Moreover, there was another side to the worship of Istar which bears indirect testimony to the Semitic origin of her cult at Erech. By the side of the Istar of the official faith there was another Istar, who presided over magic and witchcraft. Her priestesses were the witches who plied their unholy calling under the shadow of night, and mixed the poisonous philtres which drained away the strength of their hapless victims. The black Istar, as we may call her, was a parody of the goddess of love; and the rites with which she was adored, and the ministers by whom she was served, were equally parodies of the cult that was carried on at Erech. But the black Istar was not only a parody of the goddess of the State religion, she was also the Istar of the popular creed, of the creed of that part of the population, in fact, which was least intermixed with Semitic elements and least influenced by Semitic beliefs. It was amongst this portion of the nation that the old Sumerian animism lingered longest and resisted the purer teaching of the educated class. The Semitic conceptions which underlay the worship of Istar at Erech were never thoroughly assimilated by it; all that it could do was to create a parody and caricature of the official cult, adapting it to those older beliefs and ideas which bad found their centre in the temple of En-lil. The black Istar was a Sumerian ghost masquerading in Semitic garb. As Bel attracted to himself the other gods, appropriating their names and therewith their essence and attributes, so Istar attracted the unsubstantial goddesses of the Babylonian pantheon. They became mere epithets of the one female divinity who maintained her independent existence by the side of the male gods. One by one they were identified with her person, and passed into the Istarât, or Istars, of the later creed. Like the Baalim, the Istarât owed what separate individuality they possessed to geography. On the theological side the Istar of Nineveh was identical with the Istar of Arbela; what distinguished them was the local sphere over which they held jurisdiction. The difference between them was purely geographical: the one was attached to a particular area over which her power extended, and where she was adored, while the other was the goddess of another city—that was all. It was the same goddess, but a different local cult. The deity remained the same, but her relations, both to her worshippers and to the other gods, were changed. There is no transmutation of form as in Egypt, but a change of relations, which have their origin in geographical variety.