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This Roman woman had aroused desires that he had never known in the gardens of Ashera; her face was to the faces of the courtesans who thronged the sacred woods on feast days, as the glory of the crescent moon was to the sputter of the rancid oil in the lamp that illumined the cell of Fancula Cluvia.
He had a home, his first, the Temple, built gorgeously by Solomon, where invisibly, mysteriously, perhaps terribly, beneath the wings of cherubim that rose from the depths of the Holy of Holies, he dwelled. But the shrine, however ornate, was not the only one. There were other altars, other gods; the plentiful sanctuaries of Ashera, of Moloch and of Baal.
The libertine longings of nature, the free fecundities of mother-earth, imaged to the grosser people the Power working round about them and within their very bodies; and men and women gave free rein to their appetites and passions, in honor of divinities like Ashera, the Syrian Venus. The various tribes probably had different rites.
Sometimes it is the moon; her name is Astarte or Ashtoreth, and she is a very different being from the Ashera of Canaan; the names are not the same, and the characters are opposite.
"Lo! the spoils of Italy assigned to my Lord I give to thee,"; and, taking off necklace and bracelet, he knelt and piled them at her feet, raising and parting his arms in the attitude of oblation. Charmed as by a serpent, Marcia watched him with horrible disgust, yet unable to turn her eyes aside. "What is Tanis to thee!" he went on. "What, Ceres! What, Proserpine! Ashera!
Over the latter we naturally see the radiate Sun and Crescent moon in conjunction. In figure 16 on the same plate are representations of an Ashera and a Masseba, respectively surmounted by a Crescent moon and a radiate Sun. A similar remark applies to figure 17. A sacrificing priest can be seen in this and the last named instances.
The comparison with the ashera or pole worship among Phoenicians and Hebrews is fully justified, and is a proof of the great antiquity of the symbol, which, without becoming a formal part of the later cult, retained in some measure a hold upon the popular mind.
The Sidonian Astarte and the Canaanite Ashera represent two opposing types of female deity, both of which may possibly have their reflections in Greece the latter in the lower forms of the worship of Aphrodite, and the former in the figures of such strict maiden goddesses as Artemis and Athene. Another worship which prevailed in Phenicia should not be left unnoticed that of the Cabiri.
A massive tree-trunk, fixed in the ground and with some of its branches perhaps still remaining, represented the female deity who is the invariable companion of the Baal. This is the Ashera of Canaan, a word which in the Authorised Version is translated "grove," after an error of the Vulgate, but which in the Revised Version is rightly left untranslated.
We have here the worship of an agricultural community; and as the Baal is the lord of the soil and the author of its fertility, who is entitled to receive the first-fruits, so the Ashera is the fertile matron who represents the principle of increase. The Old Testament leaves us in no doubt as to the kind of worship which was carried on at these shrines.
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