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eminent collectors in putting two identical copies of an extremely rare book on his own shelves, expressly in order that neither of them should fill a gap in the library of another collection.

In this respect, also, we venture to believe that Mr. Huntington has followed Lord Spencer's example in deciding to sell by auction the residue of the Britwell books, together with the substituted copies from his own library.

THE

BAGHDAD.

As we go to press, the welcome news of the fall of Baghdad reaches us, and considering the immeasurable importance of the event, we have thought it not inappropriate to FALL OF ask Dr. Mingana to favour our readers with his views on certain aspects of its significance. Dr. Mingana writes with the authority of one who is intimately acquainted not only with the city of Baghdad, but also with the surrounding country of Mesopotamia, where he has spent a great part of his life.

THE ORIGIN OF THE CULT OF APHRODITE.1

BY J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., LITT.D., etc.,

WE

HON. FELLOW OF CLARE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

E have in previous essays shown that it was possible to dig down to the ground form of a number of the cults of the divinities which go to make up the Greek pantheon. Dionysus has been traced back to the ivy on the oak, and we can go no further in the direction of origins than this; we are actually at the starting-point of the cult, whatever other elements, ritual or orgiastic, may be combined with the Ivy Cult. In the same way Apollo has been traced to the mistletoe on the apple-tree, which is a secondary form of the mistletoe on the oak, and we have shown that his skill as a healer and master in wizardry is due to the all-healing powers of his mistletoe and to certain other plants in his medical garden. From these conceptions the Apollo Cult must proceed, and although there is still some unresolved complexity in the cult, the major part of it is translucent enough. Artemis, too, with her woman's medicines, and garden of herbs helpful and of herbs hurtful, is now a much more intelligible figure, though still containing perplexities for further study and resolution. She, too, is, in the first instance, personified medicine.

We now pass on to the Cult of Aphrodite, and find ourselves face to face with a problem in which our previous investigations appear not to lend any assistance. She is a daughter of Zeus by tradition, apparently of Zeus and Dione, but there seems no way of attaching her to the sky, either bright or dark, or to the oak-tree, or to the woodpecker, or to the ivy or the mistletoe, or to a medical garden. Moreover, by common consent, she is ruled out of the company of gods with Greek originals. She is an immigrant in the Greek pantheon, an alien, however desirable, and however much at home. Her luggage has Cyprus labels on it, to say nothing of other islands where she has made stay; and this has not unnaturally led to the view that she is Oriental and not Greek at all. In spite of the interest

1 A lecture delivered in the John Rylands Library, 17 October, 1916.

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which she takes in other people's business, she has no direct cult-relations with the rest of the gods, she does not share temples nor honours except in rare and insignificant cases1; her worship is conventional as far as the sacrifices are concerned, and no special animal, not even the dove, betrays by its presence the links which connect the great goddess of Love with her past: and yet we are sure that she had a past, even if we do not at first know in what direction to look for it. The Greek mythology tells us nothing: the poets play with her name and perpetrate philological impertinences to show why she is born of the foam (appós), and only lead us from the truth, instead of towards it, by their industrious myth-spinning. We evidently must begin this enquiry de novo, both as regards the ancient mythologists and their modern representatives. We will not even assume too hastily that she is a foreigner: for that requires the underlying assumption that the Greeks had no god or goddess of Love of their own and had no necessity for one, which I, for one, find extremely difficult to believe. Cyprus and Cythera may turn out to be not so far from the mainland after all and even if she did originate in Cyprus or Cythera, we have still to be told the story of her birth. Is she a personified force of nature, a vegetable demon of fertility, some person or thing that makes for growth and multiplies products? Can we look on her as another view of the Corn-Mother, or as a spirit of physical inebriation, like Dionysos? or is it possible that she, too, may be like Apollo and Artemis, the virtue of a plant?

As we have said, her relation to Zeus is merely ornamental: so that if she has a vegetable origin, it can hardly be found in the oak or its parasites. It would have to be sought in that part of the botanical world that is supposed to have sexual virtues. Now a little enquiry into the history of medicine, which we have shown to be for the most part the history of plants, will tell us that the ancients were very interested in determining what plants would make people fall in love with one another; they used their observation leisurely and their imagina on industriously, and in the end they evolved all that branch of magic which has for its object the manufacture of philtres and potions, and, as Falstaff would say, "medicines to make me love him ".

1 The case of Dodona is not included: for here Aphrodite is hardly to be distinguished from Dione; the Dodona Cult is about the oldest thing in Greek religion.

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