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Sarratu, from which Sarai comes, was the title of the moon-goddess. In Genesis, Sarai is Abraham's wife. Abraham is a derivative of Aburamu, which was one of the moon's many names. Among these, one in particular has since been identified with Jahveh. That flight of arrows, being interpreted, means: Jave ilu, Jahveh is god.
She must allow you to freely encircle her waist with an arm, so that having felt the emotion you can write "How tenderly that yielding form, Thrills to my touch! And then, even as a painter who pays so much per hour for studying from the life, you can go away and forget her or you can exaggerate her charms in rhyme, or 'imagine' that she is fairer than Endymion's moon-goddess- -for so long as she serves you thus she is useful, but once her uses are exhausted, the poet has done with her, and seeks a fresh sample.
Medieval chroniclers, writing in bastard Latin, and following the example of classical authors, when they had to find a name for this demon-goddess, chose, of course, Diana the heathen huntress, the moon-goddess, and the ruler of the night. In the same way, when they threw Odin's name into a Latin shape, he, the god of wit and will, as well as power and victory, became Mercury.
Indeed the Syrian and Jewish rites dated largely from Babylonia. "The Hebrews entering Syria," says Richard Burton "found it religionized by Assyria and Babylonia, when the Accadian Ishtar had passed West, and had become Ashtoreth, Ashtaroth, or Ashirah, the Anaitis of Armenia, the Phoenician Astarte, and the Greek Aphrodite, the great Moon-goddess who is queen of Heaven and Love."
So the zone of the moon-goddess Aphrodite inveigles all-seeing Zeus to treacherous slumber on Mount Ida; and by a similar sorcery Tasso's great hero is lulled in unseemly idleness in Armida's golden paradise, at the western verge of the world. The disappearance of Tannhauser behind the moonlit cliff, lured by Venus Ursula, the pale goddess of night, is a precisely parallel circumstance.
Istar, another Sumerian deity, became softened in Semitic speech to Athtar, the moon-goddess of Southern Arabia; and the connection of this moon- and cow-goddess with the similar Hathor of Egypt seems very probable. Ansar was another Sumerian god, meaning 'the sky, or the spirit world of the sky; and this might have passed into Anhar, the sky-god, known both in Upper and Lower Egypt.
The moon-goddess, or Aphrodite, of the ancient Germans, was called Horsel, or Ursula, who figures in Christian mediaeval mythology as a persecuted saint, attended by a troop of eleven thousand virgins, who all suffer martyrdom as they journey from England to Cologne. The meaning of the myth is obvious.
But Sumerian influence and memories were too strong to allow of any transformation either in the name or in the attributes of the goddess. She remained Istar, without any feminine suffix, and it was never forgotten that she was the evening-star. It was otherwise in the West. There Istar became Ashtoreth with the feminine termination, and passed eventually into a Moon-goddess "with crescent horns."
This strict goddess is not to be identified with Istar of Babylonia, although the names are alike. Istar is not a moon-goddess like Ashtoreth; in Babylonia, in fact, the moon is masculine, and the characters of the two goddesses are opposite.
But it is not I that threaten it, any more than I hate you, in whom I acknowledge a fellow of my craft, but one greater than myself that it is my duty to obey." "Have done! Why do you torment me?" "Can the priests of the Moon-goddess torment Isis, Mother of Magic, with their prayers and offerings? And can I who would make a prayer and an offering " "What prayer, and what offering?"