s.[34] The fish were kept in ponds
in the proximity of the temples.[35] A superstitious fear prevented people
from touching them, because the goddess punished the sacrilegious by
covering their bodies with ulcers and tumors.[36] At certain mystic
repasts, however, the priests and initiates consumed the forbidden food in
the belief that they were absorbing the flesh of the divinity herself. That
worship and its practices, which were spread over Syria, probably suggested
the ichthus symbolism in the Christian period.[37]

However, over this lower and primordial stratum that still cropped out here
and there, other less rudimentary beliefs had formed. Besides inanimate
objects and animals, the Syrian paganism worshiped personal divinities
especially. The character of the gods that were originally adored by the
Semitic tribes has been {118} ingeniously reconstructed.[38] Each tribe had
its Baal and Baalat who protected it and whom only its members were
permitted to worship. The name of _Ba'al_, "master," summarizes the
conception people had of him. In the first place he was regarded as the
sovereign of his votaries, and his position in regard to them was that of
an Oriental potentate towards his subjects; they were his servants, or
rather his slaves.[39] The Baal was at the same time the "master" or
proprietor of the country in which he resided and which he made fertile by
causing springs to gush from its soil. Or his domain was the firmament and
he was the _dominus caeli_, whence he made the waters fall to the roar of
tempests. He was always united with a celestial or earthly "queen" and, in
the third place, he was the "lord" or husband of the "lady" associated with
him. The one represented the male, the other the female principle; they
were the authors of all fecundity, and as a consequence the worship of the
divine couple often assumed a sensual and voluptuous character.

As a matter of fact, immorality was nowhere so flagrant as in the temples
of Astarte, whose female servants honored the goddess with untiring ardor.
In no country was sacred prostitution so developed as in Syria, and in the
Occident it was to be found practically only where the Phoenicians had
imported it, as on Mount Eryx. Those aberrations, that were kept up until
the end of paganism,[40] probably have their explanation in the primitive
constitution of the Semitic tribe, and the religious custom must have been
originally one of the forms of exogamy, whi