow the Canaanite inscriptions with relative ease. The language, literary style, and terminology are reminiscent of the Old Testament, and the script is the same as that of Israelite Hebrew.

The pantheon that unfolds from the Canaanite texts bears many similarities to the later Greek one. At the head of the Canaanite pantheon, too, there was a supreme deity called
El,
a word that was both the personal name of the god and the generic term meaning "lofty deity." He was the final authority in all affairs, human or divine. Ab Adam ("father of man") was his title; the Kindly, the Merciful was his epithet. He was the "creator of things created, and the one who alone could bestow kingship."

The Canaanite texts ("myths" to most scholars) depicted El as a sage, elderly deity who stayed away from daily affairs. His abode was remote, at the "headwaters of the two rivers"—the Tigris and Euphrates. There he would sit on his throne, receive emissaries, and contemplate the problems and disputes the other gods brought before him.

A stela found in Palestine depicts an elderly deity sitting on a throne and being served a beverage by a younger deity. The seated deity wears a conical headdress adorned with horns—a mark of the gods, as we have seen, from prehistoric times—and the scene is dominated by the symbol of a winged star—the ubiquitous emblem that we shall increasingly encounter. It is generally accepted by the scholars that this sculptured relief depicts El, the senior Canaanite deity. (Fig. 35)

Fig. 35

El, however, was not always an olden lord. One of his epithets was Tor (meaning "bull"), signifying, scholars believe, his sexual prowess and his role as Father of the Gods. A Canaanite poem, called "Birth of the Gracious Gods," placed El at the seashore (probably naked), where two women were completely charmed by the size of his penis. While a bird was roasting on the beach, El had intercourse with the two women. Thus were the two gods Sha
h
ar ("dawn") and Shalem ("completion" or "dusk") born.

These were not his only children nor his principal sons (of which he had, apparently, seven). His principal son was Baal—again the personal name of the deity, as well as the general term for "lord." As the Greeks did in their tales, the Canaanites spoke of the challenges by the son to the authority and rule of his father. Like El his father, Baal was what the scholars call a Storm God, a God of Thunder and Lightning. A nickname for Baal was Hadad ("sharp one"). His weapons were the battle-ax and the lightning-spear; his cult animal, like El's, was the bull, and, like El, he was depicted wearing the conical headdress adorned with a pair of horns.

Baal was also called Elyon ("supreme"); that is, the acknowledged prince, the heir apparent. But he had not come by this title without a struggle, first with his brother Yam ("prince of the sea"), and then with his brother Mot. A long and touching poem, pieced together from numerous fragmented tablets, begins with the summoning of the "Master Craftsman" to El's abode "at the sources of the waters, in the midst of the headwaters of the two rivers":

Through the fields of El he comes

He enters the pavilion of the Father of Years.

At El's feet he bows, falls down,

Prostrates himself, paying homage.

The Master Craftsman is ordered to erect a palace for Yam as the mark of his rise to power. Emboldened by this, Yam sends his messengers to the assembly of the gods, to ask for the surrender to him of Baal. Yam instructs his emissaries to be defiant, and the assembled gods do yield. Even El accepts the new lineup among his sons. "Ba'al is thy slave, O Yam," he declares.

The supremacy of Yam, however, was short-lived. Armed with two "divine weapons," Baal struggled with Yam and defeated him—only to be challenged by Mot (the name meant "smiter"). In this struggle, Baal was soon vanquished; but his sister Anat refused to accept this demise of Baal as final. "She seized Mot, the son of El, and with a blade she cleaved him."

The obliteration of Mot led, according to the Canaanite tale, to the miraculous resurrection of Baal. Scholars have attempted to rationalize the report by suggesting that the whole tale was only allegorical, representing no more than a tale of the annual struggle in the Near East between the hot, rainless summers that dry out the vegetation, and the coming of the rainy season in the autumn, which revives or "resurrects" the vegetation. But there is no doubt that the Canaanite tale intended no allegory, that it related what were then believed to be the true events: how the sons of the chief deity fought among themselves, and how one of them defied defeat to reappear and become the accepted heir, making El rejoice:

El, the kindly one, the merciful, rejoices.

His feet on the footstool he sets.

He opens his throat and laughs;

He raises his voice and cries out:

"I shall sit and take my ease,

The soul shall repose in my breast;

For Ba'al the mighty is alive,

For the Prince of Earth exists!"

Anat, according to Canaanite traditions, thus stood by her brother the Lord (Baal) in his life-and-death struggle with the evil Mot; and the parallel between this and the Greek tradition of the goddess Athena standing with the supreme god Zeus in his life-and-death struggle with Typhon is only too obvious. Athena, as we have seen, was called "the perfect maiden," yet had many illicit love affairs. Likewise, Canaanite traditions (which preceded the Greek ones) employed the epithet "the Maiden Anat," and, in spite of this, proceeded to report her various love affairs, especially with her own brother Baal. One text describes the arrival of Anat at Baal's abode on Mount Zaphon, and Baal's hurried dismissal of his wives. Then he sank by his sister's feet; they looked into each other's eyes; they anointed each other's "horns"—

He seizes and holds her womb. . ..

She seizes and holds his "stones." . ..

The maiden Anat . . . is made to conceive and bear.

No wonder, then, that Anat was often depicted completely naked, to emphasize her sexual attributes—as in this seal impression, which illustrates a helmeted Baal battling another god. (Fig. 36)

Like the Greek religion and its direct forerunners, the Canaanite pantheon included a Mother Goddess, official consort of the chief deity. They called her Ashera; she paralleled the Greek Hera. Astarte (the biblical Ashtoreth) paralleled Aphrodite; her frequent consort was Athtar, who was associated with a bright planet, and who probably paralleled Ares, Aphrodite's brother. There were other young deities, male and female, whose astral or Greek parallels can easily be surmised.

But besides these young deities there were the "olden gods," aloof from mundane affairs but available when the gods themselves ran into serious trouble. Some of their sculptures, even in a partly damaged state, show them with commanding features, gods recognizable by their homed headgear. (Fig. 37)

Whence had the Canaanites, for their part, drawn their culture and religion?

The Old Testament considered them a part of the Hamitic family of nations, with roots in the hot (for that is what
ham
meant) lands of Africa, brothers of the Egyptians. The artifacts and written records unearthed by archaeologists confirm the close affinity between the two, as well as the many similarities between the Canaanite and Egyptian deities.

The many national and local gods, the multitude of their names and epithets, the diversity of their roles, emblems, and animal mascots at first cast the gods of Egypt as an unfathomable crowd of actors upon a strange stage. But a closer look reveals that they were essentially no different from those of the other lands of the ancient world.

The Egyptians believed in Gods of Heaven and Earth, Great Gods that were clearly distinguished from the multitudes of lesser deities. G. A. Wainwright
(The Sky-Religion in Egypt)
summed up the evidence, showing that the Egyptian belief in Gods of Heaven who descended to Earth from the skies was "extremely ancient." Some of the epithets of these Great Gods—Greatest God, Bull of Heaven, Lord/Lady of the Mountains—sound familiar.

Although the Egyptians counted by the decimal system, their religious affairs were governed by the Sumerian sexagesimal
sixty,
and celestial matters were subject to the divine number
twelve.
The heavens were divided into three parts, each comprising twelve celestial bodies. The afterworld was divided into twelve parts. Day and night were each divided into twelve hours. And all these divisions were paralleled by "companies" of gods, which in turn consisted of twelve gods each.

The head of the Egyptian pantheon was Ra ("creator"), who presided over an Assembly of the Gods that numbered twelve. He performed his wondrous works of creation in primeval times, bringing forth Geb ("Earth") and Nut ("sky"). Then he caused the plants to grow on Earth, and the creeping creatures—and, finally, Man. Ra was an unseen celestial god who manifested himself only periodically. His manifestation was the Aten—the Celestial Disc, depicted as a Winged Globe. (Fig. 38)