“‘Then thou didst say to her, thus: “O Queen of the goddesses, wherever thou goest let me go with thee!” Then she made answer to thee, thus: “I will protect thee! and I will march with thee at the time of the feast of Nebo. Meanwhile eat food, drink wine, make music, and glorify my divinity, until I shall come and this vision shall be fulfilled.” “‘Thy heart’s desire shall be accomplished. Thy face shall not grow pale with fear: thy feet shall not be arrested: thou shalt not even scratch thy skin in the battle. In her benevolence she defends thee, and she is wroth with all thy foes. Before her a fire is blown fiercely, to destroy thy enemies.’” Mr. Talbot makes the following editorial comment on the historical event connected with Asurbanipal’s narrative: “The promises which the goddess Istar made to the king in this vision of the month Ab were fulfilled. In the following month (Elul) Asurbanipal took the field against Tiumman, and his army speedily achieved a brilliant victory. Tiumman was slain, and his head was sent to Nineveh. There is a bas-relief in the British Museum representing a man driving a rapid car, and holding in his hand the head of a warrior, with this inscription, _Kakkadu Tiumman_, ‘The head of Tiumman.’” THE DESCENT INTO HADES. As the goddess of love Venus is the restorer of life, and as such she descends into the underworld and brings the dead back to life. Lewis Richard Farnell in his _Cults of the Greek States_[16] reproduces a remarkable votive tablet which shows Hermes the soul-dispatcher (_psychopompos_) confronting a woman holding in her outstretched hand a pomegranate blossom (the symbol of both the chthonian Aphrodite and Persephone) and Eros, the god of love, on her arm. The obvious meaning of the tablet indicates that it is love which redeems from death. This conception of the great goddess found a fit expression in the myth of Demeter’s daughter Persephone (called in Latin “Proserpina”) who, after being snatched away by Pluto, the ruler of Hades, is allowed to return to earth. So life on earth with its bloom of vegetation dies off each winter but returns annually in the spring. This idea became a symbol of human immortality in the Eleusinian mysteries, presumably derived from older sources which go back to religious cults in Babylonia and Asia Minor, and the Christian doctrine is apparently derived from the same tradition. Paul says (1 Cor. xv. 36-38): [Illustration: EROS IN THE UNDERWORLD. Votive terra-cotta tablet.] “Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die. And that which thou sowest, thou sowest not that body that shall be, but bare grain, it may chance of wheat, or of some other grain. But God giveth it a body as it hath pleased him, and to every seed his own body.” Jesus echoes the same argument and uses the same simile of the grain of wheat in John xii. 24: