From conceptions such as these the transition is easy to that wider view which regarded the tree as the material representative of the mysterious feminine reproductive power, the good genius of general prosperity. We know that the Semitic nations worshipped under various names a great mother-goddess, the progenitrix of gods and men, and there is evidence to show that the tree was widely venerated as her divine symbol. In the coins of Heliopolis (Baalbek), where this great deity was worshipped under the name of Astarte, the figure of the goddess under the peristyle of her temple is sometimes replaced by a pyramidal cypress. In a coin of Myra, in Lycia, the bust of a goddess is represented in the foliage of a tree.[192] The goddess, who is of the veiled archaic type and wears on her head the _calathus_, the symbol of fertility, is identified by Mr. Farnell with Artemis-Aphrodite, “who is here clearly conceived as a divinity of vegetation.”[193] The Canaanites, and under their influence the Israelites, worshipped Ashtaroth, the fruitful goddess, under the symbol of an _ashêra_, a tree or pole, decked with fillets, like the May-tree. An ancient Babylonian cylinder represents a decorated tree with a worshipper beside it, who in the inscription invokes the goddess as her servant.[194] On other cylinders the tree-symbol sometimes accompanies and sometimes replaces the figure of Istar, the great procreative goddess more or less related to the goddess of the _ashêrim_.[195] [Illustration: Fig. 25.—Sacred tree and worshipper.(Goblet d’Alviella.)] The conception of the tree as the symbol of fertility seems to be still more clearly emphasised in the Assyrian cylinders and bas-reliefs, where it is conventionally represented as a date-palm between two personages, who approach it from either side bearing in their hands a cone similar to the inflorescence of the male date-palm. Mr. Tylor suggests that these personages, variously represented as kings or priests, genii with wings and heads of eagles, or mythical animals, may represent the fertilising winds or divinities, whose procreative influence was typified by the artificial fecundation of the palm, a procedure which is necessary for its successful culture, and which we know from Herodotus to have been familiar to the Babylonians.[196] The design is usually surmounted by the winged disc representing the sun, and the whole is not improbably meant to symbolise the mystery of procreation, in which the male element enshrined in the sun, and the female element inhabiting the tree are appropriately represented. The same collocation is met with on an altar from the Palmyrene now in Rome, on one of the faces of which is the image of a solar god, and on the other the figure of a cypress with a child carrying a ram amidst its foliage.[197] In this connection it may be remembered that Apuleius, wishing to paint the son of Venus in his mother’s lap, is related to have depicted him in the midst of a cypress-tree.