Atargatis

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At Hierapolis-Bambyce in northern Syria — the modern Manbij, northeast of Aleppo — stood a temple that pilgrims reached from across the Near East, walking the last stage of the road with their heads shaved and a single sheep led for sacrifice. Inside, on a throne flanked by lions, sat the goddess the Greeks and Romans called simply the Syrian Goddess, Dea Syria: Atargatis, principal deity of the region through the Hellenistic and Roman centuries, mistress of fertility, of the waters, and of the welfare of the city. Beside her on a second throne, drawn by bulls, sat the storm-god Hadad; between the two stood a strange gilded standard surmounted by a dove. The temple’s lake, fed by springs, teemed with fish that wore jeweled fins and answered to their names, and that no one was permitted to take or eat.

A name that records a merger

The name itself is a seam where two older deities were joined. Atargatis is the Greek form of an Aramaic ʿAtarʿatā, and that compound preserves, in its own syllables, the fusion of two divine names: the goddess ʿAttar — a form of the name borne by Astarte, and behind her by Mesopotamian Ishtar and Sumerian Inanna — joined to ʿAtta, an Aramaizing form of the warrior-goddess later called Anat. The two had already been paired in the Bronze Age cult of Ugarit, Astarte and Anat standing side by side among the deities of the Canaanite world that underlies Phoenician religion; at some point in the long Aramaean afterlife of that pantheon they coalesced into a single great goddess whose name still carries both. By the time she enters the surviving record she is one figure, not two, and the doubled name has hardened into a proper noun.

A further contraction of the same name produced a second goddess-shadow. At Ascalon on the Philistine coast the name was shortened and altered to Derketo (Derceto), and there she acquired the form for which she is now most remembered: a woman above, a fish below. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century BCE, identifies Derceto of Ascalon with Atargatis and supplies a foundation tale in which the goddess, shamed by a mortal love, casts herself into a sacred pool and is taken up into the bodies of fish. On the coins of Demetrios III Eukairos, struck at the close of the second century BCE, the fish-tailed goddess appears on the reverse, human-headed above the scaled body. The fish-woman is a late and partial image — Atargatis at Hierapolis is fully human in form — but it is the one that traveled furthest, and it grew directly out of the cult’s most famous taboo.

The cult statue and her consort

The image at Hierapolis was a study in composite divinity. She sat in gold, crowned with rays and a tower-like kalathos — the mural crown of a goddess who is herself a city — holding a scepter in one hand and a spindle in the other, jeweled at the throat and girdle, lions couched beneath her seat. A single great gemstone in her headdress was said to light the temple by night. To the Greek eye she read as several goddesses at once: chiefly Hera, to whom the seated, sovereign, throned posture belonged, but with the attributes of Aphrodite, Athena, Selene, Rhea, and the Fates folded into the one figure. Beside her sat Hadad, the Aramaean storm-god whom the Greeks read as Zeus, smaller and more conventional, drawn by bulls as she was carried by lions. The pairing of throned goddess and storm-god is old West Semitic grammar — the consort of Baal reconfigured for a new age — but here the goddess is the senior partner, the temple hers and the rites built around her.

Between the two divine thrones stood the object the cult called the semeion, the “sign” or “standard”: a gilded pole bearing disks and emblems and topped by a golden dove, carried in procession twice a year down to the sea and back. That this was no literary invention is shown by a relief from Dura-Europos on the upper Euphrates, where Atargatis appears on her lion-throne and Hadad on his bull-throne with the dove-topped standard rising between them — stone confirmation of the arrangement otherwise known only from words.

The treatise that preserves her

Almost everything reported of her worship at Hierapolis comes from a single Greek text: On the Syrian Goddess (De Dea Syria), transmitted under the name of Lucian of Samosata and composed in the second century CE. It is a deadpan ethnography written in a deliberate, archaizing pseudo-Ionic — a mock-Herodotean dialect in which a Syrian narrator reports, with elaborate seriousness, on the temple of his own homeland. Whether Lucian himself wrote it has been argued both ways, and the degree to which its straight-faced reportage shades into parody is harder still to fix. The modern critical edition by J. L. Lightfoot, Lucian: On the Syrian Goddess (Oxford, 2003), marshals the linguistic and thematic parallels — the dialect closest to the genuine On Astrology, the recurring Lucianic turns of irony — and argues for authentic authorship; on that reading the work is a sophisticated literary game played by a Hellenized Syrian about Syrian religion, neither plain documentary nor simple mockery. The text is at once the richest source for the cult and a notoriously slippery one, and reading it means holding both facts at once: that it preserves details corroborated by coins and reliefs, and that its author never quite lets the reader forget he is performing.

What the treatise describes is a temple of overwhelming wealth — gilded roof and doors, an inner sanctum the priests alone might enter — fed by the wealth of a whole region and ringed by the institutions of a great pilgrimage center. It catalogs the foundation legends the cult told of itself, tracing the temple variously to Deucalion of the flood, to Semiramis the Babylonian queen, and to the love-tale of Stratonice and the eunuch Combabus, this last a story that explains, in the cult’s own idiom, why its leading priests were eunuchs.

Fish, doves, and the galli

Three features of the Hierapolis cult recur across the wider record and mark the goddess most distinctly. The first is the sacred lake. Beside the temple lay a deep spring-fed pool, hundreds of feet across, stocked with tame fish that came when called, some wearing gold ornaments, none ever to be caught or eaten. Fish ponds of the same kind are attested at her other great shrines — Ascalon and Edessa among them — and the prohibition was general: her devotees abstained from fish entirely, and from the dove, the bird sacred to her whose flesh and even whose touch could render a worshipper consecrated for a day. The fish-taboo and the fish-goddess are two faces of one logic. The creature set apart and never consumed became, at Ascalon, the creature the goddess herself half was; the uneaten fish of the pool and the fish-tailed Derketo of the coin belong to a single imaginative economy.

The second feature is the sacred doves — kept in the temple precinct, fed and unharmed, woven into the cult’s emblems down to the dove that crowned the semeion. Where the fish marked the boundary of the eaten and the not-eaten, the dove marked the goddess’s reach into the air and the affinity with the love-goddesses, Astarte and Aphrodite, in whose orbit the bird already moved.

The third is the galli. These were the goddess’s ecstatic servants, men who in a state of frenzy at the spring festival took up a sword and unmanned themselves, then ran through the city flinging the severed parts into a house, which thereafter owed them women’s clothing and ornament. Thereafter they lived and dressed as the goddess’s eunuch-priests. The act bound the servant permanently to the deity, a self-offering that could not be undone, and it tied the Syrian cult to a wider Anatolian and Near Eastern pattern of castrate priesthoods — above all that of Cybele and the Magna Mater, with whom Atargatis was readily assimilated, and within whose orbit the figure of the gallus is most fully documented. The treatise reports the rite at a careful narrative distance, the narrator declining to join, which is itself part of its method.

A goddess who traveled

Atargatis did not stay at Hierapolis. Her cult moved outward along the same channels that carried the other Eastern deities into the Hellenistic and then the Roman world — the roads and sea-lanes of trade, the slave markets, the auxiliary cohorts of the army. The earliest and best-documented foothold abroad was the free port of Delos, where in the second century BCE a community of Syrian merchants and their households built her a sanctuary; the island has yielded a dense cluster of inscriptions in which she is honored, often as Hagne Aphrodite, “Holy Aphrodite,” and served by a succession of named priests. From Delos and the other entrepôts her worship spread through Italy and across the western provinces — into Spain, Gaul, the Rhine frontier, and as far as Roman Britain, where altars to the Syrian Goddess have been recovered in the north. Syrian auxiliaries carried her with the legions; merchants and slaves carried her with their households; a Palmyrene bilingual preserves her full name where Aramaic and Greek meet.

One vivid, hostile witness to the cult’s mobile form survives in Latin literature. In Book 8 of The Golden Ass, Apuleius sets the transformed Lucius into the hands of a troupe of wandering priests of the Dea Syria: led by the eunuch Philebus, they carry the goddess’s image from town to town on the back of the ass, beat cymbals and castanets, work themselves into prophetic frenzy, gash and scourge their own bodies before a paying crowd, and pass the collection bowl for coins, wine, and cheese before moving on. The portrait is a satirist’s caricature — greedy, fraudulent, lurid — and it should be read as Apuleius reading the cult, not as the cult itself. But it documents, even through the contempt, the institution it mocks: the begging itinerant priesthood that carried the Syrian Goddess far beyond Syria, the portable image, the cymbals and the ecstatic self-wounding that marked her devotees on a Roman street.

Identifications and the work of syncretism

Wherever she went she was received under a familiar name. On Delos she was Aphrodite; to Lucian’s eye she was chiefly Hera; in the western provinces she was assimilated to Cybele and the Magna Mater, sharing with them the lions, the mural crown, and the castrate priesthood; and across the eastern cults of the empire she stood among the great mother-goddesses beside whom Roman worshippers also met Isis and her consort Serapis, and the Phrygian and Thracian deities such as Sabazius. This fluid identifiability is not a confusion to be corrected but the working logic of the age — the same syncretism by which a powerful local deity could be received abroad as a known goddess wearing a foreign name, and by which the gods of the Roman Empire flowed into one another at the edges without ever quite merging at the core. Within that logic Atargatis keeps her West Semitic ancestry — the line back through Astarte and the Canaanite pantheon — while presenting, at each new shrine, the face the local worshippers could read. She is to be distinguished, in that crowded field, from the West Semitic grain-god Dagon, a separate deity of an older and different cult, and the Akkadian title Bel, “Lord,” which belonged to the great gods of Mesopotamia and never to her consort.

The textual and material record

The reconstruction of the cult rests on an uneven base, and its foundations are worth setting out. The single literary pillar is On the Syrian Goddess, now read through Lightfoot’s commentary, which prints the Greek with translation and a six-hundred-page apparatus and remains the indispensable modern edition (Oxford University Press). The older standard English version — Herbert Strong and John Garstang’s 1913 translation — circulates freely as a public-domain text and is the route by which most readers first meet the treatise, though its notes are now long superseded. The historical and epigraphic synthesis was laid down by H. J. W. Drijvers, whose studies of the religion of Hatra, Edessa, and Palmyra placed Atargatis within the documented Aramaean cults of the region rather than in the haze of “Oriental religion,” and whose work, with the corpus of inscriptions from Delos and the reliefs from Dura-Europos, anchors what can be said against material evidence. The Latin caricature in Apuleius supplies the western, traveling form, available in translation (Poetry in Translation).

What no source supplies is the goddess in her own people’s voice. The temple liturgies, the prayers, the theology her worshippers held of her — these have not come down; the picture is assembled almost entirely from outsiders looking in, from a Hellenized satirist and a Latin novelist and the silent testimony of coins, reliefs, votive inscriptions, and the foundations of the temples themselves. The interior of the cult is reconstructed from its exterior, and the reconstruction is provisional by nature.

The fish in the sacred pool, kept and fed and never eaten, is among the few details that comes down intact — a small, exact image of a cult organised around what was set apart and not to be touched.

→ Related: Sabazius · Bel · Mesopotamia · Astarte · Phoenician Religion · Ishtar · Baal · Apuleius · Hera · Syncretism · Isis · Serapis · Dagon · Hellenistic Period · Roman Empire