life-awakening, phallic god, as well as the tutelar god of marriage. A peculiar reverence was enjoyed among the Cabiri by the deity who was added as an eighth to these seven; his name was Esmun, _i.e._ the Eighth. In this form it seems that the peculiarities of the seven gods were taken up and gathered together. At any rate in Carthage the temple of Esmun stood in the Byrsa, and on the highest part of it. In this temple the holiest relics of the city were preserved and the most important deliberations held. The Greeks call Esmun by the name of Asclepius, but also add that he was different from the Greek Asclepius. He was, it appears, a healing, _i.e._ an appeasing deity, like Jasion in the Cabiric mysteries of Samothrace. Esmun is also compared and confounded with Hermes, as with the Thoth of the Egyptians. Just as Thoth revealed the sacred books of the Egyptians, did Esmun reveal the sacred books of the Phenicians. Esmun was represented with a serpent in his hand as the serpent-holder (Ophiuchus), and his head as surrounded by eight rays. The forms of the eight tutelar gods were carved by the Phenicians on the prows of their ships; it was the Cabiri, as Philo told us, who discovered the ship. Even now Phenician coins exhibit the Cabiri in that dwarfed and distorted form in which the Phenicians loved to represent the nature and superhuman power of the gods.[561] From the circumstance that the Greeks, when settling in Lemnos, Imbros, Samothrace, and Rhodes, found the worship of the Cabiri in existence, and adopted it, though not without certain alterations, we may conclude that the Cabiric system was established before the year 1000 B.C. In the tutelary gods of the sea-loving nation of the Phenicians the Greeks recognised and worshipped the deities favourable to mariners, and from this side they combined them with their own Dioscuri. On the other side the myth of Melkarth and Astarte, who were adopted into this circle of divinities, the myth of Melkarth, who discovers the lost moon-goddess in the land of gloom, and returns thence with her to new light and life, and who wakes to new life after the slumber of the winter, gave the Greeks an opportunity of connecting with the mysteries of the Cabiri those conceptions of the life after death, which grew up among them after the beginning of the sixth century.