Atargatis

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Atargatis was the principal goddess of northern Syria in the Hellenistic and Roman periods — a deity of fertility, water, and the welfare of the city, whom Greek and Latin writers knew simply as the Syrian Goddess, Dea Syria. Her great cult centre was Hierapolis-Bambyce, the modern Manbij, where her temple drew pilgrims from across the Near East.

The name itself is a fusion. Scholars generally read Atargatis as a Greek rendering of two older Semitic divine names compounded — the goddess ʿAttar (cognate with Astarte) joined to ʿAtta or to the figure later called Anat — so that the name records, in its own syllables, the merging of cults that produced her. By the time she appears in the surviving record she is a single great goddess, often paired with the god Hadad, and frequently shown enthroned and crowned with a mural crown, flanked by lions.

Most of what is reported about her worship comes from one text: the Greek treatise On the Syrian Goddess, transmitted under the name of Lucian of Samosata and written in the second century CE. Whether Lucian wrote it, and how much of its deadpan ethnography is straight reporting and how much is parody, remain open questions; the work is at once the richest source for the cult and a notoriously slippery one. It describes a vast temple at Hierapolis, a sacred lake stocked with tame fish that no one was permitted to eat, flocks of doves held sacred to the goddess, and ecstatic rites in which her devotees, the galli, castrated themselves in her service. The taboo on fish and doves is attested well beyond this one account, and it shaped the later image of Atargatis as a goddess sometimes pictured with the body or tail of a fish.

Her cult travelled. Wandering begging-priests carried her image through the Roman world — Apuleius, in The Golden Ass, gives a hostile portrait of such a troupe — and her shrines have been traced from Syria to Delos, Italy, and the western provinces, often through the movement of slaves, soldiers, and traders. In this diffusion she was readily identified with other great goddesses: Aphrodite, Hera, Cybele, the Magna Mater. That fluid identification is itself characteristic of the religious world she belonged to, in which a powerful local deity could be received elsewhere as a familiar goddess under a foreign name.

What her worshippers held of her in their own terms is harder to recover than the externals of the rite, since almost nothing survives in the Syrian voice itself; the picture is assembled chiefly from outsiders looking in, and from the coins, reliefs, and inscriptions that outlasted the temples. 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.

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