as he also accepts Mannhardt’s in full; and, while he associates--as I think, wrongly--the Babylonian rite with general temple-prostitution, he adds a third suggestion, prompted by his theory of kingship: the king himself might have to mate with one or more of the temple-harlots “who played Astarte to his Adonis”:[277.4] such unions might serve to maintain the supply of human deities, one of whom might succeed to the throne, and another might be sacrificed in his father’s stead when religion demanded the life of the royal man-god. I do not find this theory coherent even with itself; and, like the others, it fails to explain all the facts, and, on the other hand, it imagines data which are not given us by the records. That state of communism when sexual union was entirely promiscuous is receding further and further into the anthropological background: it is dangerous to predicate it of the most backward Anatolian State in any period which can come into our ken. When the Byzantine Sokrates gravely tells us that the men of Heliopolis {278} had their wives in common, he does not know what he is saying. And if this sacrifice of virginity before marriage was a recognition of the original rights of all the males of the community, why did not some representative of the community take the virginity, the priest or some head-man? This ill-considered sociologic hypothesis shipwrecks on that mysterious stranger.[278.1] Prof. Westermarck, in his _Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_,[278.2] regards the Mylitta-rite as intended to ensure fertility in women through direct appeal to the goddess of fertility, and he explains the formula which the stranger uttered--ἐπικαλέω τοι τὴν θεὸν Μύλιττα--as signifying generally “May the goddess Mylitta prosper thee.” Obviously the phrase, “I invoke the goddess for thee,” could as naturally mean, “I claim thee in the name of the goddess,” the stranger basing his right to the woman on this appeal. But his general theory appears not so unsound as those which have just been noted.