At the same time they bit their arms and cut themselves with swords. The most frenzied began to moan and prophesy. At last he bewailed his sins, took up the knotted whip, and beat himself on the back till the blood ran down. When the dancing and the scourging was ended, the eunuchs collected subscriptions from the bystanders. Some gave money; others, milk, wine, cheese, and meal. These they hastily gathered together in order to compensate, by a hearty meal at evening in their retreat, for the torments of the day.[535] These friendly and hostile, creative and destructive, natural and supernatural powers stood mutually opposed in the religious consciousness of the Syrians. Just as the Egyptians went forward, and saw in the myth of Osiris the beneficent deity as the conqueror of the evil god in the process of vegetative life and in the revolution of the year, so did the Semitic nations unite the beneficent and destructive powers of heaven in the same deities, who in turn dispensed blessing and destruction, and by themselves and in themselves overcame the destructive element. This combination is obvious in the form of Baal of Tyre, whom the Tyrians invoked as the king and protector of their city under the name of Melkarth,_ i.e._ city-king.[536] The Greeks identified this god with their own Heracles; but as the protector of navigation and the god of the sea, they are acquainted with Melkarth, under his native name of Melicertes. Herodotus was astonished at the splendour of the ancient temple of this god at Tyre, at the richness and beauty of the votive offerings, and the two rectangular pillars in the temple, the one of pure gold, the other of emerald, and so large that it shone by night.[537] Hiram, king of Tyre, had dedicated the first about the year 1,000 B.C. to Melkarth. To the Phenicians Baal Melkarth was a labouring and conquering deity, who creates new life out of destruction, vanquishes the baneful signs in the zodiac, brings back the sun from perigee and apogee, from excessive heat and wintry cold, to beneficial operation, whose life is seen in the sun's course.[538] When the sun burned with the fiercest glow, and stood in the sign of the lion, then the good sun-god must vanquish the lion or symbol of fiery heat; he pressed the lion to his own breast, forced back into himself the fiery beams, and consumed himself in his own heat. The good sun-god must overcome the evil sun-god, or he must consume himself, so that with renewed youth he may again secure gentler warmth for the earth. When the sun appeared most remote from the earth, Baal of Tyre had gone on a journey or was asleep. In the Phenician colonies in the West, in Crete, Sicily, and at Gades, in the distant land of the setting sun, were pointed out the resting-places of the deity, from which he arose with the vernal sun to new activity and life. At the end of February or the beginning of March the festival of the awakening of the god took