Abraham's Knife: The Mythology of the Deicide in Anti-Semitism

By Judith Civan

Please visit the author's website at Abrahamsknife.com

Christians may take the idea of deicide for granted but to Jews it is a bizarre notion, especially when it is turned against them, becoming the accusation of "You killed Christ" and setting in motion the antisemitic acts of the last two thousand years of history. Over and over again, Jews ask, "Why do they hate us?" and protest their innocence and their standing as good citizens of their societies.

With a background as a student of literature and a journalist, Judith Civan set out to explain first for her own understanding and then for others who are similarly bewildered, the origin and meaning of the deicide charge, the least rational and most powerful of the various ingredients of antisemitism. Where did this idea originate and how could it have played such an important role in Western culture and history over some two millenia? Drawing upon biblical scholarship and the work of historians of subsequent periods, Civan has attempted a literary analysis of the figures of Abraham, Isaac, Jesus, Judas, and Shylock which might make some sense of this persistent and pernicious myth.

Though weakened by the reforms of Vatican II, the deicide myth has not been disposed of and it is still vitally important to try to understand it. It is important not only for the safety of Jews who only recently suffered the devastation of the Holocaust, but also for the health and moral integrity of Western culture. Civan concludes that the accusation of deicide is so virulent because it is not so much about the killing of God as it is about the sacrifice of children, about parental love, ambivalence and guilt, and the human sense of vulnerability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 24, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469105062

Judith Civan

Judith Civan studied English literature at Radcliffe and Columbia, then worked as a reporter and feature writer at the Newark Star-Ledger and was a columnist for the New York and Washington Jewish Weeks. She is the author of “Abraham’s Knife: the Mythology of the Deicide in Antisemitism”, a literary and historical study of the origins and ramifications of the deicide accusation, and the novels “Leaving Egypt” and “Choosing”.

Book preview

ABRAHAM’S KNIFE

The Mythology of the Deicide in

Antisemitism

Judith Civan

Copyright © 2004 by Judith Civan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

INTRODUCTION

PART I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

PART II

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CONCLUSION

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

For my children and grandchildren,

that they may sit under their vines and their fig-trees "

and none shall make them afraid" (Micah 4:4).

Indeed, there are ways in which the symbols express their truth more adequately than the more formal and exact language of the doctrine, for the truth in question is not an idea but a reality-of experience so fundamental and alive that we cannot pin it down and know about it in exact terms.

Alan Watts, Myth and Ritual in Christianity

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank those who read the manuscript in its early stages: Ethan Civan, Jesse Civan, Professor Norman Oler, Dr. Ascher Segall, and Deborah Strober. I am grateful to Hilda Pring of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania for her assistance.

Most of all, I am indebted to my husband, Dr. Mortimer Civan, who has supported me in every way, emotionally, financially and intellectually, through the many years this book took to grow and without whom I would not have had the courage to complete the task.

I regret that I did not finish in time to thank Grace and Judah Goldin, while they were still living, for their friendship and encouragement, but I do have their memory which is truly a blessing.

I would also like to thank The Arni Magnusson Institute, Iceland for permission to reproduce The Sacrifice of Abraham from the Bible translation Stjórn, mid-14th century, on the book cover.

INTRODUCTION

Vienna, City of My Nightmares

T his book began in Vienna, although I didn’t know it at the time. In the summer of 1966 my husband rescued me from the incessant demands of a house, a toddler and a new baby to take me along to a biophysics congress in Vienna. While he talked science with his colleagues I was free to roam about Vienna’s streets, sit in cafes and explore museums. The museums of Vienna were numerous and fascinating and I rated them in excellence on a level with the opera, the coffee and the pastries.

Nevertheless, despite these amenities, and the sudden, blessed freedom from diapers and crying babies, I was not at ease in Vienna. I was fairly ignorant but not ignorant enough to enjoy my bliss. I knew Vienna had once had a large Jewish population which had been not only large, but also extraordinarily creative, productive and important in the economic and cultural life of the city. I saw no signs of sorrow or regret over the almost total disappearance of this population. I use the word disappearance purposively because as far as the Viennese were concerned, the Jews seemed to have vanished from the life of their city abruptly and somewhat magically, as at the wave of a conjurer’s wand or in the shifting of the scenery, between one act and another of a theatrical drama.¹ It seemed rude and inappropriate to suggest that some very energetic human intervention had been needed to arrive at Vienna’s practically Judenrein condition.

And yet I knew that there had been such energetic human intervention, that Nazism had flourished in Austria and that at least a good fraction of the Viennese had played a far from passive role in the process of divorcing Vienna from its Jews.

I walked about Vienna feeling like a very small fly who had somehow slipped into an immaculate and well-screened house. Just because the fly-swatter was not evident did not mean that it could not be brought into play at a moment’s notice, and in my illicit peregrinations about the city, I kept alert. No wonder Theodore Herzl had decided on the necessity of a Jewish state, I thought. He had lived in this city.

One morning, in a small art museum, I found myself facing a large painting by Hieronymus Bosch. It was a vivid, detailed and graphic depiction of hell and all the multifarious possibilities it offered for the torment of human bodies and souls. Although Bosch had painted this canvas in the 16th century, I was convinced he was bearing witness to the reality of Auschwitz more truly than any other work of art I had ever encountered. He gave me something to think about later as I sat in Demels eating my Sachertorte with whipped cream.

Here in Demels I had escaped from a nightmare. The dark chocolate cake, heavy and rich; the smooth refinement of the coffee cup and saucer; the polite, restrained chatter of the customers reduced the unbearable reality of the Bosch to a mere shadow and echo of itself. Still, I continued to see obscene images reflected from the sugar bowl and the cream pitcher. Some nightmares are tenacious.

Another day I entered another nightmare. Or was it another one? Perhaps it was one continuous nightmare whose episodes only seemed discrete. In a museum of Austrian folk art I saw Jesus hanging in bleeding agony on cross after cross after cross. This was not the gentle, saccharine Galilean shepherd whose image I had seen in many books and churches but a writhing, twisted, almost demonic figure who might have come straight out of Bosch’s hell. The workmanship was cruder but the emotion behind it was akin. And there were other bloody pictures too, pictures of saints suffering the many gruesome varieties of martyrdom. Having expected a cozy, cheerful, gemütlichkeit kind of folk art, I was stunned. Besides all the fat roses and curlicues, there was this too, the demon-god being tortured on the cross.

And this image must have been in the heart of the Austrian peasant when he heard the word Jew or looked at the face of one. All this inchoate emotion and obsession with blood coming to focus on the person of a real, live Jew. I began to think that it was not remarkable that antisemitism had flourished in Austria but rather that Austrians had been able to bear the presence of Jews amongst themselves to any extent.

But why were we Jews associated in the Christian mind with so much blood and terror? What had they to fear from us? Could it be that the mythology of the Gospels, their claim that the Jews were behind the crucifixion of Jesus, and that they were a deicide people, was still so powerful nearly two thousand years after the supposed event? An incredible thought for one brought up in proximity to polite Christian circles where Christ-killing had never seemed to be the issue, only some sort of ill-defined social repulsiveness of the Jews to the extent that they remained unassimilated and different from their Christian neighbors.

I returned home to Boston and babies, the tortured figure on the cross fading as do all nightmares in the morning light, and forgot what I had learned. Or rather pushed it into that far reach of the mind where all uncomfortable notions fester, neglected and unresolved.

A number of years later I was rummaging haphazardly through the Jewish history stacks of Widener Library at Harvard when I came upon the diaries of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, a former official in the British colonial administration of Palestine and a friend of Haim Weizmann. The diaries went home with me to satisfy my burgeoning Zionist curiosity about what it was like there in the early days. There I was, reading innocently, about politics and personalities in twentieth century Jerusalem, London, etc. when I came upon the following entry for the 14th of April, 1919:

Weizmann tells me that when he met Clemenceau with a view to enlisting his sympathy with the National Home, that he found him unsympathetic and remarked, We Christians can never forgive the Jews for crucifying Christ, to which

Weizmann remarked, Monsieur Clemenceau, you know perfectly well that if Jesus of Nazareth were to apply for a visa to enter France, it would be refused on the grounds that he was a political agitator.²

As in Vienna, I was amazed. Once again something ancient and ugly was thrusting itself forth in a presumably modern, civilized milieu. That Clemenceau said these words was particularly shocking because during the Dreyfus affair which had split France into two contentious and vehement camps for years, Clemenceau had stood with the pro-Dreyfus party, stood for reason and justice against the reactionary forces embodied in the Army, the Church, and the antisemitic movement. Clemenceau was the last man I would have expected to throw the epithet Christkiller at Weizmann, even in a polished manner.

I retorted, Nonsense, Monsieur Clemenceau. Nonsense.

Clemenceau remained standing there, dignified and cool, an elder statesman with an ancient irrational agenda, confronting Weizmann and me. What if he means it? I thought. What if I took him at his word? What then? I would have to begin afresh, look at everything anew, revise my world view. Jews, Christians—it would all be turned inside out. I might even have to write a book.

Weizmann smiled his man of the world, eminent professor smile and replied, Monsieur Clemenceau, you know perfectly well, that if Jesus of Nazareth. . . . Answering him rationally, on the historical plane, as Jews always want to answer these accusations. Weizmann’s reply was graceful and clever but Clemenceau was unsmiling, aloof and unforgiving.

Perhaps he means it, I thought. Perhaps they all do.

PART I

Establishing the Myth

CHAPTER 1

Can a God Die?

If you go to Jerusalem, you will certainly want to visit the Mosque of Omar, also known as the Dome of the Rock. One of the chief sights of this holy and ancient city, it was built by the Caliph Abd el-Malik in the 7th century C.E. on the site of an earlier mosque erected by Omar. It is a building of outstanding beauty, its exterior encased in an arrangement of ceramic tiles whose intricate, brilliant greens and blues dazzle the eye with their counterpoints and harmonies, a sophisticated Mozart concerto of a facade. Inside, the floor is covered with soft, lovely oriental rugs and the inner shell of the building continues the display of superb tile work. But surrounded by all this magnificent artistry, sheltered and enclosed by it, lies the reason for its existence: the rock.

It is a shockingly large, rough hunk of stone which rises from the ground, indeed erupts from the depths of the mountain on which the mosque is perched as a tumor or boil pushes up to break through the smooth skin of a comely body. The rock startles with its primitiveness. It is ugly, powerful, as old as the beginning of the world. Some call it the navel of the universe. This could, you think, be true. Certainly the rock is frightening and unforgettable, the visual equivalent of a rude, shrill blast of a ram’s horn (such as Jews hear in the synagogue during the Days of Awe) piercing through the Mozartean artifice of the mosque.

What is this rock and why did Omar, Abd el-Malik and subsequent Muslim rulers who added to the mosque, honor it with the most beautiful structure in Jerusalem? This rock is said to be the spot from which Mohammed ascended to heaven on the back of his horse, el-Burak. But why in Moslem legend did Mohammed ascend from this very spot? Because the rock already possessed an ancient history of holiness. Jewish tradition identified this rock as the site of the Binding of Isaac, the Akedat Yitzhak, which Christians call the Sacrifice of Abraham. And because this spot was reputed to be exactly where Abraham bound Isaac on the altar in accordance with the commandment of his God, showing his willingness to sacrifice his beloved son, Jewish tradition tells us that here was set the altar of the Temple which Solomon later built. At this very spot, it was believed, Abraham was tested by God and demonstrated his faith and, some might say, God too was tested and justified Abraham’s faith in him. God and Abraham here established an understanding, a commitment to life and to faith which reaffirmed the covenant they had already made, and thereby initiated the subsequent millenia of the Jewish religious experience.

Was this rock indeed the site of the Akedah? Are we dealing with history here or with a myth? Biblical scholars discuss the problem of the location of the land of Moriah to which God commanded Abraham to take Isaac his son. Moriah, according to the story in Genesis, was three days journey from Abraham’s home somewhere in the neighborhood of Beersheva. To some minds, this condition would rule out identification of the land of Moriah with Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem. Today certainly one can travel by car from Beersheva to Jerusalem in a couple of hours. On foot one could do the trip within a single day. Is it conceivable that some four thousand years ago, with a countryside in a different, wilder condition, with great stretches which are now cleared perhaps then grown over with thickets and forests and with no paved roads to speed the progress of the pedestrian, the trip could have lasted some three days? Or is it necessary to postulate the location of Moriah elsewhere, in a different direction from Beersheva, somewhere in the wilderness of the Negev?

The question is certainly interesting to debate, but ultimately irrelevant. What really matters is not where Moriah was located in the realm of provable fact, but where Moriah has been located for countless generations in the minds and hearts of believers in the significance of the Akedah. It is a question equivalent to the question of whether the Akedah itself ever took place, in the sense of the taking place of an historical event, involving specific, identifiable people who lived and acted at a particular identifiable moment in time. The Akedah belongs to an ancient period of Jewish history for which we have scant historical evidence. There is too little information to make a definitive judgement about the historicity of the story. Was there really an Abraham? Most likely there was, but we cannot prove it. The story of the Akedah may belong to history, as many believe, and it may belong instead to the realm of myth, as many others think, but if it is mythical rather than historical, this makes it no less true and real. Myth is not the opposite of truth, but a particular category of truth, discernible from but no less valid than historical truth. What people believe to have happened is no less important than what actually did, within the limits of factuality, occur at a particular time and place. The trouble with myth is not that it is untrue or unreal within its own parameters but that it is capable of being confused and confounded with history, and from this confusion tragic situations can sometimes issue, as the Jewish people has good reason to know.

To scholars of religion, myth is used to describe a story or group of ideas and images which tells the members of a community who they are, what they believe and why it is true. As William Nicholls says, a myth is the charter of a religious community, the energy center by which it lives. Usually the myth explains such ultimate mysteries as the creation of the world, the struggle between good and evil, and the way human beings can be saved in the future.¹ And usually the myth is clearly metahistorical, having taken place in some realm beyond ordinary time, in the land of once upon a time, or in illo tempore, as the scholar Mircea Eliade likes to call it in his studies of myth and religion. While history describes events which transpire in the objective world around us, one explanation of myth, offered by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, defines it as the description of events that go on within us, in the inner world of the human psyche. These inner events are genuine and real, of a surpassing realness, but they are by their very nature not linked or limited to specific individuals and particular moments in time. They are by nature universal, or nearly so, and timeless. Jung spoke of myth as the language and expression of the collective unconscious, by which he meant those ideas not acquired through the experience of an individual’s life nor learnt from his particular culture but inherent in the structure of his mind, due to the circumstance of his membership in the human species.² Jung’s understanding of myth is in harmony with the way scholars of religion look at myth.

To move from the realms of religion and psychoanalysis to that of history and try to define what that term means, it may be helpful to look at the Hebrew word for history, toledot. It is a double duty word, meaning both history and generations and thus suggesting that history is the recounting of the generations of a family, a clan, a people, preserving for the present generation the experience of past generations. One way of looking at the difference between history and myth might be to say that history is a recounting of a series of events, including interpretation of them, but primarily a recounting of how we got from there to here, to prevent the past from being swallowed up in oblivion and becoming useless to us, lest we forget. Myth on the other hand is focussed on the explanation of problems or phenomena. While it tells a story, as does history, its emphasis is not on a series of events but rather on a single discrete thing or event for the purpose of explaining its meaning, lest we do not understand. This explanation is free of the constraints of factuality; the issue of whether it really did happen this way is of no concern provided that it gives us insight and enlightenment.

In the case of Mt. Moriah and the Akedah, we may be dealing with a historical incident from the toledot of the Jewish people, or we may possibly be dealing with a myth which explains the substitution of animal for child sacrifice. If the story is historical or if it is mythical, its belonging to the one category or the other is unimportant from the point of view of its consequences in the world of history in which we live. In neither case is anyone harmed; on the contrary, whatever its membership in the categories of truth, this story has been beneficial to mankind. Subsequently, the Temple was built on Moriah and its altar placed there, a simple historical fact based on a story which, historical or mythical, is innocent, in the original meaning of the word, i.e. it does no harm.

Not all stories are harmless however, and sometimes it may become important to sort out the mythic elements from the historical. Myth may be as true as history in its own way but it is not the same as history. And it may also become important to evaluate the accuracy of the historical elements in a story. Sometimes historical and mythic factors become intertwined and entangled in such a convoluted way that it becomes very hard to sort out which is which, and the consequences of that confusion do not turn out to be inconsequential, particularly if the history is inaccurate and distorted. At times what people believe in, the myth they have embraced, can yield the most tragic and evil results, if they confuse a mythical-historical melange with history pure and simple, and proceed to act out their confusion on the historical scene. This, seen from a Jewish perspective, is precisely what occurred with the Christian version of the crucifixion of Jesus. This founding myth of Christianity, an original creation built upon a historic event overlaid with a mixture of elements drawn from Hellenistic pagan mythology along with some politically distorted historiography, has been sincerely believed by many generations of Christians, unaware of its mythological and pseudo-historical aspects, to represent undeniable historic truth. While evidence is lacking for evaluating the historicity of the Akedah, the crucifixion took place much later, in a period more accessible to historical investigation, and there are sources of information which make possible judgements about the historical basis of the story and its subsequent politicization and transformation into myth.

Mt. Moriah is not the only holy hilltop in Jerusalem. Not far away, tourists and pilgrims visit another hilly site whose name may be less familiar to Jews but is more readily known to Christians, the hill of Golgotha. Golgotha is notorious as the site of what Christians consider the greatest crime in history, the crucifixion of Jesus. This crime is frequently described as deicide, the killing of God, for Christians believe Jesus to have been the son of God, indeed God himself, incarnate in a human body. To kill God, in the form of his only and beloved son, is truly a terrible crime, very likely the worst crime imaginable to the mind of man. Yes, the Jew agrees with the Christian, to murder God—a dreadful idea! But, the Jew continues, an impossible idea, for God cannot be killed, can never die. Every Sabbath in the synagogue the Jew sings a familiar hymn, Adon Olam, Lord of the World, which asserts that God is without beginning, without end; that He was, is, and will always be. One of the basic ideas of the Jewish religion is that God, although related to man, is radically different from him; that man is mortal but God is immortal. Thus to the Jew deicide is an impossible, meaningless concept. To kill God? Horrible—if you could do it. But you cannot. If He were to die, He would be a human, not God, and the crime would constitute homicide, a crime which is reprehensible but common enough, hardly earth-shaking, as the death of Jesus was literally believed to have been (Matthew 27:51).³

Where, the Jew wonders, did Christians ever get the idea of deicide? Did they invent this mind-boggling concept? For a Christian believer this question is no problem. Where did he get the idea? From history, of course. Deicide occurred, in the province of Judea, during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate. This idea is basic to his religion but to him it is not an idea but a fact. However, to the Jew it is not a fact. When he looks at history the conclusions he will draw will be different ones, telling him that the Christian believer’s history is distorted and is seen through the lens of Christian myth.

Looking at the history of the ancient world at the time of the beginning of Christianity, the Jew finds to his amazement that the idea of deicide was not unique to Christianity but was a religious commonplace, almost a cliche. Among the pagans of the Mediterranean region, gods were always being born or reborn, and dying.⁴ Some died a more or less natural death, through accident or tragic catastrophe, but some were actually murdered by villanous opponents. Although gods died frequently in the ancient pagan world, knowledge about their deaths was largely suppressed in the centuries after Christianity gained control of the former Roman empire and adjoining lands of Europe. Early Christians were always distressed by the many parallels between their doctrines and practices and those of the pagan mystery cults which celebrated the deaths and resurrections of gods other than the Christian Jesus. They tended to attribute such similarities to the work of the Devil, out to confuse newly converted Christians and lead them astray. The less known about such gods the better, in the minds of the Church Fathers.⁵

It was only in the early years of the past century, with the rise of the modern discipline of comparative religion, that scholars rediscovered the dying and rising gods of the old, pre-Christian world. Some scholars were exhilarated by the discovery, on occasion running a little wild in their theories because of excitement, while other scholars were distressed and reluctant to confront this old-new material that threw into question some of their most cherished assumptions about the uniqueness of Christianity. In as recent a publication as the Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics of 1951, the author of the entry on deicide is uncomfortable and uneasy although intrigued by the modern rediscovery of dying gods. One senses his scholar’s mind in conflict with his religious heart as he refers to facts which seem to show that there has been a wide-spread custom of putting to death both men and animals thought to be gods incarnate and concludes

None of the phenomena which the scientific study of religions has made known has aroused more interest than those obscure rites and ceremonies, those strange customs, which seem best explained by the theory that deicide, once supposed to find its only example in the Crucifixion, has been, in fact, a wide-spread custom, which has left a deep impress on the religious thought of the race.⁶

He is very much torn between his feeling that the evidence after all, is so scanty and elusive, and his realization that notwithstanding all this, no part of the great study of religions is fuller of suggestion than this, more especially in the strange parallels noticeable between pagan and Christian thought and ritual.⁷

With due respect to the unhappiness of Christian scholars, there can be no doubt that in the ancient pagan world gods did die and were killed. If the gods of the ancient Greeks, for example, were known as Immortals, theirs was a very precarious immortality. In The Golden Bough Sir James Frazer tells us

The grave of Zeus, the great god of Greece, was shewn to visitors in Crete as late as about the beginning of our era. The body of Dionysus was buried at Delphi beside the golden statue of Appollo, and his tomb bore the inscription, Here lies Dionysus dead, the son of Semele. According to one account, Appollo himself was buried at Delphi; for Pythagoras is said to have carved an inscription on his tomb, setting forth how the god had been killed by the python and buried under the tripod. The ancient god Cronus was buried in Sicily, and the graves of Hermes, Aphrodite, and Ares were shewn in Hermopolis, Cyprus, and Thrace.⁸

Frazer recounts one of the most famous stories of the death of a god as told by Plutarch, the story of the death of the great god Pan. It seems that during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, aboard a ship sailing through the Greek islands enroute to Italy, a strange cry was heard from shore telling the ship’s pilot to announce as he approached Palodes that the Great Pan is dead. The pilot did as he was told, and the people on the ship heard a great sound of lamentation arising from the shore of Palodes. This strange tale got back to Tiberius himself who sent for the pilot and questioned him. Frazer comments that

In modern times, also, the annunciation of the death of the Great Pan has been much discussed and various explanations of it have been suggested. On the whole the simplest and most natural would seem to be that the deity whose sad end was thus mysteriously proclaimed and lamented was the Syrian god Tammuz or Adonis, whose death is known to have been annually bewailed by his followers both in Greece and in his native Syria. At Athens the solemnity fell at midsummer, and there is no improbability in the view that in a Greek island a band of worshippers of Tammuz should have been celebrating the death of their god with the customary passionate demonstrations of sorrow at the very time when a ship lay becalmed off shore, and that in the stillness of the summer night the voices of lamentation should have been wafted with startling distinctness across the water and should have made on the minds of the listening passengers a deep and lasting impression.⁹

The confusion or identification of the Greek god Pan with the Syrian god Adonis illustrates a basic theme in the religious life of the ancient Mediterranean world, that of syncretism. Alexander the Great of Macedonia in 336-324 B.C.E. created the first great international empire, breaking down the barriers first between the city-states of Greece, then between the countries adjoining Greece, and finally between East and West, as his conquests extended through Persia as far east as the borders of India. While he spread Greek culture and language throughout his empire, he also tolerated the religions of his subject peoples and strove to fuse the cultures of many realms into one cosmopolitan amalgam. He is credited with being the first ancient conqueror to concede any rights to those he conquered¹⁰ and he made his policy clear by celebrating the success of his conquering armies with a gigantic marriage spectacle at Susa, during which many of his commanders were married to Persian princesses. Although Alexander died not many years after and the unity of his empire broke up into several political units, the world remained permanently transformed from its pre-Alexandrian state. The mixture of Greek and oriental cultures he effected produced that international culture known as Hellenism which dominated the world for several centuries until it evolved into the culture of the Roman empire.

In the new international world of Alexander’s empire, people were introduced to one another’s gods in an atmosphere of mutual curiosity and tolerance. Polytheists did not feel threatened by encounters with foreign gods. Their usual response was to pay homage to local gods as a matter of courtesy and for the protection of their own interests while in the gods’ territories. As the conquering armies worshipped new gods, they often found them strangely familiar, in the same way that conquered populations paying homage to the newly imported Greek gods recognized features of their own local deities. Equations were made between this Greek god and that foreign one.

That the gods of many lands were basically similar should not be surprising. All the peoples of the ancient world, living in predominantly agricultural civilizations, shared the same major concerns about the fertility of the earth and their flocks, the repetitious phenomena of the seasonal cycle, and the unpredictable happenings of the weather, sometimes favorable to them, sometimes disastrous. In modern America we take the availability of food for granted. Food is always procurable, so long as we have money in our pockets, and rather than Nature, that mysterious entity the Economy arouses our own hopes and anxieties. But for the peoples of some two thousand years or more ago Nature was a living and powerful presence, their ally and adversary in the struggle for life, the central concern of their existence. No year’s harvest could be taken for granted, subject as it was to so many factors beyond man’s control, such as frost, drought, or plagues of insects. Those who go out into the fields and struggle with such problems every day tend to worship the same gods, no matter where they may live.

And no matter where they lived, all people were concerned with the related human phenomena of birth, sexuality, and death. Like the earth on which they lived, like the plants and animals upon which they fed, human beings went through the same cycles of springtime, summer, fall, and winter; birth, flowering, fertility, and death. The sun seemed to weaken and succumb to darkness every winter, only to be reborn and reinvigorated every spring. The plants which sprouted from the earth followed the pattern of the sun: growth, faltering, and rebirth every year. Vegetation died down and disappeared into the earth, only to sprout up again with the renewal of the year. People worshipping the earth and sun and elements of the weather as great gods naturally imagined that these gods must be subject to birth, death, and rebirth. And they themselves, the human beings, subject to birth and death, must they be different from the sun and the earth’s vegetation, or could they too be reborn after death?

The need for fertility of fields, of flocks, and of one’s own body, to provide a continuity of life, and the yearning for some assurance of rebirth after death, were the great concerns of religion throughout the lands of Alexander’s empire. Agricultural fertility, human fertility, and the attainment of immortality were all inter-related needs and in the domain of the same inter-related gods, whether they were called Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Adonis and Astarte in Syria, Cybele and Attis in Phrygia, Dionysis and Demeter in Greece, or Bacchus and Ceres in Rome. As industry and urban life grew in importance, the stress may have shifted in these cults from the worshippers’ concern for the fertility of the earth to their concern for the rebirth and immortality of their own souls, but the connection between the life and death cycle of the heavens, the plant and animal realms, and the human one remained strong.

The connection of fertility and immortality is, as we have seen, literally a natural one and is exemplified by