Astarte

Astarte (in Northwest Semitic ʿAshtart, and in the biblical sources Ashtoreth) is the great goddess of the ancient Levant, attested in the texts of Ugarit from the fourteenth century BCE. Goddess of love, sexuality, fertility, war and sovereign power, she was also associated with the stars and, in particular, with the planet Venus, the evening star. In the Canaanite pantheon she appears linked to El and is often presented as consort of Baal Hadad, the storm god. Her name and functions connect with the Mesopotamian Inanna-Ishtar, of whom she constitutes the West Semitic variant. Astarte embodies a twofold nature (that of the love which engenders life and that of the warlike fury which reaps it), a trait she shares with other great goddesses of the ancient Near East.

The cult of Astarte radiated from Phoenicia towards its great cities (Tyre, Sidon and Byblos) and its Mediterranean colonies, with Carthage at the head; she was also received in Ramesside Egypt. Philo of Byblos, transmitted by Eusebius, calls her “the greatest goddess” and relates that she placed upon her head the head of a bull as an emblem of royalty and that she consecrated in Tyre a star fallen from the sky. Hence her characteristic iconography: the nudity associated with fecundity, the horns, the lion that symbolizes warlike strength, the dove of sacred love and the astral star. Her sanctuaries received offerings, music and dances; later classical authors also attributed to her rites of sacred prostitution, today disputed by modern scholarship.

For the Greeks, Astarte was identified with Aphrodite (the Phoenicians “say that Astarte is Aphrodite”, according to Philo), and thence with the Roman Venus; Lucian of Samosata, in “On the Syrian Goddess”, linked her also with the Moon. The Hebrew Bible condemns her under the name of Ashtoreth, “abomination of the Sidonians”, reproaching Solomon for her cult and celebrating its destruction in the reform of Josiah (1 Kings 11 and 2 Kings 23); the Masoretic vocalization seems to deform her name with the vowels of “bosheth” (shame). It is fitting to distinguish the goddess from her late demonization as Astaroth, the masculine demon of the medieval and Renaissance grimoires: they are the same root, but Astarte is the historical deity of love and war, not that infernal figure.