"Did Worship Of Goddess Tanit Include Castration?" Topic

And the making of eunuchs for her Phoenician/Carthaginian temple "services", or has also this been re-written by today's great omniscients?

Dan
PS. And they also seem to keep finding more temple cemeteries (tophets) set aside to the (male?) infants sacrificed to her. Wow. If true, that goddess really had some serious issues. :)

Yeah. All the modern enlightened historians accused the Romans of slander right up until they started finding baby bones in the temple furnaces. Suddenly G.K. Chesterton's take on the whole thing makes more sense.

However, this is a wargame site, and I am NOT feeding plastic infants into a model furnace to get a +1 on my saving throws.

Glad you found dry land. Or a ship with Internet access?

Robert

Thanks so much! Staying at my inlaws at the moment, and now I'm going through some of their old ancient history books. So I'm trying to get into the heads of the Phoenicians/Carthaginians.

And no, please don't make any of those. That would be so morbid and depressing.

Dan
PS. Here's a much later representation of Tanit. They sure made her look creepy. Is that supposed to be a cat/lioness face? Reminds me of that Stephen King "Sleepwalkers" movie.
link

I think those who worshpped that deranged deity had the oddest atttudes!

All the modern enlightened historians accused the Romans of slander right up until they started finding baby bones in the temple furnaces.

Well, for starters it's not like the Romans were immune to propaganda.

However, you are correct that the archeological evidence is overwhelming. However, the modern enlightened historians who champion the killing of infants for sacrifice have little evidence for this. For instance, how do we know that these are not stillborne babies or ones that died in early childhood? Dr Quinn states that these would be poor examples for doing divine sacrifices, but here she is doing pure conjecture. Maybe Carthaginians who suffered the loss of a child, burnt it in a ritual for asking for better luck with the next pregnancy. That's conjecture too on my part, and every bit as probable. Tanit is, after all, the patron Goddess of fertility, as is her forbearer, the Egyptian goddess Nieth or Nit.

Dr Quinn doesn't agree because that can't account for all the dead children in a time of large infant mortality. In other sections she claims that cremation of bone was an expensive and difficult process. Therefore, the sacrificed babies were dead infants from the wealthy who could afford burial and the tophets and the sculpting of stone monuments.

link

So Diodorus could be correct, but the archeology for the motivation underlying the ritual is not there yet, any more than for the motivation for the Andean mummy children, as a similar example.

In the meantime was this behaviour seen in other Phoenician cities like Tyre, Byblos, Cyrene, Malaka, Cartagena, etc? Or is this a purely Carthaginian ritual?

I think those who worshpped that deranged deity had the oddest atttudes!

I think that is true for many religions, even modern ones. However, giving specific examples may get me dawghoused.

Just found this about the Carthaginians infant cemeteries:

"Professor Piero Bartoloni of the University of Sassari cites the fact that seven out of ten children were likely to die in their first year in ancient times, and asks ‘is it reasonable that with such a high level of infant mortality, these people killed their own children?"

Prof. Pietro Bartoloni, interview in Archeologia Viva, May 2007

In the meantime was this behaviour seen in other Phoenician cities like Tyre, Byblos, Cyrene, Malaka, Cartagena, etc? Or is this a purely Carthaginian ritual?

If it was practiced, you can be sure it would be in the Bible. What great propaganda value!
Not being a biblical scholar (we Catholics are not really Christians, don't you know? ), I wouldn't know.

I seem to recall an Ammonite inscription with a king bragging about his piety in sacrificing his child (to Moloch).

So, if foreign accounts were right about the kingdom of Ammon, a neighbor of the Phoenicians (about 100 kilometers away) and Canaanites, I think there is a chance that what was also reported about the Phoenicians in Lebanon might have also been true, and we just haven't found any evidence for it yet.

Also, until someone finds evidence that the Carthaginians came up with the practice of child sacrifice independently of Phoenicia, my money is on the ritual being practiced by both the Phoenician mother country and the Carthaginian colonists. Rome's focus would be mostly on what was done in Carthage, of course.

Just a guess of course. And future excavations may or may not have the answers any of us want or expect.

Dan

My fuzzy memories of the Old Testament (but somewhat like Winston, it was the Douay-Rheims translation, so who knows?) contain references to human/child sacrifice for Dagon and Baal -- don't recall Tanit, offhand. But didn't the Romans themselves resort to human sacrifice during the darkest days of the 2nd Punic War? I have clearer memories of reading about that. It was noted by the pro-Roman historians as a sign of how desperate they were. So in a way, however it plays out, no hands are entirely clean.

For what's it worth (I seen it on da internets , so it's got to be true!) there's this.
link

By the way, I see that we've strayed from the unpleasant topic of castration to the more pleasant speculation on ritual child sacrifice.

Winston,

I think that article is very similar to the one I read a couple of years ago, but couldn't find. Thanks so much for that link.

Dan
PS. As for self-castration rituals, it seems like Tanit wasn't the only Near Eastern goddess that had her male followers emasculating themselvelves to prove their devotion. Ashtoreth/Astarte/Ishtar did the same thing done in her temples. Weird stuff.

I think the Bible at least implies that child sacrifice was the norm in the Ancient Near East (the Abraham/Isaac story tells how the Jews stopped doing it).
The early Greeks did it on occasion as well.

Looks like the bug has struck this thread. Look at the union and confederate poker card thread
TMP link

Both practices seem bizarrely impractical, from a biological view. Why would any successful species adopt counter-reproductive behaviors? Sure don't make no scientific sense. But perhaps it illustrates that we're an evolutionary dead end, unpleasant as that may be to consider.

This is a very thorny problem.

When you talk about a people in the past, even as far back as the 19th century you aren't talking about "people just like us." They had very different world views and how reality is put together. This is demonstrated by peoples wonderment at the lives and beliefs of he Victorians, who are our very near relations.

When you go back thousands of years the differences become more and more accentuated until it seems you are talking about alien life forms.

Here in the time of the Cartheginians and before you are talking about people in the "mythopoeic" age. Here questions that are important to us like "counter-productive behaviours" simply do not enter into their view. While sacrifice of children may seem "biologically counter productive" they are also to us monstrous. But remember all peoples at that time practiced infanticide if the child was deformed or crippled in some way, and that "crippling" could be that they were simply female. Killing healthy females because sons were preferred is "biologically counter productive" in the most extreme form.

To even get close to the mindset you have to understand what people thought and how they saw the world in the "mythopoeic" age. That's anybody's mythopoeic age, be they Greek, Bablylonian, Celtic, Egyptian, whomever.

That is no easy thing. I can recommend lots of books like Frankfort's "Before Philosophy" Colasso's "The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony" Murray's The five Stages of Greek Religion" and lots of works on Mesopotomia by Botero.

Hoever. you can't get this by going to the LaRousse Dictionary of Mythology, or a Gazeteer of the Gods. These lay out things in too logical too modern, to rational a view.

The mythopoeic is world view where the universe is an
"Alltogethereverythingatoncemixedinonegreathugeundifferentiated ball." There really is no time, no cause and effect, and there is not one myth there are many myths and many differnet myth retellings of the same myth. There can be 20 different tales of a myth of say Europa and the Bull, or Utna-pishtim and the flood, and they differ wildly in major story elements.

To take one of the sources above Gilbert Murray in "The Five Stages of Greek Religion" divides its course up in five steps "Saturna Regina" which is the true mythopoeic, "The Olympian conquest" where the previously undifferentiated and complex elements of "the gods" become personified in the characters of the Olympians and assigned definite names and shapes. Then the advent of the Philosophical Schools which divide the gods more finely and move to the for the philosophical questions, and finally the downfall of them and the rise of monotheism and the last protests of polytheism.

What is important is that history is the sworn enemy of the mythopoeic. It is its atomization. Everything exists together in the mythopoeic but in history there is cause and effect, this comes before that, and not everything exists at once. Significantly with the growth and emercence of the great schools, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, Platonism, so also arises history. Causality is born. Thus it is almost correct to say that time is itself invented with history and at the end of the period of the schools there is Aristotle who begins "science" in envisioning cause and effect through completely non supernatural means and most important of all, and completely destructive to the Gods, that a thing cannot be, and be its own negation at the same time. It cannot be one thing, and also the thing that is anathema to it. For example, it cannot be raining and not raining at the same time. Oh it can be raining and the sun is shining, but not raining and not raining. Significantly Aristotle said that if you ever met someone who argued that, just stop talking to them for there could be no communication between you.

When you are talking then about things like child sacrifice you are talking about something that exists in an age which has an entirely different world view.

consider that the ancients considered the world grossly overpopulated even at the time of Homer. Homer puts into the mouth of Zeus the reasons for causing the war of Troy was to bring the age of heroes to an end, but also because the world was already too burdened with too many people. He wanted to make a great cavity in the humans that burdened creation.

Bowman – agree entirely.

I believe priests of Cybele had to "lighten their load" a bit at their own hands too. And there's an Indian guru doing serious prison time right now for getting his followers to do likewise.

Livy records human sacrifice in Rome once during an emergency, but adds that it was widely condemned as un-Roman behaviour.

Theon Greyjoy just demonstrated one of the advantages of such a practice.

One thing that's very different is how in the people in the West today have kids so that the kids can one day live their own lives, but not so that the parents have someone to take care of them when they get old.

Also, in the past people had as many kids as possible to work the farm or the shop, because they never knew how many would actually grow up to be adults.

My wife's grandmother (a third generation Texan of Mexican and Spanish descent) worked the fields alongside migrant workers, picking cotton and other crops. In between all that work and travel she had 18 children, of which 12 made it to adulthood.

I can't even imagine that life and the mindset that could have driven people to do all the incredible things they did in their day.

And that was just a few generations ago. In the rest of the world this is still the norm. So in the past people would have certainly had an even more radically different worldview.

Dan

Whose biology, though, as in which segment of an ancient population? And, writing of biology, there would seem to be trade-offs that are implicit in such things as litter size and clutch size such that more offspring is not necessarily "better".

Well, to muddy the waters even more. From John's link:

The paper also cites the "unanimous" support of contemporary Greco-Roman sources, Van Dommelen said, some of which explicitly state that Phoenicians practiced this custom.

Well, there was only one contemporary who witnessed the sack of Carthage. That was Polybius, who does not mention child sacrifice. The closest one who does is Diodorus of Sicily, who lived 100 years after the event.

Here is a good collection of writers who mention the sacrifice of Carthaginian children:

link