The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism [1911] - Get a Free Blog

SYRIA.
1 19
As a second blemish, the Semitic religions practised
human immolations longer than any other religion,
sacrificing children and grown men in order to please
sanguinary gods. In spite of Hadrian s prohibition of
those murderous offerings,* 2
they were maintained in
certain clandestine rites and in the lowest practices of
nia^lc, up to the fall of the idols, and even later. They
corresponded to the ideas of a period during which the
life of a captive or slave had no greater value than
that of an animal.
These sacred practices and many others, on which
Lucian complacently enlarges in his opuscule on the
goddess of Hierapolis, daily revived the
barbarous past in the temples
habits of a
of Syria. Of all the
conceptions that had successively dominated the coun
try, none had completely disappeared. As in Egypt,
beliefs of very different date and origin coexisted,
without any attempt to make them agree, or without
success when the task was undertaken. In these be
liefs zoolatry, litholatry and all the other nature wor
ships outlived the savagery that had created them.
More than anywhere else the gods had remained the
chieftains of clans^s because the tribal organizations
of Syria were longer lived and more developed than
those of any other region. Under the empire many
districts were still subjected to the tribal regime and
commanded by "ethnarchs" or "phylarchs."44 Re
ligion, which sacrificed the lives of the men and the
honor of the women to the divinity, had in many re
gards
remained on the moral level of unsocial and
sanguinary tribes. Its obscene and atrocious rites
called forth exasperated indignation on the part of