Looking at the non-Semitic races of Asia Minor, we have noted the
monumental evidence among the Hittites for the worship of a
mother-goddess, who with her son figures in the procession on the
reliefs at Boghaz-Keui. It may be she who appears on a Hittite votive
relief as a large seated female with a child on her knees,[169.2] a
type which the Greeks would call κουροτρόφος. Her name may have been
Umma; for this divine word is now given us among the names of Hittite
divinities in cuneiform texts recently discovered, which have been
published and interpreted by Professor Sayce in the _Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society_.[169.3] He there connects the word with the
Assyrian Umma = Mother, and regards this Hittite goddess as the
ancestress both by name and nature of the Cappadocian goddess Mā,
famous at Comana in the later period. Now the name Mā designates “the
mother,” and yet the Hellenes identified this goddess not only with
the great mother Kybele, but freely with Artemis. I believe the
external inducement to this latter assimilation was the isolation of
Mā in her cult, into which no god entered. From this late evidence it
is too hazardous to infer an early Hittite virgin-mother, especially
as the processional relief at Boghaz-Keui seems to present us with a
ἱερὸς γάμος, the solemn union of a god and a goddess. As regards the
great goddess of the Asia-Minor coast, it {170} has been somewhat
hastily concluded that here and there her cult included the mystic
idea of a virgin-mother. We have only some evidence from a late
period, and in any case it would be a bold leap to argue back from it
to the second millennium. But the evidence is weak. I have criticised
it elsewhere, and I found it and still find it very frail.[170.1] I
have not been able to detect any clear consciousness of the idea in
the cult and cult-legends of Kybele: we must not build much on the
Pessinuntian story that Arnobius gives us concerning her resistance to
the love of Zeus, for certainly the general legend of Kybele and Attis
is inconsistent with any dogma of the goddess’s virginity, nor was she
ever called Παρθένος in cult. She was rather the mother-goddess, with
whom the worshipper himself in a mystic ritual might be united in
corporeal union.[170.2]
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