ch compelled the woman to unite
herself first with a stranger.[41] {119}

As a second blemish, the Semitic religions practised human immolations
longer than any other religion, sacrificing children and grown men in order
to please sanguinary gods. In spite of Hadrian's prohibition of those
murderous offerings,[42] they were maintained in certain clandestine rites
and in the lowest practices of magic, up to the fall of the idols, and even
later. They corresponded to the ideas of a period during which the life of
a captive or slave had no greater value than that of an animal.

These sacred practices and many others, on which Lucian complacently
enlarges in his opuscule on the goddess of Hierapolis, daily revived the
habits of a barbarous past in the temples of Syria. Of all the conceptions
that had successively dominated the country, none had completely
disappeared. As in Egypt, beliefs of very different date and origin
coexisted, without any attempt to make them agree, or without success when
the task was undertaken. In these beliefs zoolatry, litholatry and all the
other nature worships outlived the savagery that had created them. More
than anywhere else the gods had remained the chieftains of clans[43]
because the tribal organizations of Syria were longer lived and more
developed than those of any other region. Under the empire many districts
were still subjected to the tribal regime and commanded by "ethnarchs" or
"phylarchs."[44] Religion, which sacrificed the lives of the men and the
honor of the women to the divinity, had in many regards remained on the
moral level of unsocial and sanguinary tribes. Its obscene and atrocious
rites called forth exasperated indignation on the part of {120} the Roman
conscience when Heliogabalus attempted to introduce them into Italy with
his Baal of Emesa.

* * * * *

How, then, can one explain the fact that in spite of all, the Syrian gods
imposed themselves upon the Occident and made even the Caesars accept them?
The reason is that the Semitic paganism can no more be judged by certain
revolting practices, that perpetuated in the heart of civilization the
barbarity and puerilities of an uncultivated society, than the religion of
the Nile can be so judged. As in the case of Egypt we must distinguish
between the sacerdotal religion and the infinitely varied popular religion
that was embodied in local customs. Syria possessed a number of great
sanctuar