accident, they year by year beat their breasts, and utter lamentations, and go through the orgies, and hold a great mourning throughout the land.  When the weeping is ended, first of all, they make to Adonis the offerings usually made to a corpse; after which, on the next day, they feign that he has come to life again, and hold a procession [of his image] in the open air.  But previously they shave their heads, like the Egyptians when an Apis dies; and if any woman refuse to do so, she must sell her beauty during one day to all who like.  Only strangers, however, are permitted to make the purchase, and the money paid is expended on a sacrifice which is offered to the goddess.”  “In this way,” as Dr. Doellinger goes on to say, “they went so far at last as to contemplate the abominations of unnatural lust as a homage rendered to the deity, and to exalt it into a regular cultus.  The worship of the goddess [Ashtoreth] at Aphaca in the Lebanon was specially notorious in this respect."[11131] Here, according to Eusebius, was, so late as the time of Constantine the Great, a temple in which the old Phoenician rites were still retained.  “This,” he says, “was a grove and a sacred enclosure, not situated, as most temples are, in the midst of a city, and of market-places, and of broad streets, but far away from either road or path, on the rocky slopes of Libanus.  It was dedicated to a shameful goddess, the goddess Aphrodite.  A school of wickedness was this place for all such profligate persons as had ruined their bodies by excessive luxury.  The men there were soft and womanish—­men no longer; the dignity of their sex they rejected; with impure lust they thought to honour the deity.  Criminal intercourse with women, secret pollutions, disgraceful and nameless deeds, were practised in the temple, where there was no restraining law, and no guardian to preserve decency."[11132]

One fruit of this system was the extraordinary institution of the Galli.  The Galli were men, who made themselves as much like women as they could, and offered themselves for purposes of unnatural lust to either sex.  Their existence may be traced in Israel and Judah,[11133] as well as in Syria and Phoenicia.[11134] At great festivals, under the influence of a strong excitement, amid the din of flutes and drums and wild songs, a number of the male devotees would snatch up swords or knives, which lay ready for the purpose, throw off their garments, and coming forward with a loud shout, proceed to castrate themselves openly.  They would then run through the streets of the city, with the mutilated parts in their hands, and throw them into the houses of the inhabitants, who were bound in such case to provide the thrower with all the apparel and other gear needful for a woman.[11135] This apparel they thenceforth wore, and were recognised as attached to the worship of Astarte, entitled to reside in her temples, and authorised to take part in her ceremonies.  They joined with the priests