(M104) If there is any truth in these guesses—for they are little more—the three principal figures in the processional scene at Boghaz-Keui represent the divine Father, the divine Mother, and the divine Son. But we have still to ask, What are they doing? That they are engaged in the performance of some religious rite seems certain. But what is it? We may conjecture that it is the rite of the Sacred Marriage, and that the scene is copied from a ceremony which was periodically performed in this very place by human representatives of the deities.(421) Indeed, the solemn meeting of the male and female figures at the head of their respective processions obviously suggests a marriage, and has been so interpreted by scholars, who, however, regarded it as the historical wedding of a prince and princess instead of the mystic union of a god and goddess, overlooking or explaining away the symbols of divinity which accompany the principal personages.(422) We may suppose that at Boghaz-Keui, as at many other places in the interior of Asia Minor, the government was in the hands of a family who combined royal with priestly functions and personated the gods whose names they bore. Thus at Pessinus in Phrygia, as we shall see later on, the priests of Cybele bore the name of her consort Attis, and doubtless represented him in the ritual.(423) If this was so at Boghaz-Keui, we may surmise that the chief pontiff and his family annually celebrated the marriage of the divine powers of fertility, the Father God and the Mother Goddess, for the purpose of ensuring the fruitfulness of the earth and the multiplication of men and beasts. The principal parts in the ceremony would naturally be played by the pontiff himself and his wife, unless indeed they preferred for good reasons to delegate the onerous duty to others. That such a delegation took place is perhaps suggested by the appearance of the pontiff himself in a subordinate place in the procession, as well as by his separate representation in another place, as if he were in the act of surveying the ceremony from a distance.(424) The part of the divine Son at the rite would fitly devolve upon one of the high-priest’s own offspring, who may well have been numerous. For it is probable that here, as elsewhere in Asia Minor, the Mother Goddess was personated by a crowd of sacred harlots,(425) with whom the spiritual ruler may have been required to consort in his character of incarnate deity. But if the personation of the Son of God at the rites laid a heavy burden of suffering on the shoulders of the actor, it is possible that the representative of the deity may have been drawn, perhaps by lot, from among the numerous progeny of the consecrated courtesans; for these women, as incarnations of the Mother Goddess, were probably supposed to transmit to their offspring some portion of their own divinity. Be that as it may, if the three principal personages in the processional scene at