and the human sacrifices in Babylonia, referred to in the Bible, were, no doubt, connected with agricultural religion of the private order, as was also the ceremony of baking and offering cakes to the Queen of Heaven, condemned by Jeremiah, which obtained in the streets of Jerusalem and other cities.  Domestic religion required no temples.  There were no temples in Crete:  the world was the “house” of the deity, who had seasonal haunts on hilltops, in groves, in caves, &c.  In Egypt Herodotus witnessed festivals and processions which are not referred to in official inscriptions, although they were evidently practised from the earliest times.

Agricultural religion in Egypt was concentrated in the cult of Osiris and Isis, and influenced all local theologies.  In Babylonia these deities were represented by Tammuz and Ishtar.  Ishtar, like Isis, absorbed many other local goddesses.

According to the beliefs of the ancient agriculturists the goddess was eternal and undecaying.  She was the Great Mother of the Universe and the source of the food supply.  Her son, the corn god, became, as the Egyptians put it, “Husband of his Mother”.  Each year he was born anew and rapidly attained to manhood; then he was slain by a fierce rival who symbolized the season of pestilence-bringing and parching sun heat, or the rainy season, or wild beasts of prey.  Or it might be that he was slain by his son, as Cronos was by Zeus and Dyaus by Indra.  The new year slew the old year.

The social customs of the people, which had a religious basis, were formed in accordance with the doings of the deities; they sorrowed or made glad in sympathy with the spirits of nature.  Worshippers also suggested by their ceremonies how the deities should act at various seasons, and thus exercised, as they believed, a magical control over them.

In Babylonia the agricultural myth regarding the Mother goddess and the young god had many variations.  In one form Tammuz, like Adonis, was loved by two goddesses—­the twin phases of nature—­the Queen of Heaven and the Queen of Hades.  It was decreed that Tammuz should spend part of the year with one goddess and part of the year with the other.  Tammuz was also a Patriarch, who reigned for a long period over the land and had human offspring.  After death his spirit appeared at certain times and seasons as a planet, star, or constellation.  He was the ghost of the elder god, and he was also the younger god who was born each year.

In the Gilgamesh epic we appear to have a form of the patriarch legend—­the story of the “culture hero” and teacher who discovered the path which led to the land of ancestral spirits.  The heroic Patriarch in Egypt was Apuatu, “the opener of the ways”, the earliest form of Osiris; in India he was Yama, the first man, “who searched and found out the path for many”.

The King as Patriarch was regarded during life as an incarnation of the culture god:  after death he merged in the god.  “Sargon of Akkad” posed as an incarnation of the ancient agricultural Patriarch:  he professed to be a man of miraculous birth who was loved by the goddess Ishtar, and was supposed to have inaugurated a New Age of the Universe.