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THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

LOS ANGELES

THE CULT

OF THE

HEAVENLY TWINS

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Bombag anl) ffalcutta: MACMILLAN AND CO., Ltd.

THE CULT

OF THE

HEAVENLY TWINS

BY
J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., D.Litt. (Duel.)

LATE FELLOW OF CLARE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

WITH SEVEN PLATES

CAMBRIDGE:

AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

1906

CambvttigE

PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A.
AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

PREFACE.

"FN the following pages T have returned to the subject
which was introduced in the lectures on the Dioscuri in
the Christian Legends. The field has widened under survey,
and is now comparable with ' all time and all existence.' The
man who deals with a universal subject needs something more
than a universal spirit ; he must have a number of friends and
know how to use them. In the following pages will be found
the traces of more minds than one or two. Dr Moulton and
Mr Chadwick have advised my philological weakness, and
found me parallels to my investigations from the lore of the far
north and the far east : Mr Johns has advised me as to the
Assyrian and Babylonian beliefs that may be quoted ; Mr Bass
Mullinger supplies me with an interesting case of Dioscuro-
phany from the Middle Ages ; Mr Conybeare suggests to me to
examine the pretty story of Sisinnius and Sisinnodorus ; Miss
Jane Harrison points out some archeological parallels ; and
Mr T. R. Glover watches over the work with constant sugges-
tion, wise rebuke and solicitude, as if it were his own. My
hearty thanks to them and to others. The faults of the book
will be mine, the virtues will be credited elsewhere.

J. RENDEL HARRIS.

March, 1906.

INTRODUCTION.

There are few directions of modern investigation in which
a small and apparently restricted subject has grown more
rapidly to a large and varied one than the enquiry into the
meaning of the third sign of the Zodiac, which goes by the
name of the Heavenly Twins. The average man's knowledge
about them would probably be nearly the same as that of a
schoolboy who understands that one section of the Zodiac is
marked by two bright companion stars, whose names are
individually Castor and Pollux, and collectively Gemini, the
Twins ; and that Castor and Pollux are a couple of deified
heroes, whose chief achievement on earth was to win the battle
of the Lake Regillus for the Romans, and so to furnish inaterial
for one of Macaulay's spirited Lays of Ancient Rome. Beyond
that, all is a blank ; the schoolboy may indeed be closer
involved than he knows with the history of the Twins ; his
ejaciilations may sometimes take the form " by jiminy " without
his recognizing that an appeal is being made, in a forcible
manner, to the Twins as the guardians of public fjiith and the
avengers of acts of perjury ; but even if he had recognized the
connexion between his own slang and the ancient piety, it
would probably be some time before he detected the reason for
the connexion in the portions of the ancient Roman history and
literature which it was his duty to read. When, however,
we examine the legends of the Twins more closely, passing
over from the Roman world to the Greek world and so to
the further East, and the Indian literature, the qualities,
powers and actions ascribed to the Twins become so diversified

H. 1

2 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS.

that it is difficult to understand not only how the Twins
became the guardians of good faith, but also how a single pair
can be credited with the playing of so many and so varied
parts as we find assigned to them ; for we find them as the
patrons of almost all the industries and avocations of life, as
the benefactors of every kind of needy people, as governing
horse-craft and ship-craft and plough- craft and leech-craft, as
presiding over the merchant and the soldier and the sailor;
in the bestowal of rain from heaven they seem to have the
prerogative of Zeus, in thd healing of the sick of Aesculapius,
in the foughten field they are more in evidence than Ares, and
in subtlety and skill they are a match for Hermes. How did
all these varied functions come into the mind of the early
speculative man ? Can the examination of a pair of companion
stars account for so many arts and crafts and occupations ?
Can a single pair of heroes do so many things well beside
fighting ? And if they were really men, why did the legend-
makers make one of them immortal and show the grave of the
other to prove that he was mortal ? It must be obvious that
we cannot lay all these characteristics of the Twins to the
charge of a single pair of fixed stars which happen to be in
a certain division of the Zodiac. The Zodiac is a long-suffering
beast of burden, and has had many fearful and wonderful
hypotheses put upon its back, but it is quite impossible that
it can be responsible for the variety of stories which are
brought to light in even a rapid survey of the Greek archeo-
logy, or the allusions to the Twins in the Rig-Veda. And the
anthropologists have been slowly finding out for us that the
Heavenly Twins can be taken out of the Zodiac altogether,
that they belong to a time when Chaldean astronomy was
not yet dreamt of, and to a period of human development
which can only be called historical at all by a very liberal use
of the term, and that their varied activities and philanthropies
are a mirror in which we can read the evolution of the arts of
human life as disclosed by the inventions of many aeons of
progress. For this reason the Heavenly Twins are a peculiarly
attractive study to the anthropologist, who can take us back in
their company to the very dawn of civilization.

INTRODUCTION. 3

In the following pages we have no intention of making an
exhaustive study of the cult of the Heavenly Twins. What we
want to do is to carry back a few of the characteristics of the
Twins to the lowest strata of human history, and then to show
how many traces of the cult remain in mediaeval and in modern
life. On this last point we have written briefly in the book
called The Dioscuri in the Christian Legends. In the following
pages we shall return to the theme and add some further
illustrations in support of our theories. But first of all we
must move backward into the earliest times and find out, if
possible, how the belief in the existence of the Heavenly Twins
arose, and which of their varied peculiarities are the most
ancient.

CHAPTER I.

That the Heavenly Twins are one mortal and
the other immortal.

It will probably occasion surprise that we should claim the
highest antiquity for the belief that one of a pair of twins is
mortal and the other immortal.

We understand from the Greek legends of the Dioscuri, or
sons of Zeus, that one of them, Castor, was buried in Greek
soil ; the other, Polydeuces (or Pollux, as the Latins call him),
was made immortal by Zeus ; and the Greek mythologists have
added a beautiful description of the discontent of the deified
Polydeuces because his brother could not share his honours
with him, and his determination not to enjoy Heaven alone,
together with an account of the way in which Zeus rewarded
the disinterested affection of Polydeuces, and divided immor-
tality for one between two, thus furnishing the Greek moralists
with their classical instance of the higher forms of love in
sacrifice.

My impression is, that there is hardly any of the legends of
the Twins of which we should more unhesitatingly say a priori
that it was altogether a product of the Greek mind than this
peculiar story of the divided immortality and shared mortality.
But perhaps some hesitation might have been produced by the
reflection that the same terms (mortal and immortal) are used
of another pair of twins (still Greek, but apparently an inde-
pendent cult), viz. the Twins worshipped at Thebes, under the

CH. l] TWINS MORTAL AND IMMORTAL. 5

names of Amphion and Zethus. For, as I pointed out\ we have

some verses preserved by Pausanias from the Greek poet

Asius, in which he speaks of the birth of Amphion and his

brother in the following terms :

And Antiope bore Zethus and divine Amphion,

She the daughter of Asopus, the deep-eddying river,

Having conceived by Zeus and by E]3opeus, shepherd of peoples.

Here we are warned to discriminate between Zethus the
mortal and Amphion the immortal, and the reason of the
difference is assigned, viz. the double paternity, divine and
human, which affected their mother Antiope ; just as in the
case of Castor and Polydeuces we are referred to Zeus and
Tyndareus.

In the same way the twin brethren Herakles and Iphikles
are reputed to be of one mother, viz. Alkmene, but the fathers
are different ; Zeus is the parent of Herakles, but Amphitryon
of Iphikles. (Notice, in passing, the rhyming of the names of
this pair of twins.)

And the suggestion at once arises that the explanation
given may be one that would naturally be given by primitive
man explaining phenomena to himself, without the aid of
advanced Greek mythology. Is it not probable that all of the
cases referred to have come down from an earlier stratum
which is not necessarily Greek at all ? and that their common
origin can be carried back to the very bounds of the Aryan
civilization ? I propose to show that the explanation can be
found at an earlier date than any known civilization. In order
to do this we must examine the survivals of primitive human
life which are embedded in our present civilization ; we must
turn to the beliefs and customs of savage peoples, in order to
find out how they regarded and explained such a phenomenon
as the birth of twins.

In a recent report on the Essequibo Indians by Commissioner
M°Turk, we find the following passages relating to certain re-
crudescences of superstition among the Indians :

" Regarding puiism or sorcery, it has increased of late years,
especially among the Indians inland, and no one unacquainted

1 Dioscuri, p. 18.

6 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH,

with the inner life of the Indian can tell how they suffer from
its influence, and how detrimental it is to their advancement.

" It is all very well for people who have only a hearsay
knowledge of pui to laugh at and ridicule it. It may appear
ridiculous to them from an intellectual point of view, but it is
no laughing matter to the Indians, but one from which their
superstitious ignorance at times causes them intense suffering.
Their belief in puiism is more sincere and general than in the
Christian religion, to which it is in a measure antagonistic ;
and for the good of the race, it would be well if an effort could
be made to stamp it out. I could relate many instances of
serious sufferings and even death that resulted from the super-
stitious belief in the powers of the pui man — the most recent
will suffice.

" An Indian woman gave birth to twins : at the time there
was considerable sickness in the neighbourhood and a pui man
was called in. He declared the cause of the sickness to be one
of the twins, who he said was the child of a Kenaima^ as a
woman could not naturally produce two children at a birth.
The particular child was sick and fretful, and one night on the
cry of an owl or other night bird the child woke and com-
menced to cry. The pui man, who was present, declared the

J Some caution will be necessary in the explanation of the word Kenaima.
It need hardly be said that it does not mean a deity, nor has it the exact sense
of a spirit, as we understand spirit. If we examine the account given of the
Indian superstitions in Mr im Thurn's Indians of British Guiana we shall find
that the Kenaima is one of "the most marked and influential characters in
every-day Indian life" (p. 328). He is commonly conceived as "a man, who,
having devoted himself to slaying some other man, has the power of seijarating
his spiritual from his bodily substance" (p. 329). "All tangible objects, ani-
mate (including man) and inanimate alike, consist each of two separable parts —
a body and a spirit" (ibid.). "Every object, in the whole world, is a being,
consisting of a body and spirit, and differs from every other object in no respect
except that of bodily form, and in the greater or less degree of brute force and
brute cunning consequent on the difference of bodily form and bodily habits"
(p. 850). The Kenaima, then, is an animistic conception, at an early stage of
human thought. The Kenaima is the external soul of something or somebody,
almost always hurtful, and requiring the counteracting influences of the peaiman
(pui-man). He is hardly yet a spirit and far from being a god. But he will
become a god some day, the peaiman will be his priest and the Twins his
assessors.

l] TWINS MORTAL AND IMMORTAL. 7

cry of the bird to be the Kenaima father of the child calling to
it, and the child's crying its answer. The next day at his
instigation a large hole was dug in the ground and a fire built
in it, and, when it was well ablaze the infant was thrown into
it and burned to deaths"

Here, then, we have the very belief that we are in search
of, an expression of the most elementary thought of the human
race on the subject of the birth of twins. The occurrence is
abnormal, and an abnormal cause must be found for the ab-
normal effect^ The hypothesis is a dual paternity, one father
being the known and visible factor, the other an unknown and
spirit factor. It is only one step from this belief to the state-
ment that the Dioscuri were, one mortal and one immortal.
We are, however, carried back by that single step to the very
beginnings of human civilization. And we are not limited to
Indo-Germanic origins, for the explanation is evidently a spon-
taneous one on the part of the primitive man, long before the
point of departure of any developments of Aryan civilization.
We have only to turn the invisible spirit of the Indian sorcerer
into the " Father " of the Greek Olympus and the existence of
Castor and Polydeuces is explained. If this be so, we are far
and finally removed from any attempt to explain the Twins
by the Zodiac or by the stars. We are at an earlier date
in human history than star-gazing and star-naming^ Any

1 A little later, the mother shared the fate of the child.

- This sense of the abnormal comes out very clearly in the language of the
Baronga of East Africa, who have a special word to express it. Accordingly
M. Junod, in his work Les Baronga, p. 477, when discussing the expression yila
which is constantly on the lips of the people says that the expression psa yila
answers to our "not allowed" ; and that amongst certain phenomena described as
yila are derogations from the laws of physical nature. Such, for example, as
the bringing of twins into the world, psa yila. The second class of phenomena
are those which are a derogation from universal and observed custom. It may,
however, be doubted whether the distinction would be made by the savage mind.
We suspect "twins" belong just as much under M. Junod's second class as under
the first. Psa yila would seem to be the Baronga translation of what the South
Sea islander calls "taboo."

i* For example, Jeremias, Das alte Testament im Lichte des alien Orients,
p. 20, deduces the origin of the myth of the Dioscuri from the opposition of the
Sun and Nergal (the Moon!), which are supposed to be a pair of twins separated
from one another by the breadth of the Ecliptic, and only united once a year !

8 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

connexion between the Twins and the stars must belong to
the reflections of relatively recent civilization. But the Twins
themselves have been believed in from the earliest days of
human thought. Their legends, occurring no doubt spon-
taneously at many points of human history, have almost as
long a record as the race itself

But when we have thus referred the Heavenly Twins to
the early explanation of a perplexing natural phenomenon, we
are in a position to go a step or two further, as we try to
realize the situation which furnishes the starting-point of the
legends.

The simplest form, then, which we have yet detected of the
cult of the Dioscuri shows us a woman with two children and
suggests to us a double paternity. Here we observe that the
woman of the tale appears as the mother of the twins and not
as the sister, as in the case of Castor and Tolydeuces and their
sister Helena, and as in the case of the Twins of the Rig-Veda,
who take with them on their chariot the virgin Surya, who is
the daughter of the Sun. We can hardly hesitate to conclude
that the cult of the Dioscuri with Helen is based upon an
earlier cult of Twins plus their mother. It must have often
been noticed how superfluous Helen is in the legends of the
Dioscuri : it is not, however, a very simple matter to explain
how she came to be added to the company.

At all events, we have shown that the feature which seemed
most Greek in the story of the Twins, viz. their description as
an immortal-mortal pair, goes back to some of the earliest
speculations of the human race, and we may be sure that the
cult has had a history of extraordinary length. The earlier
investigators of the meaning of the statement that the Twins
were mortal and immortal stopped short of this primitive
explanation. They discovered that in very early times there
was a belief that the Morning and Evening Star were two
distinct stars, and that Hesper and Phosphor were, in fact,
twins. Hence they concluded, because one star was "up"
when the other was " down," and because one was lost in the
light before the rising sun and the other lost in the dark after
the setting sun, that therefore they came to be described as

l] TWINS MORTAL AND IMMORTAL. 9

mortal and immortal. But it now appears that the explanation
was earlier and simpler. The Twins were identified with the
supposed pair of stars because they were immortal and mortal.
The distinction was earlier than the astronomical identification.
It is certainly very remarkable that the roots of a belief should
go so far down into the strata of the past. It is a far cry from
Sparta to British Guiana, and from Greek culture to Indian
savagery. We will now show that it is possible to go further
back in the history of the cult than the form which we find
current in British Guiana.

CHAPTER II.

That, in the earliest stages of human evolution, twins are taboo,
luithout distinction hetiueen them, and that their mother
shay^es the taboo with them.

We now pass from British Guiana to the West Coast of
Africa, where we shall find the taboo on twins in a still earlier
form, without any trace of reflection upon dual paternity or
spirit parentage. And we shall be able to trace the modifica-
tion of the taboo, and how it oscillates between a sense of
certain danger or a conviction of something good and sacred,
and also to notice how the taboo becomes restricted, as regards
the mother and as regards a selected one of the twins.

Our first field of study will be the tribes in the regions
watered by the Niger and the Congo, and we will introduce
the matter by some extracts from the journals and writings of
travellers and missionaries who have laboured in those regions.
We will begin with an extract from Miss Mary Kingsley's
Travels in West Africa, p. 324 :

"All children are thrown [into the bush] who have not
arrived in this world in the way considered orthodox, or who
cut their teeth in an improper manner. Tivins are killed
among all the Niger Delta tribes, and in districts out of English
control the mother is hilled too, except in 0-mon, where the
sanctuary is. These twin mothers and their children are exiled
to an island in the Cross River. They have to remain on the
island, and if any man goes across and marries one of them, he
has to remain on the island too. This twin-killing is a widely
diffused custom among the negro tribes."

CH. Il] TWINS ARE TABOO. 11

Here, then, we have the primitive taboo staring us in the
face, and we see its first modifications, as exile is substituted
for death, and as the mother escapes (under foreign influence)
the fixte of the children. There can be no doubt what the
primitive custom was. Miss Kingsley continues :

" There is always a sense of there being something uncanny
about twins in West Africa, and in those tribes where they are
not killed they are regarded as requiring great care to prevent
them from dying on their own account

" The terror with which twins are regarded in the Niger
Delta is exceedingly strange and real. When I had the honour
of being with Miss Slessor at Okyon [Miss Slessor is a lady
missionary who has found her field of service amongst the tribes
described by Miss Kingsley], the first twins in that district were
saved from immolation owing entirely to Miss Slessor's great
influence with the natives and her own unbounded courage and
energy. The mother in this case was a slave-woman, an Eboe,
the most expensive and valuable of slaves. She was the
property of a big woman, who had always treated her — as
indeed most slaves are treated in Calabar — with great kindness
and consideration, but when these two children arrived all was
changed; immediately she was subject to torrents of virulent
abuse, her things were torn from her, her English china basins,
possessions she valued most highly, were smashed, her clothes
were torn and she was driven out as an unclean thing."

We observe here, what is often noticed amongst savages,
that the taboo upon an individual extends to his property. The
clothes, fu^-niture, and probably the hut, are affected by the taboo.
Miss Kingsley goes on to describe how Miss Slessor saved the
unfortunate mother and one of the children ; the other one
was already dead from rough handling. A new path had to be
cut for their return to the village ; if they had used the ordi-
nary path it would have been polluted and no one would have
travelled over it. The attitude of the natives towards the
rescued child was significant. " They would not touch it, and
only approached it after some days, and then only when it was
held by Miss Slessor and me.... Even its own mother could not
be trusted with the child ; she would have killed it. She never

12 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH,

betrayed the slightest desire to have it with her, and after
a few days' nursing and feeding up she was anxious to go back
to her mistress, who, being an enlightened woman, was willing
to have her, if she came without the child. The woman... would
have to live for the rest of her life an outcast, and for a long
time in a state of isolation, in a hut of her own, which no one
would enter, neither would any eat or drink with her, nor par-
take of the food and water she had cooked or fetched. She
would lead the life of a leper, working in the plantation by day,
and going into her lonely hut by night, shunned and cursed."

Here then we have a very vivid picture of the extent to
which the birth of twins produces a state of taboo. It will be
noticed that there is no distinction made between the children.
If only one had been subject to taboo, the instinct of the mother
would have identified the uncanny child with the dead one ;
but both are equally uncanny and their mother is taboo with
them : everything connected with them shares the curse.

Miss Kingsley concludes her pathetic picture of the poor
woman upon whom the curse had lighted as follows : " She
would sit for hours singing, or rather, moaning out a kind of
dirge over herself ' Yesterday I was a woman, now I am a
horror, a thing all people run from. Yesterday they would talk
to me with a sweet mouth, now they greet me with curses and
execrations. They have smashed my basin, they have torn my
clothes,' and so on, and so on. There was no complaint against
the people for doing these things, only a bitter sense of injury
against some superhuman power that had sent this withering
curse of twins down on her."

Perhaps in defining the curse as the work of a superhuman
power Miss Kingsley has travelled a little beyond the mental
position of the negro woman, and anticipated a later step that
will be taken in the explanation of the phenomena.

Now let us confirm Miss Kingsley 's observations by some
missionary reports : we will turn to a little book by Mr Goldie
called Calabar and its Mission, where we find as follows (p. 24):

" Whether the most unnatural of the customs prevailing
among the Calabar people, the destruction of the infant twin-
born, originated in reluctance to undertake the care of their

ll] TWINS ARE TABOO. 13

upbringing it is hard to say. Eventually it took the place
[? the form] of an act of obedience demanded by the objects of
their idolatry, and, strange to say, it is most strenuously sup-
ported by the women, though they suffer most from it. The
mother, who was visited with the much-dreaded affliction of
a twin-birth, was no doubt formerly destroyed with her infants:
but we found on our arrival, that though she was driven out of
the town and mourned for as dead, she was permitted to live in
the farm districts, and a hamlet was built on the outskirts of
each town, called the twin-mothers' village, in which those
resided who were undergoing the banishment for life."

It is interesting to observe the way in which the original
taboo becomes modified, and it might be a subject of enquiry
whether traces of twin -mother villages are to be found in other
countries \ Mr Goldie gives some instances of the extent to
which the taboo on twins still prevails :

" The wife of Okun Nyamsi, the teacher at Eseko, came in
one day to report the circumstance of a twin-birth in the
neighbourhood. The father of the infants had carried them
into the bush and buried them. Okun and his wife got notice
of the matter, and he hurried out to see if anything could be
done for them. The fiither refused at first to show the spot
where he had put them, but, yielding to Okun's sharp rebuke,
they were taken out of the hole still alive, but neither of them
lived, and the poor mother would not look at them."

Mr Goldie continues with some similar cases; it is important
to collect them, for we do not know what features in savage life
may not be current in far more highly-evolved forms of human
life, and we shall find that even apparently unimportant details
will reappear in communities that are widely separated from
one another by space as well as time. Mr Goldie quotes a note
which he received from Asuqua Ekanem, a native missionary at
Ikunetu, as follows :

" On Wednesday morning a lad came and told us of a twin-
birth at a farm. Ekpenyong Ndang (a native assistant) and I

1 For instance Branchidae was originally known as Didymi, and the temple
of the place is dedicated to Apollo Didymaeus, i. e. to Apollo of Didymi. But
there may be many reasons for calling a place Twin-town.

14 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

went out immediately and saw the woman in the bush. She
was weeping very much, and we tried to comfort her, but she
would not listen. We asked her to go home with us, but she
refused, nor would she receive any help. She would rather die
than he a tiuin-mother. We asked for the infants, but all were
afraid to tell us. At last one boy, on the promise of a shirt, led
us to a pot lying under a palm-tree. On turning it up we
found two little girls squeezed into it. We wrapped them up
and brought them home, and put them into a warm bath. One
of them died after the bath, for the people had wounded it on
the head, and cut her hands and face and broken one of her ribs."

Another instance is given by Mr Goldie from a brother
missionary, Mr Timson of Ikorofiong, who states that " on the
dreaded calamity of a twin-birth occurring in the household of
a man who pretended to be his friend, the said frieud had
thrown both mother and child into the river, and thought it
strange he should be rebuked for so doing." Mr Timson had
the pleasure shortly after of rescuing by force the first twin
child of the Ibibio tribe preserved from the wonted doom. The
infant was a little girl, who is now the wife of an assistant-
teacher at Ikorofiong station ; but for years the heads of the
village where she was born insisted that she should be brought
back from Creek Town (where she had for safety been taken)
and that she should be killed.

It is important that we should get a just idea of the extent
to which the abhorrence of twins is rooted in the savage mind,
and of its extraordinary persistence. For we shall presently
show that the belief that twins are uncanny persisted, in
a more advanced and non-abhorrent form, in the Christian
Church all over Europe ; and it is interesting to contrast with
its persistence in an amicable form in the Christian Church
the similar conservatism of the hostile feeling in the savage
mind. And under the same head we may examine what hap-
pened when the savages of Nigei^ia embraced Christianity in
its more modern form, from which the belief in the great Twin
Brethren had disappeared ; for we shall find that while they
accepted the Christianity which was presented to them, they
could not rid themselves of the belief in the malign influence

ll] TWINS ARE TABOO. 15

of twins, any more than the people of middle Europe could rid
themselves of the belief in the helpfulness of the great Twin
Brethren, and so for a long while the native Christians in
the Calabar region refused to allow the membership of twin
children or their mother in the Churches which had been
formed amongst them.

Returning to the general phenomenon of these regions, the
detestation of twin-bearing and twin-births, we begin to look
round for traces not only of modification of the ruthless custom
of the primeval savage, but also of modification of the belief
itself, and we shall find, to our surprise, that it sometimes
happens that quite adjacent tribes take opposite views of the
matter, the one regarding it as a case of uncanny evil, the
other of mysterious good.

For example, I am informed by my fi'iend, Mr J. Marcus
Brown, who was for some time a missionary on the Oil Rivers,
that among the Fang tribes of the interior twins were formerly
regarded as monstrosities and were killed, and that this is still
the custom in some tribes, whilst amongst others it is now
usual to kill only one. It would be interesting to know the
mental process by which the tribes in question arrived at this
modification of the ancient rule and the reasons they give for it
and the selection of the surviving child. We seem here to be
drawing near to the point of view of the Guiana Indians.

The contrast between the customs of adjacent tribes is most
conspicuous in such a case as is given by Mr Goldie, who, after
describing the way in which King Eyo suppressed twin infanti-
cide in his own tribe, remarks that " amongst the Ekoi tribe, at
no great distance from us, when a twin-birth occurs they make
it an occasion of rejoicing, and her neighbours present gifts to
the happy mother^"

1 Here again Mr Goldie's observations bring out the extent to which the
taboo affects the dwelling and the property as well as the persons : he tells us
that "a small tribe near Ikorofioug killed both mother and children : the people
of Akaba, another small tribe in our neighbourhood, drive the poor mother into
the bush and allow her to perish of want. The Calabar people sometimes pick
them up, the women going to the side of the river to hail any canoe passing.
Another tribe drives off both father and mother, but the father is allowed to
return to society on paying a fine, and catching a certain animal without

16 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

When we were referring to observations on the question of
twins in W. Africa made by Miss Mary Kingsley, it would have
been proper to draw attention to the acknowledgement which
she made of her indebtedness to the missionaries of various
societies, from whom she derived information as to the fetish
rites in their districts. Amongst these a prominent place
should be given to Dr R. H. Nassau, for forty years an
American missionary in the French Congo. Dr Nassau has
recently published a work, entitled Fetichism in West Africa,
which is full of valuable material for the folk-lorist and anthro-
pologist, though the treatment of the subject by the author is
far from being scientific. On the subject of twins, Dr Nassau
records his own observations and those of others. We learn
from him that in the Gabun country twins are welcomed,
though an expiatory ritual is practised over them : we also are
informed that twins have fixed names amongst certain tribes,
and that there are W. African tribes amongst whom they are
objects of worship. From a West African newspaper, which
Dr Nassau quotes without naming it, and without describing
the locality or tribe to which the information refers, we learn
that the worship of twins occurs every month, a point to which
we shall probably have occasion to refer later.

But perhaps we had better transcribe certain notes from
Dr Nassau's collection, as one never knows when or where the
parallel to a West African custom may turn up, and we are
dealing, as will be seen clearly enough as the enquiry proceeds,
with a custom which prevailed over almost the whole world.

Dr Nassau, then, reports as follows^:

" Mr Arnot states that in Garengauze ' cases of infanticide
are very rare. Twins, strange to say, are not only allowed to
live, but the people delight in them.' Though they are not
regarded as monstrosities deserving death, as among the Calabar
people on the west coast, it is nevertheless considered necessary
that certain preservative ceremonies should be performed on
the infants and their parents."

wounding it. The house in which a twin-birth occurs is commonly jjulled
down."

1 Fetichism in W. Africa, p. 205.

Il] TWINS ARE TABOO. 17

Then follows an account of the purification of the parents,
who present their offspring ceremonially to the king of the
tribe. The following description is given by Mr Swan, a
colleague of Mr Arnot, mentioned above :

" An elderly woman came forward, with a dish in her left
hand and an antelope's tail in her right. When she reached
Msidi [the king], I was astonished at her dipping the tail in
the dish and dashing the liquid over his face. Msidi's wife had
a like dose. But my surprise increased when she came to us
and gave us a share. What was in the dish I cannot say, but
it struck me as possessing a very disagreeable odour. This
discourteous creature was the Ocimbanda (fetich-doctor). She
did not cease her dousing work till she had favoured all sitting
round... The king then went into the house, and his wife came
out with some cloth, which she tied round the mother's waist ;
and then a piece of cloth was given to the husband. The
friends had brought some native beer ; and when Msidi came
out, he went to one of the pots, filled his mouth, spouting the
beer in his wife's face : she did the same to him, after which
the spouting became general... They told me it was their •
custom to act thus when twins were born\"

Dr Nassau notes further that, if one child should die out of
the pair {i.e. in a country where twins are honoured), an image
is made of the departed child and placed by the living one.
"In the Benga tribe, thirty-five years ago, I observed that when
one of a pair of twins died, a wooden image was substituted
for it in the bed or cradle-box, alongside of the living child. I
strongly suspected Animism in the custom^; but some Christians
explained that the image was only a toy, so that the living babe
should not miss the presence of an object resembling its mate^"

1 From Ellis, Yoriiha-speaking Peoples, p. 81, we find that twins have a tute-
lary deity, called Ibeji among the Yorubas, and corresponding to the god Hoho
of the Ewe-speaking tribes. Here Ibeji = twins, and Hoho has a twin-like
appearance. There is also a small black monkey, sacred to Ibeji, a kind of
twin totem. Twins are commonly named after it, or rather one of them is so
named.

^ That is, as Ellis explains, the image is for the spirit of the dead child to
enter into, and not for the amusement or comfort of the living child, except in
the negative sense, that the spirit of the dead is kept from worrying the living.

2 On p. 270 we are told of the " Yoruba custom of having images carved of

H. 2

18 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

With regard to the names of twins, Dr Nassau remarks
that in certain tribes twins have the same names. " In Benga
they are always Ivaha (a wish) and Ayenwe (unseen). These
names are given irrespective of sex. But not every man or
woman whom one may meet with these names is necessarily a
twin." "Among the Egba tribes of the Yoruba country... they
are given twin names, which, of course differ in different
languages. Among the Egbas, the firstborn is Taiwo, i.e. ' the
first to taste the world/ and the other Kehende, i.e. ' the one
who comes last^.'"

We have now sufficiently shown from W. African customs
that the taboo on twins is very early in human evolution ;
most of the African tribes agree that twins are uncanny, but
some think them lucky, others unlucky : some tribes kill and
some exile both the mother and the child ; even those who
welcome them use special ceremonies for averting evil. There
appears to be no trace of the belief of a dual parentage, nor any
idea that one of the children is of a spirit-ancestry I

Now let us go into S. Africa and see whether we find
similar beliefs and customs to those which we have found in
such elementary forms amongst the negroes of the Niger and
the Oil Rivers^ Our best guide will be a Swiss missionary,
M. Junod, who has laboured amongst the Baronga tribes of
Portuguese S. Africa, not far from Delagoa Bay*.

dead twins, and that the carving of these images is a flourishing and money-
making trade. If the parents of the dead child are in comfortable circum-
stances the carvers tell them that they have seen in their dreams the dead twin
and that he or she has asked them to send such and such clothes, articles of
food, money, &c."

1 Is this the original meaning of the name Jacob ?

2 But against this note that in the Ondo country they are said to destroy one
of twins, and that amongst the Yorubas the totem name appears to be given to
one of the two children. It is difficult to think the selection wholly arbitrary:
and, even if it were, we may be sure that an explanation would soon be found
which would remove it from the class of arbitrary actions.

^ From the Congo Free State I have no information except of a negative
character. It seems that in this district the treatment of twins is normal : both
are brought up, and there is no ill-treatment of the mother. So Dr W. Holman
Bentley, who has had twenty-five years' experience of life on the Congo.

* M. Junod's work is entitled, Les Ba-ronga, ^tude ethnographique sur les
indigenes de la Baie de Delagoa ; it was published at Neuchatel in 1898 as the
tenth volume of the Bulletin de la Societe Neiichateloise de Geographie.

Il] TWINS ARE TABOO. 19

From M. Junod, then, we learn that among the Baronga^
the arrival in the world of two or three infants at a birth is
regarded as a great misfortune, a defilement for which special
rites of purification are required. He gives the description of
what happens in such an event amongst the clan Zihlahla,
beyond Tobane, where, after a multiple birth, the witch-doctor
is at once sent for. Meanwhile the mother has to leave the
village and take up her abode in a wretched hut which has
been constructed for her in the neighbourhood. Here, then, we
have the survival of the expulsion of the mother, which is such
a cruel custom amongst the Calabar natives. The women of
the neighbourhood take the opportunity to pray for rain ; we
shall return to this point presently. After certain dances and
songs they throw water over the mother and children. M. Junod
thinks this is the beginning of the ceremony of purification : it
is more likely that it is a part of the rain-charm to which we
have just alluded. He then describes the taboo under which
the mother and children are laid, a taboo so severe that the
woman is not allowed to give food to her other children, and
which necessitates the destruction by fire of her hut and all its
furniture, except in so far as custom permits the witch-doctor
to annex half the property, presumably because he is superior
to the risks that spring from the taboo. It will be remembered
that the same custom was in vogue on the Oil Rivers, with the
exception of what is excepted in the case of the medicine- man.
The taboo continues to affect both the growing children and
their mother. If they should approach the native village they
are driven away, and ashes are thrown at them with cries of,
" Go away, children of the sky." Here we have the new and
striking modification, to which we shall have to give special
attention presently, that the sky is in some way concerned with
their parentage. To such an extent is dislike for twins carried,
that when a naughty child has to be reproved or reviled, it is
sufficient to tell it that it is as bad as a twin. As regards the
taboo on the mother, the custom is that, after a year of isolation,
she is permitted to go away by herself to some distant place
where she will be unknown : or, on the other hand, she may

I Les Ba-ronga, p. 412,

2—2

20 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

take two years' isolation and then return to her husband. Here
we have again a modification of the expulsion and exile which
is practised in the Calabar region.

M. Junod quotes some interesting details of the treatment
of twins from the letters of Mme. Eberhardt, the wife of a
missionary at Antioka. A poor woman who had given birth to
twins was found under a tree, with her children lying on the
ground beside her. All the women of the neighbourhood were
there, uttering piteous laments.

"What is the matter?" said Mme. Eberhardt.

" Oh ! don't you know that it is a great misfortune to have
borne twins ?"

"Do you see," added another, "the grandfather wished
immediately to kill one of them, but we prevented him ?"

" Wretch," said Mme. Eberhardt, " if he does that, he will
be seized by the Portuguese."

Then follows an account of how Mme, Eberhardt rescued the
woman from the open field, to which she had been driven, and
where, according to custom, she should have remained, and took
her to the Mission House : after which comes a horrid account of
the lustration of the poor creature by the witch-doctor, who seems
to have collected everything nasty for the purpose of her puri-
fication, and poured it on her. The importance of the account
does not, however, lie in the composition of the medicine, but in
the way in which evidence is brought forward for the custom of
killing one of the twins : the grandfather, here, stands for the
previous generations, and we need have no hesitation in saying
that it used to be the custom amongst the Baronga to kill one
of the pair of twins. Here we are more advanced than in
Calabar, and not very far removed from the practice of British
Guiana. We have also detected the traces of sky-parentage
and that the twins have something to do with^ the giving of
rain, two important points which must be examined into more
closely. M. Junod records not only the case of the Baronga,
who regard twins as of evil omen, but also points out the customs
of other South African tribes, and that there are those who
regard twins as a blessing rather than a bane, a feature which
we had already come across in Nigeria and the French Congo.

Il] TWINS ARE TABOO. 21

He tells us (p. 415) that the customs with regard to twins vary
from one clan to the next. In certain tribes they are a blessing,
in others they are looked upon as a curse. At Tembe and
Matolo the women desire to be the mothers of twins, and they
will beg from twin-mothers portions of the fat with which they
anoint their offspring, in order that, if possible, they may
transfer fertility with the ointment. Amongst these people the
hut of the twin-mother is not burnt and the twin-children are
proud of their title. In the same way, the Hereros of German
South-west Africa consider a multiple birth one of the happiest
events that can befall them. Amongst these people on the
West Coast, in the very same latitude as the Baronga on the
East Coast, it is the custom to give the parents of twins
the right to exact a ransom from their neighbours, as though
the danger from the twins threatened the tribe rather than the
individual. The customs of these people are described by a
missionary named Daunert, in the Folklore Journal of Cape-
Town for November, 1880; he tells us that the father and
mother of twins are condemned to a rigid silence, for fear of
bringing down curses on those with whom they converse. The
whole of the tribe is assembled, and they bring their cattle
with them. The family of the twins is received by them with
lamentations, each member of the tribe presents some pearls or
other ornaments, after which the father and mother undergo
purification by a witch-doctor's powder. After this the father
is allowed to go round the village and collect an ox from every
hut ; he becomes in this way a rich man.

M, Junod is perplexed over customs which are apparently
so self-contradictory. He finds it hard to explain the difference
between the treatment of twins among the Baronga, for
instance, and those just described among the Hereros. His
attempt at an. explanation is that the blessing or malediction
results from a sense of awe caused by the mysterious presence of
an unknown factor in the shape of the sky. We shall have to
recognize this factor presently, and no doubt it is a sufficient
cause of religious terror ; but as we have found the same
diversity of treatment amongst tribes lower down the scale
than the Baronga or Hereros, and apparently without any

22 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

sense of the intervention of the sky, we can hardly accept
M. Jimod's explanation, or regard the toll of oxen as a ransom
intended for the celestial power. The explanation seems to
be farther back in the perplexing and contradictory mind of
primitive man.

Further north than the Baronga, we have some recent in-
formation in Capt. Merker's interesting account of the customs
and traditions of the Masai. These nomads are held by him to be
the descendants of one of the numerous Semitic immigrations
from Asia into Africa, and to have preserved in their cults and
traditions many traces of early Arabian life and religion. It is
interesting to notice that twins are regarded by the Masai as
a blessing and not a curse. Merker tells us that they desire
male children rather than female, which is a common feature of
most of the human species, but that above all they wish for
twin cJdldren^. When twins are born it is customary for one to
be entrusted to the mother, and the other to some other woman
of the same kraal. The twins are decorated with a necklace
made of leather and cowrie-shells, which serve as a distinction
and illustrate the paternal pride. There appear to be no signs
of any special purification.

We shall see, later on, that the Masai traditions which are
so closely parallel to those preserved in the Pentateuch enable
us to detect some Dioscuric features in certain Biblical stories
where we might otherwise have failed to recognize them^

If now we cross over to Madagascar we shall find traces of
the twin-superstition : and as the population of Madagascar is
Malay and not Negroid, it looks as if the belief about twins
had come to them from the east and not from the west. At
all events it was the custom, not long since, to exile or kill one

J Merker, Die Masai, p. 51.

^ They have also a curious and impossible tradition about the birth of twins,
where the interval between the elder and younger is imagined to be as long as
three months, a curious belief of which Merker reports parallels in the Talmud.
We may refer to T. B. Niddah 27". "It happened that the second child (of a
pair) did not come into the world till 33 days after the other." In another case
not till three mouths, and the Rabbi adds, "Behold they are sitting before me in
the Beth ha-Midrash ; 'Who are they?' Judah and Hezekiah, the sons of R.
Chiya."

Il] TWINS ARE TABOO. 23

of a pair of twins. From Mr Standing's book, Children of
Madagascar (p. 31), we learn that "Twins were also con-
sidered unlucky, and one would often be sent away to be
brought up by someone else or even j^^^t to death as soon as
horn"; and my friend, Miss E. M. Clark, who belongs to the
same mission^ as Mr Standing, informs me that she has heard
it stated that in some parts of the island the custom was in
vogue not very long since.

It will not escape the student of Classical Archeology that,
while we are recording the folk-lore of East and West Africa,
we are throwing light upon the early traditions of Roman
History. Macaulay's description of the birth of Romulus and
Remus will come to mind :

"Slain is the Pontiff Gamers
Who spake the words of doom :
' The children to the Tiber :
The mother to the tomb.' "

That is to say, in Rome also, twins were taboo and their
mother taboo with them, and the taboo was of the West
African type. The story of the lapsed Vestal who was mother
of Romulus and Remus is an attempt to explain to a later age
the taboo on the mother of twins.

But now let us return to the Baronga and their reference
of twin children to the parentage of the sky, and to the in-
fluence which they ascribe to them in the production of rain^

^ Society of Friends' Madagascar Mission.

2 In demonstrating the reality and the wide-spread belief in the " taboo " on
twins, it is amusing to record one case in which it survives in our own country
with regard to animals. There was a farmer in Wales who had a cow which had
borne twin calves, and he desired to sell her for fear of ill-luck or misfortune
that might affect him in consequence. The superstition is said to be common in
Cardiganshire and in S. Wales generally. See Notes and Queries, November 19,
1904.

CHAPTER III.

That T'wins, undei^ certain conditions, become Heavenly Twins
and are krWwn as the Children of the Sky.

The Twins in the Rig-Veda are credited with an interest
in agriculture and in the needs of the agriculturist ; they,
themselves drive the plough as well as the chariot, and they
have connexion with wind, rain, and dew. Surprising as this
may seem to those who approach the subject on the military
side and who learned to know them as gigantic heroes riding
upon colossal horses, there seems to be no doubt that like so
many of the Greek gods they were " sheep in wolves' clothing " :
they concealed under their martial array a peaceable and neces-
sary life as shepherds or agriculturists. And if Ares and
Athena can be traced back to deities of vegetation, I do not
see why we should be so very astonished that the Dioscuri
disclose affinities with the ploughman, that they appear as the
inventors of his implements, and that they help him with the
necessary rain from heaven. Indeed the Indian poets saw no
discordance between the callings, but praised them in the same
breath :

" You, O A9vins, that lay enemies low, sow grain with

the plough, and milk out the quickening streams of water

for men."

It will be interesting to determine whether these occupa-
tions of the Twins are early in their historical development,
and, if so, how early. It has long been observed that, amongst
savage people, agriculture is of the woman, just as war and
hunting are of the man. Whether we are investigating North

CH. Ill] TWINS CHILDREN OF SKY. 25

American Indians, South Africans, or the forefathers of the
Greeks whose customs and beliefs survive in their ancient
rituals, the same truth comes to light ; that agriculture is a
feminine craft. Accordingly Jevons sajs^:

" The cultivation of plants was one of woman's contributions
to the development of civilization ; and it is in harmony with
this conjecture that the cereal deities are usually, both in the
Old World and the New, female. The agricultural or semi-
agricultural mysteries, therefore, from which even in civilized
times women used to exclude men, may be survivals of early
times, when agriculture was a cult as well as a craft, a mystery \
as well as a ministerium, and when, further, the craft (and
therefore the cult) was the exclusive prerogative of the wives
of the tribe."

Mr Jevons proceeds to argue that cultivated plants were
originally totems and that cereals were originally sex-totems.

It is evident that if there were, to the mind of the savage,
such a connexion between the productive power of life in
woman, and the productive power of life in a cereal, it would
go far to explain why the woman had charge of agriculture and
its processes. Miss Harrison brings the analogy out very
clearly in her recent work^ and says:

"In days when man was mainly concerned with hunting
and fighting it was natural enough that agriculture and the
ritual attendant on it should fall on the women. Moreover to
this social necessity was added, and still is among many savage
communities, a deep-seated element of superstition. ' Primitive
man,' Mr Payne observes^ ' refuses to interfere in agriculture ;
he thinks it magically depends for success on Avoman, and is
connected with child-bearing.' 'When the women plant maize,'
said the Indian to Gumilla, ' the stalk produces two or three
ears. Why? because women know how to produce children.
They only know how to plant corn and ensure it germinating.
Then let them plant it, they know more than we know.' Such
seems to have been the mind of the men at Athens who sent

1 Introduction to the History of Religion, p. 240.

2 Prolegg. to Greek Religion, p. 272.
=* Hist, of the New World, Vol. ii. p. 7.

26 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

their wives and daughters to keep the Thesmophoria and work
their charms and ensure fertility for crops and men."

But if this be a correct statement, or even a partially
correct statement of the reasons for the influence of primitive
woman on early agriculture, it will almost follow as a con-
sequence, which even the savage mind can draw, that the
woman who has borne twins will have greater influence in
agriculture, and a liigher authority in agricultural cults, than
the ordinary woman who only produces her children one at a
time. For, to use the illustration of the Indian quoted above,
" Her stalk produces two or three ears." And that this is the
case we are able to verify in a variety of ways. For example,
we hear from Uganda that when the natives desire to produce
an especially fine crop of plantains they "medicine" the fruit
by contact with the body of a woman who has borne twins.
In the same way we find all over the world that when rain is
needed for the crops the natural rain -maker is a woman who is
the mother of twins. And from this it is only one step further
to regard the twins themselves as the cause of the fertility
desired and as the agents for producing the requisite rain
from heaven. This point is brought out with clearness and
detail in the sections of the Golden Bough which deal with
rain-charms and associated matters. For example^ we are
told that " among the Shushwap Indians of British Columbia,
twins are credited with the making of good or bad weather at
pleasure." And again^ "among the Nootkas of British Columbia
twins are believed to have the power of making good or bad
weather," And again, " The Baronga, on the shores of Delagoa
in South-eastern Africa, ascribe to twins the same power of
influencing the weather which is attributed to the Nootkas far
away on the Pacific coast of North America. They bestow the
name of Tilo, that is, the sky, on a woman who has given birth
to twins, and the infants themselves are called the children of
the sky." The importance of this observation will be evident
to anyone who will reflect that we have here among the
Baronga the exact equivalent of the Greek ALoa/covpot.

1 Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 83.

2 G. B. I. 90, 91.

Ill] TWINS CHILDREN OF SKY, 27

Mr Frazer, in transcribing the account from the Swiss mis-
sionary Junod, adds in a note the remark that the " reason for
calling them children of the sky is obscure." But if we reflect
that Zeus is a sky-god and the Dioscuri his children, we see at
once what it means to call them by the equivalent name in the
language of the Baronga. Is it certain that it is the woman
who is called Tilo^? that title belongs rather to the invisible
parent, who has by this time annexed to his family both of the
twins. The account of the actual method of producing rain, as
given by M. Junod, brings out very clearly the importance in
the ritual of both the mother and the children. The women,
clad in leaves, go the round of the wells and springs and
cleanse them. After that " the women must repair to the
house of one of their gossips who has given birth to twins, and
must drench her with water, which they carry in little pitchers ^
...When they have cleansed the wells they must go and pour
water on the graves of their ancestors in the sacred grove. It

^ M. Junod's statement is as follows {Les Ba-ronga, p. 414): "Cette puis-
sance, qui produit I'^clair et la mort, preside aussi d'une mani^re toute sp^ciale
a la naissance des jumeaux, a tel point que la femme qui les a mis au monJe est
appelee du nom de Tilo, ciel, et les enfants eux-memes : Baua ba Tilo, enfants
du Ciel." {lb. p. 418) "Pour que le Ciel donne de la pluie, 11 faut Parroser !
La mere des jumeaux, les jumeaux eux-memes sont des etres que le Ciel a dis-
tingues au point qu'ils s'appellent Ciel. Done il faut leur verser de I'eau
dessus!" The passage seems too strongly worded. The children are not called
sky, but sky-boys : and it is doubtful if the mother is called sky.

It is interesting to notice that the name Tilo is also used to express thunder
and lightning. In a story told by M. Junod of the production and purification
of twins (with rain-making?), the ceremonies are described as taking place
under a great tree. The thunder-god has bis habitation in a tree, usually in
an oak.

^ M. Junod says that when a woman has borne twins she is immediately
visited by all the women of the neighbourhood, who drench her and her off-
spring with water and chant over her a rain-charm. As we have pointed out
already, the pouring of water has nothing to do with purification, it is the usual
sympathetic magic for rain-making. M. Junod describes the chant as follows :

" Toutes les femmes du pays se rassemblent ; elles partent dans toutes les
directions au Nord, au Sud, a I'Est, a I'Ouest pour puiser de I'eau dans de
vieilles calabasses a tous les lacs, dans tous les puits de la contr^e avoisinaute.
Elles s'en vont en sautillaut sur la i^ointe des pieds et en chantonnant un chant
special appel^ le mhelelo :

mbel^lo, mbelelo ! mpfoula a yi n4 !
mbelelo, mbelelo 1 que la pluie tombe."

28 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

often happens, too, that at the bidding of the wizard they will
go and pour water oji the graves oftwins^."

Enough has been brought forward to establish the fact that
a woman who has borne twins, as well as the children them-
selves, are especially influential in the induction of fertility,
and in the necessary factor of that induction, the charming of
rain from the skies.

We see now the origin of the term Dioscuri ; it is no
peculiar Greek idea, but one which arose at a very early period
of human civilization ; and we see how the Dioscuri came to be
regarded as the patrons of agriculture and the bestowers of
rain, as in the verses quoted from the Rig-Veda. The function
assigned to the Twins is no peculiarity of Indo-Germanic
civilization. We have shown that it exists amongst savages
who are as far apart as Eastern Africa from Western America.

It will be noticed that the cult of the Twins, as disclosed in
this chapter, is slightly more advanced than what we remarked
in the case of the Indians in British Guiana, in that both the
Twins are now credited to the spirit-father and named after
him. But even in the Greek legends of the Dioscuri we can
still trace the fluctuating opinion of the early peoples, for the
Greek Twins are sometimes called Dioscuri, and sometimes
Tyndaridae, and sometimes they are assigned to their respective
fathers, Polydeuces to Zeus and Castor to Tyndareus. We can
hardly doubt that the name Dioscuri, or its equivalent, is a very
early invention of man in his first thinking times. And .ve
may also be sure, from the extraordinary variety of functions
assigned to the Greek Twins and to those of the Rig-Veda, that
their origin must be in a very distant past, and the evolution of
their cult a part of the oldest religion of the world.

We ought not to leave the consideration of this part of the
subject without reminding ourselves that a parallel form to the
Greek " Dioscuri " and the African " Children of Tilo " was

1 This custom of pouring water on the graves is still practised by the Arme-
nians of Aintab at the festival which they call Vartevar, and which is the sur-
vival of an ancient rain-festival. But I could not obtain, on a recent visit, any
suggestion that there was a preference shown to the graves of twins, as is said
to be the case among the Baronga.

Ill] TWINS CHILDREN OF SKY. 29

brought to light by Mannhardt in his famous study of the folk-
songs of Lithuania, where we read of the deiua deli, " sons of
God" (or "sons of the sky"?), who ride upon a chariot, and
liberate the daughter of the Sun.

We must not assume these Lithuanian beliefs to b^ as
independent of the Greek legends as we may naturally assume
the superstitions of the Baronga to be. They should be
classified with the Greek forms, as coming from a common
Indo-Germanic origin.

CHAPTER IV.

That the Twins, as the patrons of fer'tility, are known amongst
Semitic as well as artiongst Aryan peoples.

As soon as we have recognized the part which the Twins
and their mother play in the processes of agriculture and in
the fertilisation and growth of the crops, as has been shown in
the preceding chapter, it follows that they will also be the
patrons of fertility in the human species as well as in plant
life\ Indeed it is natural to suppose that their effect upon
growth and multiplication would be sensible in their human
subjects even sooner than amongst plants, which, to us moderns,
would seem to be more distant from the operating causes.
However this may be, we may be sure that, sooner or later, an
influence which is believed to operate upon the sown and
planted fields will also be looked for in the conjunctions of the
human race. We shall accordingly find (a) that the Twin
brethren have a care over the nuptials of the young, {h) that
they are able to reinforce the declining vigour of the aged.
Under the first of these heads we can at once range a number
of beliefs with their associated legends ; for instance, the Roman
gods, Picumnus and Pilumnus, who preside over marriages and
births, are evidently a pair of twins ; their names alone would
suggest that relation, apart from the fact that they are credited
with doughty deeds in the Dioscuric manner. Under the same
head must be arranged all those peculiar features in the Syriac
Acts of Thomas, where Jesus and His assumed twin brother are
represented as taking part in the festivities or appearing in
connexion with the sanctities of a royal wedding. Under the

1 Of. what Pliny says of the planet Venus (H.N. ii. 6): " Huius natura
cuncta generantur in terra. Namque in alterutro exortu genitali rore consper-
gens, non terrae modo conceptus implet, verum animantium quoque omniura
stimulat,"

CH. IV] TWINS PATRONS OF FERTILITY. 31

second head we shall probably be able to establish in the Semitic
literature a remarkable case of the intervention of the Dioscuri.
But before we come to this, let us observe that the Acts of
Thomas, to Avhich we have referred above, is an Edessan docu-
ment, and even though it professes to describe Indian scenes,
the customs described will be Edessan. We thus are able to
infer the cult of the Twins in Edessa, and in the lectures on the
Dioscuri in the Christian legends we were able to confirm this
belief in a variety of ways. And the twins whom we thus dis-
cover are not Greek twins, but Semitic. This is not proved
from the Acts of Thomas themselves, though these Acts are
written in original Sj'riac, for the Edessan religion may have
taken a Greek colouring, either from the Macedonian colonists
who settled there or from other sources. What convinces us is
that we have conclusive evidence from Greek sources that the
Sun was honoured in Edessa along with two assessors whose
names are Monim and Aziz : now whatever may be the explana-
tion of Monim, it is clear that Aziz is not a Greek name, it
must be either Syriac or Arabic, and means the mighty one.
We actually know it as an extant Arabic name. And if it
should be Arabic and not Syriac, it would not surprise us, for it
is well known that there is an Arabic strain in the names of the
early princes of Edessa. But if the Twins of Edessa have
Arabic or Syriac names, that almost establishes the fact that
the Twins were as natural a cult to the Semite as to the
Greeks For the worship of the Twins has been shown to belong
to the very earliest times and not to be a modern invention.

1 One hesitates to speak too positively on the meaning of the name Monim.
Julian, in describing the solar cult at Edessa, had equated it, following lambli-
chus, with Hermes ( = Nebo of the Assyrians). [See Julian, Orat. iv. p. 195.]
Movers, in his work on the Phenicians, says that Monim stands for the Hebrew
pyO and is equivalent to the Greek fiavris. This explanation would throw
light on that curious passage in the Book of Judges (ix. 37) where the enemies
of Abimelech are seen coming from the way of the Oak of the Meonnanim,
which the modern interpreter translates as the " Oak of the Enchanters," or
"Wizards' Oak," but which earlier exegetes used to explain as the "Oak of the
Cloud-compellers." Either explanation would suit the Dioscuri, and an oak is
their natural and appropriate home. But in that case, should we not have to
point the Hebrew word as a dual? And is the Mahanaim of Gen. xxxii. 1 a
c'orruptiou of the same name or a substitute for it? It would be interesting if
we could show that the Dioscuri came to the help of the wandering twin Jacob.

32 V THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

The enquiry at once is suggested whether there are any
other traces of the cult of the Twins in Semitic customs and
literature. The first thing that occurs to us is that if the two
great pillars at Edessa are really set up in honour of the Twins,
considered from the point of view of the signs of the Zodiac, or
identified with the morning and evening star, or with a pair of
solar heroes, then we can hardly avoid making a similar enquiry
for the two pillars which Solomon is said to have set up in the
Temple at Jerusalem, and which were inscribed respectively with
the names Jachin and Boaz. Closely connected with this in-
vestigation into the meaning of the sacred pillars of Solomon,
is the enquiry into the meaning of the Talmudic tradition that
a pair of cedar-trees (doubtless sacred cedars) stood in the fore-
court of the Temple. For these sacred trees are always the
home of deities, if they were not originally identified with
them^ Up to the present time no satisfactory solution has
been found of the Jachin-Boaz riddle, though various attempts
have been made to turn the titles into divine names, by cor-
recting Boaz into Baal and Jachin into Jahveh. Probably the
interpretation will come out of its obscurity before very long.
Meanwhile let us observe that the Biblical account of the pillars
in the Temple makes them to be Tyrian work, and credits their
inscription to the artist that planned them. And we shall be
encouraged in our belief that the pillars are in honour of the
Twins, if we can affirm on other grounds that the cult was one
which was at home in Phenicia. When this question is stated,
the answer can be given at once. Phenicia is headquarters for
the cult of the Kabiri, or Great Ones, who are so closely allied
to the Greek Dioscuri, that when we find a monument of the
cult in a quarter which is both Greek and Phenician, like
Samothrace, it becomes extremely difficult to say whether we
ought to credit the work to the honour of the Dioscuri or the
Kabiri. True, the Kabiri are often found as a triads but it is
by no means certain that the same thing may not be said, in

We shall see reason later on to believe that Esau and Jacob, before they were
race-parents, were a couple of Dioscures. ^ As Mr Frazer suggests.

2 Later on, they will become seven. Cf. Sanchoniathon as quoted in Euseb.
Praep. Evan. i. 10 : e^' 5^ tou "EvdhK AcocrKovpoi. r/ Kd/3etpot -ij Kopv^avres v '^afj.o-
0paKes...oi eirTo, 2i;5^/c iratSes Kd/3etpot Kal 6 i'Stos avrdv d5e\4>os'A(TK\7jinos.

IV] SEMITIC AS WELL AS ARYAN. 33^

certain places, of the Dioscuri. So here we have the parallel
cult in Phenicia to the Greek cult, and there is no reason to
suppose that either set of worshippers has borrowed from the
other. They are independent modifications of similar reflections
on the part of two early human clans, and we have as much
right to call it a Semitic cult as a Greek cult. This being the
case, the argument for the worship of Twins amongst Semitic
peoples is reinforced all round, and, in particular, the belief that
the pillars in the Temple at Jerusalem were Dioscuro-Kabiric
is strongly reinforced. From this belief the next step would
be as follows. Upon reflection that the cult of the Twins, as
expressed in the Jachin and Boaz pillars, will certainly dis-
appear with the growth of monotheistic ideas, we should look
for further traces of the cult in the earlier history and in the
earlier legends of the Jewish people, and we should expect that
the further back we go, the more we should find, for the Twins
do not belong to a late growth of polj^theism but to the very
earliest deposits. ' Accordingly we should expect traces of them
in the Book of Genesis, and in those parts which, on general
grounds, are believed to incorporate the earliest traditions.

At this point we may refer for a moment to two remarkable
papers by Francois Lenormant in the Contempo7-ary Review for
February and April, 1880. The two articles are entitled 'The
First Murder and the Founding of the First City," and " The
Genealogies between Adam and the Deluge." The writer
wishes to show the primitive connexion between the Heavenly
Twins and the invention of building, and also to bring out
the connexion between the first building and the first murder.
He starts from the idea that the signs of the Zodiac were at
one time signs of the months that corresponded with them, that
each sign has its associated legend and its appropriate symbol.
Thus, if the old Semitic month is called Sivan, and if the
meaning of Sivan is "mudV' then we may suggest that this is
the month in which mud was made into bricks for building.
But then the sign of the month is the " Heavenly Twins,"
which appears ideographically in Babylonian as a portion of
an unfinished brick wall, and we may therefore say that in

1 Compare the case of tlae city Sin and its Greek equivalent Pelusium.
H. 3

34 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

Mesopotamia the Twins are thrown into connexion with the
baking of bricks and with building. The way is then open
for a string of parallels with a number of pairs of legendary
brethren, builders of cities, who are frequently twins, and of
whom one commonly murders the other. The most obvious
parallel is the case of Romulus [= Romus] and Remus; the
least obvious is the case of Cain and Abel, for the suggestion
is not yet confirmed that Cain and Abel were twins (though
they may have been), nor that both of them were builders, nor
that the building of Cain preceded the murder of Abel. More-
over, the names have nothing twin-like about them. We find
them, indeed, called Qabil and Hebel in Arabic, but this is
probably only due to misreading in an Arabic script. The
name Cain is attested, too, by Sanchoniathon, who appears
to turn it into Genos.

The folk-lore parallels to the story of the Building Twins,
of whom one is a murderer, are so many that we are obliged
to examine carefully the suggestions made by Lenormant.
We may easily satisfy ourselves about the Twins as being
the inventors and patrons of building, but we cannot so
easily affirm Cain and Abel to be Dioscuri, though there are
some things that look that way. Moreover, the method of
Lenormant in proceeding from the signs of the Zodiac to the
Twins labours under a fundamental misunderstanding. The
cult of the Heavenly Twins is older by ages and ages than the
signs of the Zodiac ; and when the Twins appeared in the sky
at all, they appeared first of all as invisible powers, then became
located as Phosphor and Hesper, and only in the latest stage
of all became a Zodiacal sign. The months also must have
preceded the Zodiacal signs, and it is a pity to make the
argument turn on what seems to be a chronological inversion
of ideas. On the other hand, for the Twins as builders, and
probably with a murder commemorated in their cult, there is
plenty of folk-lore parallels of the earliest kind.

In the second of the two papers referred to, the writer
studies the genealogies of the Sethite and Cainite families, and
points out that each genealogy ends in a triad, the Sethites
producing Shem, Ham and Japhet; and the Cainites Jabal,

IV] SEMITIC AS WELL AS ARYAN. 35

Jiibal and Thubal. He then attempts to show that the months
were originally named after (ten ?) antediluvian patriarchs, of
whom the best representation will be found in the signs of the
Zodiac. Here, again, the argument shows more ingenuity than
conviction, and we need not refer to it further, as it does not
concern us. But the observation with regard to the Triads
that appear in the genealogies of the supposed families of the
human race is important. For there are Dioscuric and Kabiric
touches in the account. The names are twin-like. We correct
away the Cain out of Tubal-cain, which is a correction to Tubal
which has wandered from the margin to the text, or a gloss
upon it, and then we have Lamech's family as composed of

Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal ;

moreover, it is significantly added that Tubal's sister is called
Noema. We at once think of the grouping of Castor and
Polydeuces with Helena. And the Biblical legend has added to
the persons the crafts that they were patrons of: as that Jabal
was patron of shepherds, Jubal of organists and Tubal of smiths
and metal-workers. One thinks at once of the musical Amphion
who helped his brother Zethus with the building of the walls of
Thebes, and of Judas Thomas and his skill in making ploughs
and yokes and all kinds of work in wood and stone.

It seems likely, then, that there are Dioscuric or Kabiric
traces in the early genealogies ^

And now leaving the very speculative ground of the gene-
alogies, we come to a case which is very much clearer. Before
discussing it, we must remind ourselves of certain functions
of the Dioscuri which come to light in the Rig-Veda but which
cannot be limited to the Rig-Veda. We allude (a) to the
power which they have to restore declining sexual functions,
(6) to the anger which they show towards those who offend them
in matters that are directly under their care and- patronage.

1 The correction of Tubal to Cain, which is suggested by the Hebrew text,
invites the idea of a correction in the inverse order. We might imagine a text
in which the first brethren were Tubal and Hebel, and then the argument for
twins would begin again. There is some reason, too, for thinking that Cain
only means smith and that the supposed derivation of the name in Gen. iii. is
mere philological byplay.

3—2

36 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

With regard to the first point, it is hardly necessary to make
a detailed statement ; for, in the nature of the case, as we have
shown above, the function of the Twins is to promote fertility in
nature and in man. And the instances of their connexion with
marriage rites are so common that it is not necessary to tabulate
them here. The Rig-Veda may suffice for the establishment
of the belief that the Dioscuri (or A^vins, as they are called in
Sanskrit) can restore lapsed or declining sexual functions^

With regard to the second point, a more detailed proof is
necessary. As a rule the Dioscuri are known as the benevolent
friends of men, the "good Saviours'^" to whom appeal is made
in all troubles at home or abroad, in peace or war, on the land
or sea. But this must not obscure the fact that they are some-
times extremely angry, and their wrath is greatly to be feared.
Occasionally they destroy whole cities, and as a general principle
they are capable of acting in two exactly contrary manners.
They can make good weather, the}^ can make bad weather;
give rain or withhold rain ; build a city or reduce it to ruins ;
open the eyes of the blind, or make those blind who now see.
Some of these forms of anger are very early. For example, we
have seen that the Nootka Indians refer both good and bad

1 Myriautheus, Die Aqvins, pp. 91—104, has a section devoted to the Agvins
as deities of rejuvenescence. The passages examined are, some of them, very
striking. But in tlie attempt to make all the descriptions of renewed vitality
square with the phenomena of returning daylight and sunshine, we have expla-
nations presented which are vitiated by the non-recognition of the antiquity of
the Dioscuri or Agvins as a wide-spread human cult, preceding the identification
of the Brethren with the Twilights or the stars. We do not question that, in
many cases, the language used of the Agvins is best explained by phenomena of
the Day and the Dawn, but even in these cases, there is an earlier and simpler
cult to be recognized, and it is this earlier cult that furnishes the idea of
fertility or of rejuvenescence.

Here are a few sentences from Myriantheus' German translations of the
passages in the Rig-Veda which show the Dioscuri repairing lapsed sexual
functions :

" You, O A(?vins, made young again by your help the aged ^yavana."
" You took from the aged ^yavana his bodily husk like a garment ; you
made him young again, and women again provoked his desire."

" By your help you protected the [aged] Kali, so that he took a wife."
And so on.

2 Cf. the "good Saviour" in Abgar's Letter to Jesus,

IV] SEMITIC AS WELL AS ARYAN. 37

weather to them. In the same way, the Messenians when
worsted in battle attributed their defeat to the hostility of the
Dioscuri, who were their normal and usual protectors. Some
have suggested that, at the battle of the Lake Regillus, the
patronage of Castor and Pollux was a Roman annexation of the
patron saints of Latium, who had thus turned against their
own side, and for some reason become angry with them. A
number of similar cases can be found in Eitrem, Die gottliclien
Zwillinge (p. 5), amongst which notice especially the punishment
of the inhospitable Phormion and the reckless Aristomenes.
It was an honour to entertain the Dioscuri, a disgrace to have
received them ill, which they themselves were prompt to avenge.
The honour of receiving them comes out clearly in Herodotus'
story of one Euphorion who had received the Dioscuri and after
that kept open house for everybody (Ev(f)opL(ovo<i rov he^ajxevov
...TOv<i AioaKoupov; koI diro rovrov ^etvoSoKeovro^ irdrra^
dv6pa)7rov<i). This last instance reminds us of a certain injunc-
tion to hospitality which is given in the New Testament
(Heb. xiii. 1), on the ground that "some have entertained
angels unawares." The reference is no doubt to the hospitality
of Abraham when visited by the three angels ; and, in view of
the parallel furnished by the hospitable Euphorion, we are dis-
posed to ask whether the story of the strangers received by
Abraham may not be understood in the sense of a visit by the
Dioscuri. There is a great deal that invites such an explanation.
Angels do not properly belong to the first period of the Hebrew
legends ; when they do occur, they are the product of later
reflection and may easily be the displacement of earlier forms
of theophany. That the situation is what we call Dioscuric is
a supposition that is invited by a consideration of the prominence
given to the law of hospitality in the visit to Abraham, against
which is set off on the other side the inhospitable character of
the people of Sodom \ There can be no doubt that this is one

1 We learn from Pindar (Nem. 10. 91) that the Dioscuri were entertained in
Argos by one Pamphaos and that ever after the descendants of Pamphaos were
under their protection. From Pindar, also, we learn that the worship of the
Dioscuri in Agrigentum was due to a visit which they paid to that city, when
they, with their sister Helena, were hospitably received by the race of the
Eumenides (Pind. 01. 3. 70). So closely was the honour of the Dioscuri, and

38 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

of the leading motives of the story, and it exactly furnishes the
situation for a visit of the Dioscuri,

In the next place, their visit to Abraham under the theo-
phanic Oak or from it, is with the intention, or at all events has
the consequence, of turning his clock backwards and making
himself and his wife capable of producing offspring. This comes
out suggestively in the Hebrew text, though it has been obscured
by the treatment which the subject has received at the hands of
the editors. We are told that the angels asked after Sarah
(Gen. xviii. 9), and that one of them said : " I will surely return
to thee according to the time of life and Sarah shall have a son."
The Hebrew text of the passage is very obscure. It is commonly
taken to mean that Jahveh said He would pay another visit to
Sarah a year hence : and in this sense a later chapter observes
that the Lord visited Sarah as He had said, and did according
as He had spoken, at the very time promised. But the suggestion
arises in our mind that this is a misunderstanding of a promise
made to Abraham, that the Lord would surely cause to return
to him the time of life, that is, the sexual vigour which he had
lost. For this is what really happened (" His own body being
now dead," as the writer to the Hebrews puts it). And the
text ought to have a frank statement of the miracle that was
going to happen. And this is how the passage was understood
by the Targums ; for Onkelos has combined two explanations,
and tells us that " One of them said, Returning I will return to
thee in the coming year ; and you shall he revived, and behold,
Sarah thy wife shall have a son" ; for which the Jerusalem
Targuni has, " He said. Returning I will return to thee at that
time, to revive you, and behold, Sarah thy wife shall have a male
child." Here, then, we have the explanation of the words about
"the time of life" in Genesis. And the miracle itself is one
which in ancient times would be credited to the A9vins or to
their parallels. So far the situation is clear. As to why, in the
story, there apj^ear to be sometimes two angels and sometimes
three, the discrepancy, with many others in the account of
the incident, may be due to the composite nature of the

the protection wliich they gave, counected with hospitaUties which they had
enjoyed.

IV] SEMITIC AS WELL AS ARYAN. 39

sources of the legend and the rough amalgamation of the
editors. But the difficulty of interpretation would not be
increased if we regard the visit as made by Zeus and the
Dioscuri, or by Jahveh and the Kabiri, or if we simply say it
is a composition of two accounts of a Kabii"ic visit, one of
which had two Kabiri and the other three. It is not neces-
sary to further emphasise the wholly legendary character of
the incident.

When we turn to the destruction of Sodom, we are again
reminded of the Dioscuri, by the saving of Lot and the destruc-
tion of the inhospitable men of Sodom, by the blinding of the
savage mob, and by the final raining of fire and sulphur from
heaven. And it is precisely in such parallels that we are able
to establish that the story of the angel-visit is folk-lore and not
fact. Dr Cheyne has done great service in bringing this out
so clearly in his article on Sodom and Gomorrah in the Encyclo-
pedia Bihlica, although here as elsewhere the critic, who wishes
to make use of his arguments, has to begin by subtracting a
good deal of superimposed Jerahmeel matter. But Dr Gheyne
is surely right when he says that to understand the story in
question, you must begin by the study of the folk-lore parallels.
If we follow his lead through the instances which he selects, we
shall find that he establishes very clearly that the story belongs
to folk-lore. But the sti'ange thing is, that he did not recognize
that some of the parallel matter was Dioscuric and that he had
in his hand the key to the mysterious visit of the angels.
For example, he begins with the story of " the punishment
of the lawless city of Gortyna. The people of this city led
a lawless existence as robbers. The Thebans, being their
neighbours, were afraid, but Amphion and Zethus, the sons of
Zeus and Antiope, fortified Thebes by the magic influence of
Amphion's lyre. Those of Gortyna came to a bad end through
the divine Apollo." Here we have a very close parallel indeed,
the wicked city being destroyed and the just city protected
by the joint influence of Apollo and the Theban Dioscuri. The
parallel to the case of the tlu'ee angels in Genesis is notable ; it
suggests, as we have done above, a conjunction of Jahveh and
two Kabiri,

40 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

When the Dioscuri are treated inhospitably in any house,
their anger descends upon that house, and when they are
insulted by any person, vengeance follows that person. Ac-
cordingly we are told by Pausanias stories concerning the
inhospitable Phormio and the reckless and irreverent Aristo-
menes. Phormio's story is as follows :

" Near it [the sanctuary of Hilaeira and Phoebe] is a house
which the sons of Tyndareus are said to have originally in-
habited ; but afterwards it was acquired by one Phormio, a
Spartan. To him came the Dioscuri in the likeness of strangers.
They said they had come from Cyrene^ and desired to lodge in
his house, and they begged he would let them have the chamber
which they had loved most dearly while they dwelt among men.
He made them free of all the rest of his house ; only that one
chamber he said he would not give, for it was his daughter's
bower, and she was a maiden. On the morrow the maiden and
all her girlish finery had vanished, and in the chamber were
found images of the Dioscuri, and a table with silphium on it.
So runs the tale." (Pausanias, tr. Frazer, iil 16. 2, 3.)

The case of Aristomenes is of a different character. He was
at war with the Spartans, who are under the protection of the
Dioscuri, and he refused to turn back from the rout of his
enemies, when he was informed that the Dioscuri were between
him and them. According to the account they were sitting on
a wild pear-tree, a circumstance which takes us back to the
general identification of the Dioscuri with tree-spirits, who, in
the north at all events, are assessors to the oak-god. And, as
we have said, we can hardly take the oak at Mamre, with its
traditional theophanies, out of the cycle of the sacred oaks, in
which the sky-god or thunder-god manifests himself. So the
pear-tree was a holy pear-tree and parallel to a holy oak.
However, to return to Aristomenes ; he was pursuing his
panic-stricken enemies, when " the seer Theoclus bade him
not to pass it ; for he said that the Dioscuri were sitting on
the tree. But Aristomenes, hurried away by his passion, did
not listen at all to what the seer said, and when he came to the

1 Gyrene was, as the coins with the silphium plant show, a centre of Dio-
scuric worship.

IV] SEMITIC AS WELL AS ARYAN. 41

pear-tree, he lost his shield He recovered his lost shield,

after going to Delphi, and then, as the Pythian priestess bade
him, descending into the shrine of Trophonius at Lebadea.
Afterwards he took the shield to Lebadea, and dedicated it

there After an interval long enough to allow his wound

to heal, he attempted to make an entrance by night into
Sparta itself, but phantoms of Helen and the Dioscuri turned
him back." (Paiisanias, tr. Frazer, iv. 16. 5, 7, 9.) Here we
have a good instance of the way the Dioscuri protect a city that_
is under their care, and punish an individual who disregards the
protection that they afford. And, remembering the reversible
character of the Dioscuri, how they, with equal facility, blast
and bless, we can understand how "just Lot," who entertained
the Dioscuri, was protected by them, and how the city which
insulted his protectors was reduced to ashes. The whole inci-
dent of the visit of the three angels becomes quite lucid, from
this point of view, and would at once be appreciated, if it were
translated into the language of Greek theology.

For further folk-lore parallels to the story of Abraham,
Sarah and Lot (especially such as refer to hospitality shown by
an aged couple, or to the escape of a single righteous man from
a doomed community of wicked men) we may refer to Cheyne's
article. For our own purpose enough has been said ; the
angels in Genesis are the equivalents of the Dioscuri, and, as
we suspected, Dioscurism is just as real a feature of Semitic as
of Greek folk-lore \

Perhaps a remark needs to be made in concluding this
chapter, with reference to the care of the Twins over special
cities, and their converse hatred of cities that, for any reason,
are hostile to them. There is one case in which we have
reduced the evidence which makes the Twins destroyers of
cities. It is well known that the Greek mythologists have a
name for the Dioscuri, who are known as Lapersai, which they
interpret to mean " the ravagers of Las." I have, however,
shown, in Dioscuri and the Christian Legends, that this must

1 We shall show later on that Esau and Jacob are a pair of Dioscuri, and
that there is some reason for regarding certain details, at least, of their story
as unhistorical.

42 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. IV

be a mere piece of word-play ; the name Lapersai has its first
vowel short, and the word should be explained as equivalent to
stone-workers ; i.e. the Twins are viewed as city-builders rather
than city-wreckers. If my view is correct, we have withdrawn
a striking case from the proof of the hostility of the Twins
to cities with which they are offended. But I do not know
that the argument is really affected. There is still evidence
on the point, and what we take away with one hand we give
back with the other, by adding one more proof (if further
proof were necessary) that the Twins preside over the build-
ing of cities.

CHAPTER V.

That the Twins are sometimes female, and that they are
not always thought of as equal and similar.

We now pass on to two new points, one that the Heavenly
Twins in traditional lore are not always male, the other that
they are not always equal and similar.

The first point springs to view as a natural hypothesis, as
soon as we have cleared our minds of the necessary martiality
of the Dioscuri, and have gone further back in history than
the Lake Regiilus and all that corresponds to it. For if the
cult goes back to the perplexities produced in savage minds by
a double or triple birth, there is no reason to limit such
perplexities to the appearance of male children. And further,
if the persistence of the cult is due in great measure to
the influence upon agriculture of the fertile mother of Twins
and the presumably fertile Twins, since this influence will be
not less, but more, in the case of female twins, whose power
over the growth of plants is greater than that of male twins,
it will follow that we ought. to expect not only to find traces
of a belief in Heavenly Twins of the female sex, but that
such belief will be persistent.

So far we are in the region of not unreasonable hypothesis.
Now let us see what can be said in the way of verification.
The simplest way will be to test the Greek mythology for
pairs of women with Dioscuric characteristics, and we may
remember at the same time that the Lithuanian folk-lore
and the Vedic mythology have decided references to the
" daughters of the Sun," the Lettish term being devo duktele
and the Vedic divo duhita. Our first thought will be the case

44 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

of the Leukippides, who are represented as the daughters of a
certain Leukippos and as having become the brides of the
Spartan Dioscuri. The myth occurs in various complications,
and in earlier and later forms. It is complicated by the claim
made to the possession of the Leukippides by the rival
Messenian twins, the Apharidae, Idas and Lynceus. But there
seems no doubt that the earliest traditions represented the
Leukippides as really the brides of Castor and Polydeuces, and
that the fight over them of the Tyndaridae and the Apharidae
is a later attempt to work out the story of contending cults.
The names of the ladies are Hilaeira and Phoebe. They appear
to be twins ; they receive divine honours along with their
husbands, and as late as the second century a.d. we have a
Spartan inscription in honour of a priest of the Leukippides
and Tyndaridae \ The natural explanation of this would seem
to be the displacement of an original cult of female twins by a
pair of male twins. One compares the name of the Leucippides
with the title commonly given to the Theban twins, rtw \euKo-
TTcoXco. And it does not surprise us that, according to Pausanias,
Hilaeira and Phoebe had a sanctuary in Sparta close to the
house which had been the home of the Dioscuri. It means
that in Sparta, where the Twins are so much in evidence, they
were in evidence first in a female form ; and that the female
cult continued side by side with the cult of the male twins,
though, no doubt, with constantly decreasing interest. As
soon as we are able to establish a single case of the kind, a
number of parallel cases present themselves for examination,
and it will be found that there is a complete justification for
the belief in the existence of AioaKopai'^ as well as ^iooKopoi.
A striking example may be produced from the island of Delos ^

^ It must be remembered that Clytemnestra, as well as Helen, was a
daughter of Leda, and here Helen seems to be the immortal, so II. iii. 426, and
Clytemnestra is expressly said to be a daughter of Tyndareus. So perhaps they
may be originally a pair of " Great Sisters."

- This agrees with the custom of the Baronga, of East Africa, who call
their twin children after the sky (Tilo), whether they are male or female. Thus
M. Junod speaks of a girl in his Mission School, who was known as a daughter
of Tilo and had a twin brother, doubtless of a similar name.

^ Eitrem, Die guttlichen ZwilUnge, p. 109.

V]' TWINS SOMETIMES FEMALE. 45

According to Herodotus, the holy gifts of the Hyperboreans
were brought to Delos by two maidens, whose names were
Hyperoche and Laodike. They died in Delos, and their tomb
was the centre of a cult. The young women dedicated their
hair to these maidens at the tomb in question. Now we learn
from Pausanias, that at the time of the Gallic invasion, the
Gauls were routed by two heroes, who raised a storm against
them and turned them to flight. The names of the two heroes,
who appear in battle in the genuine Dioscuric manner, are
Hyperochos and Laodikos. Clearly these are a pair of Dioscuric
twins ; but they are only the masculine presentation of the
two maidens from the north who brought blessings to Delos.
And even in the Gallic struggle itself the maids were not lost
sight of For when the Pythian priestess at Delphi was
appealed to for counsel in the time of danger, she is said to
have replied that she and her White Maidens would look after
the business :

ifiol fxeXriaei ravra koI \€VKai<; Kopat^i.

Here Eitrem suggests, and I think rightly, that not only is
there the reference to the Delian maidens Hyperoche and
Laodike, but that their whiteness is due to the fact that they
are Leukippides, or rather Leukippoi. We are thus led to the
conclusion that the twins in Delos were originally female, and
that they came from the north, with white horses ; but in the
stress of battle of a later day they became displaced by men,
who behaved as the Great Twin Brethren are expected to do
at such times, putting the enemy to flight, and making such
use of the weather as the children of the sky are entitled
to do\

There remains the case of twins, one male and one female,
for which I cannot at present find good mythological parallels.

We now pass on to our second point, viz. that the Heavenly
Twins do not always remain equal and similar. The fact of
their being twins will in this case recede somewhat into the
background, and may conceivably be lost sight of altogether.
It appears that there is a division of labour between the Twins

^ For further cases of the Heavenly Maids we must refer to Eitrem, passim.

46 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH,

in many of their traditional developments. And with the
division of labour there is the underlying assumption of diverse
character, which fits them for various forms of labour. One of
them becomes stronger than the other, and rougher, because he
has rougher work to do. For instance Castor and Polydeuces
divide the work of life between them, Castor doing the chariot-
driving and Polydeuces the hard-hitting \ Naturally the latter
shows traces of his craft in his appearance. He must be the
stronger of the two, as well as the best-battered. More re-
markable still is the case of Amphion and Zethus, the Theban
twins. Here we have one doing mason's work, while the other
plays the flute. But Zethus not only knows how to build, he
is also a hunter, and when he appears in artistic representation,
you will know him by his roughness and by his dog. One
thinks immediately of Esau the rough and Jacob the smooth.
As far as the Scriptural accounts of them go, Esau and Jacob
are merely Amphion and Zethus exaggerated'-. This distinction
of rough and smooth is naturally one that invited the attention
of the artist. It served to distinguish them, and so you have
the Twins recognized by their unlikeness, according as one of
them has hair and the other has not. We actually find this
occurring onthe famous Chest of Cypselus, on which Pausanias
tells us^ that the Dioscuri were, one of them bearded, and the
other of the pair smooth-faced. Hence arises naturally a
traditional diversity of artistic treatment. The result will be
that one of the pair will appear to be older than the other, and
as we said, the idea of their being twins may recede into the
background in artistic representations. In literature the case
will be different, as the Twins do not need to be identified by
observation, and it will commonly suffice to name them. In
the Acts of Thomas, for example, Jesus and Judas Thomas are

^ The Twins of Elis are called Moliones, and are the children of Aktor.
These twins are represented by Homer as fighting from one chariot, one of the
pair wielding the lash, and the other, I suppose, doing the fighting. Of these
twins Aktor is the human father, Poseidon the divine. They drive white
horses. II. xi. 709, 750.

2 We shall refer to this point again when we come to the discovery of the
relics of certain famous saints ; see p. 89.

^ Pausanias v. 19. 2.

V] TWINS NOT ALWAYS SIMILAR. 47

SO exactly alike that every one mistakes them for one another,
and it was from this peculiarity, with others, that we were able
to deduce the fact of their being, to the author of the Acts, a
pair of twins.

The same attempt at division of labour and definition of
the brethren will, however, be found all over the field of
Dioscurism\ Thus the Messenian Twins, the Apharidae, allot
the hardest of their conflicts to Idas, who is the stronger of
the two, just as Polydeuces does the boxing, when the Argo-
nauts land in the country of the Bebryces. In the same way
there is a difference between Picumnus and Pilumnus, the
latter being the more warlike of the two-: he has a club, in
the shape of a pestle, with which he wards off evil influences
from new-born babes, while his brother is entertained in the
house where the birth occurs, and has a special couch set in
his honour. In the same way Iphikles^ appears as a mere
weakling by the side of his twin brother, and runs away from
the snakes that Herakles strangles.

It is possible that a similar explanation may have to be
made for the two Prussian gods, PatoUo and Potrimpo, who are
the assessors of the thunder-god Perkuno. That Perkuno is a
god of thunder and a god of the oak seems clear from his name.
This is explained as the Lithuanian equivalent of " thunder,"
which in the form Perkunas is still used in folk-songs^, but the
etymological connexion with the Latin quercus and with the
Hercynian forest makes it certain that it has something to do
with the oak. And this being the case the two deities Patollo
and Potrimpo are the assessors of the thunder-god who dwelt
in the oak. By their names we should suspect them to be

1 One easy way of artistically distinguishing them is to give one a white
horse, and the other a black one. Or it can be done by the colour of their caps.

2 He is credited by Virgil with the ownership of white horses, which had
been given him by Orithyia (see Aen. xii. 83).

' The divine origin of Herakles, as against Iphikles, is, of course, shown in
this way. Milton has this iu his mind when in the Hymn on the Nativity he
says,

" Our babe, to show his Godhead true,
Can in his swaddling-bands control the damned crew."
■* Chadwick, The Oak and the Thunder-God, p. 26.

48 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

twins, and this supposition fits in very well with what we
already know of the Twins as liberating the imprisoned or
darkened Sun by means of the hammer [? of Thor\]. Against
this, however, stands the objection that one of the pair is said
to be old, and the other young. Accordingly, Mr Chadwick,
who has carefully investigated the subject of the worship of
the thunder-god, doubts^ whether the theory of Twins can be
applied to Patollo and Potrimpo, and suspects that we have
rather a case of a triad of Northern deities, one of whom,
Patollo, the older one of the pair whom we have coupled to-
gether, is a god of the underworld, while the other, Potrimpo,
is the god of agriculture ; between these stands Perkuno, the
thunder-god, who is said to be of middle-age, and who may be
equated with Tlior.

I mention this case, not so much with the object of pro-
posing a counter theory to Mr Chadwick, as to state that if it
should turn out that the triad of Prussian gods reduces to the
thunder-god plus the Dioscuri, then the explanation of the
inequality of the ages of the two similarly named deities would
have to be sought in the direction of differentiation of function,
as explained above, which makes the twinness of the deities to
recede somewhat into the background. Before leaving this
point, it will be of some importance to us in the discussion of
certain identifications of the ancient Twins with later saints, to
have in our minds the evidence on which this Prussian theology
is established. A few sentences from Mr Chadwick's paper on
" The Oak aiid the Thunder-God " will put the matter in a
clear light. He remarks as follows':

" The evidence for the cult of the thunder-god amongst the
ancient Prussians is much more extensive, but unfortunately it
is late and not free from suspicion. Grunau^ gives the god's

' For Perkuno certainly answers to Tbor.

^ As be tells me in a private communication.

3 I.e. p. 26.

■* The reference is to Grunau, Preussische Chronik (ed. Perlbach, i. 62).
" Der gottliin woren 3, Patollo, Patrimpo, Perkuno, die stunden in einer eicben,
dy 6 elen dicke war. Diese eicbe und die wonen des crywen adir kyrwaidens
mit alien seinen waidolotteu, das woren priester, sie nannten Eickoyto. "

Tbe statement that Potrimpo was young and gladsome (a god of harvest)

Vj TWINS NOT ALWAYS SIMILAR, 49

name as Perkuno, and says that together with the gods Patollo
and Potrimpo he was believed to inhabit the sacred oak at
Romovo. He was supposed to commune with the priests there
in thunderstorms. In this way the fundamental laws of the
nation were believed to have been imparted by him. In his
honour a perpetual fire was kept burning under the oak. The
priest who allowed this to die out was condemned to death...
At the present time it is customary to regard the authorities
for the ancient Prussian religion, especially Grunau, with the
greatest scepticism. Some writers have even gone so far as to
doubt the existence of a god Perkuno. This, however, is cer-
tainly unjustifiable. What especially makes for the credibility
of Grunau's account in the main, distorted and embellished as
it is without doubt, is the fact that there is scarcely one of the
religious observances mentioned by him for which a parallel
cannot be found in some other European people, generally at
a very early period of history. In many cases these foreign
customs cannot have been known to Grunau."

We have now said enough to establish the points which we
reserved for the present chapter, viz., that Heavenly Tiuins may
he found in both sexes'^, and that they do not ahvays develop in
an equal and similar mannei\

and Patollo aged and death-like, comes from Grunau (i. 77), where the descrip-
tion is given of the banner of King Witowodi, on which the three gods were
depicted. See also (i. 94, 95) where it is expressly stated that Patollo is a god
of the dead. Much doubt has been thrown on this pictured banner of King
Witowodi.

^ I have not discussed the case of twins of opposite sexes, but we should
keep this in mind, in case it may be necessary in the explanation of some
features in the growth of the Dioscuric mythology. For an actual case of a
Dioscuric boy and girl, we have referred to M. -Junod [Lex Ba-ronga, p. 412),
who tells us that in the Mission School at Lorenzo Marques there was a
charming young girl whose name was Nirnnawatelo, that is to s.iy, daughter
of the sky, because she had a twin brother.

CHAPTER VI.

That the Tiuins are regarded as possessing gifts of healing, and
that there are two directions in vjhich this belief lias been
especially developed.

It is well known that the Dioscuri have been credited with
powers of healing^ some of which are what may be called
miraculous, and some of them more ordinary, and on the
road, at all events, to what we now call medicine. Their
general description as " good saviours " included the practice
of medicine. Under the head of miraculous healings and
hurtings we have a number of cases which appear to be
arrived at by regarding the Twins as children of the sky,
a belief to which allusion has been made in previous pages.
For example, as soon as they have come to be regarded as
^(t)a(j)6pot, (or at least one of them has been so regarded), it
is not surprising that they should be credited with the power
not only of bringing light to the daily reillumined world,
but also of bringing light to those amongst mortals who may
especially be said to " sit in darkness." The first mission
of the Dioscuri in miracle is to restore sight to the blind.
Coupled with this is the blinding of those whom they wish to
hurt. Accordingly we find in the Rig-Veda that the A^vins
are constantly being celebrated, not only on account of their

1 Thus Sauchoniathon (Euseb. Praep. Ev. r. 10) speaks of their medical
powers side by side with their naval skill, and makes them related to Asklepios:
ovToi, <pr]al, Trpwrot wXolov evpov iK tovtuv yeySvaaiv erepoL [?1. iarpol], of ku
pOTdfas evpov, koX Trjv tGjv daKfrQv {a(Tiv nal eVt^Sdt.

CH. VI] TWINS ARE HEALERS. 51

connexion with the rising and setting sun, but also for notable
acts of healing performed upon blind people. Myriantheus, in
his treatise Die Agvins, points out this miracle as the leading
one in the record of the Dioscuri. For him the Dioscuri stand
for the twilight, which is intermediate between the light and
the darkness, and which, if personified, can be said to set free
the Sun from the devouring Wolf of the night. The argument
is not affected if we replace the twilight of Myriantheus by the
twin-light of the morning and evening star. "By their nature
the A(,'vins are closely related both to the Light and the Dark-
ness ; they are able to mediate between them and so to liberate
the gods of light from the demons of the dark." And Myriantheus
thinks he has found the simple explanation of the peculiar
characteristics of the Dioscuri in their intermediate position
between Light and Dark, which enables them to restore to the
Sun the light which he lost at his previous setting. And he
continues' with the observation that we have the same pictorial
view of the A^vins in the restoration to sight which they accom-
plish for various mythical beings, who for the most part appear
to be aged and blind Rishis. Then he gives a string of illus-
trations from the Rig-Veda, for which we may refer directly to
his pamphlet. It may be admitted that the miracles referred
to are very natural pendants to the daily part which the Dio-
scuri play in the conflict between light and darkness. It must,
however, be remembered that it follows from the duality of the
character of the Twins, in which benevolence is the recto and
maleficence the verso, that they can as readily produce blindness
as remove it ; it only depends on the point from which we start,
the Evening Star or the Morning Star. Of the two, it may be
regarded as natural that the Morning Star should be considered
to be the greater benefactor^ and that the power of removing
blindness will take precedence of the power of causing it ; and
at the same time we must be prepared to recognize both causes
at work, and to see the reflection of either form of activity in

1 I. c. p. 82.

^ Accordingly, in the Apocalypse, Jesus is described as the " bright and
morning star."

4—2

52 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

the legends that have grown out of the primitive myth. For
example, it is quite natural and appropriate that one of the forms
of the judgment of Sodom at the hands of the Angels is that
the wicked and inhospitable people were smitten with blindness.
It is equally natural that when Ambrose had discovered and
canonised the Dioscuri in Milan, the associated portent which
justified his discovery and drove the Arians backward was the
restoration of sight to the butcher Severus, who may have
been behind the scenes in the preparation of the bloody relics
which Ambrose unearthed.

Now this form of medicine, what we may call medicine by
miracle, is of necessity abnormal and occasional. It does not
furnish a basis of sufficient area to the claim of the Dioscuri to
be regarded as the physicians of every-day life. And as it is
certain that they were so regarded, we must search for some
other line of development by which the primitive cult of a pair
of Twins could lead them to the patronage and practice of the
healing art. We shall show that they do occupy such a position,
by a natural and easy process of thought.

The medical men of antiquity counted amongst their number
one famous leech whose name was Dioscorides ; the patronymic
is the appropriate badge of all their tribe. Bat how did this
ascription of medical powers arise ? The answer, I think, lies
in the following direction.

Just as religion appears to be evolved out of magic (from
which it seldom succeeds in wholly disentangling itself) so
medicine has its origin in mantic practices, and the first
medicine men must be credited with mantic powers. And if
we are to explain the Twins as physicians, we must go back to
the Twins as prophets. Their mantic powers are the result
of their connexion with their father the sky-god or thunder-
god. The Zeus of the whispering oak at Dodona is no isolated
phenomenon, but a type of what the tree-god was expected
to be. The same thing took place at the old Baltic sanctuary
of Romovo, where the priests received communications from
Perkuno, who dwelt in the oak, accompanied by a pair of lesser
deities, whose names, at all events, are Dioscuric. But even if
the pair of gods at Romovo should turn out not to be twins ,

Vl] TWINS ARK HEALERS. 53

the connexion of the Dioscuri with holy trees can easily be
made out on their own account\ and, in that case, they would
develop a mantic of their own.

Now, of the existence of the mantic element in early
medicine there is not the least doubt; it developed into peculiai
forms of question addressed to the deity, of which, perhaps, the
most interesting is oracle by incubation, where the worshipper
sleeps in the temple of Aesculapius or some kindred deity and
obtains from him a counsel as to the right method of accomplish-
ing his cure. But the proof of the mantic element in the
Dioscuri is not so immediately obvious. One comes across
traces of ordinary mantic, as in the papyrus recently published
by Grenfell and Hunt from Bacchias in the Fayvim^, but for
medical mantic, perhaps the simplest and readiest demonstra-
tion will be the observation that whe n the w orship^f_the
Dioscuri in Constantinople was displaced (as we shall presently
see) by the cult of Cosmas and Damian, the Greek medical
_saints, the mantic elements of the former ritual passed over into
the practice of the Christian people^ the only change that was
necessary bein g the cha nge of nam es from Cast or and Poly-
deuces to Cosmas and Damian. This is brought out very clearly
in the Acts of the latter saints ; it happened on a certain
occasion that some Greeks, either very sceptical or very con-
servative, came to incubate in the church of Cosmas and
Damian, as if it were the temple of the Dioscuri. The hayio-
grapher records what happened with a charming naivete. He
tells us, as we shall see presently, that the saints appeared to
the incubators, and reproached them with their ungodly conduct
in addressing appeals to them as though they were the Dioscuri.
" We give you to understand," they said, " that we are Cosmas
and Damian." No better evidence could be wished for the
continuance of the cult and for the manner of its mantic

1 Even Helena shows the same feature and was honoured as Aev8p?Tis. In '^
the fight with the Apharidae (when Castor gets killed) the Spartan twins were
hiding in a hollow oak. When they were protecting Sparta against Aristomenes,
they sat on a wild pear-tree, &c. U^ (•

- Fayiim Papyri, no. 138, "0 lords Dioscuri, is it fated for him to depart to _
the city? " &c.

54 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. VI

medicine. We may say, without any hesitation, that ^he church
of SS. Cosmas and Damian in Constantinople is the original
temple of the Dioscuri, and that the same means were used for
obtaining prescriptions under the new religion as under the old.
Mantic survived as medicine, and under the same patronage as
formerly. The proof is complete, and is typical of much that
went on in the Christianity of the time.

It appears, then, that the apparent discordance between
the two chief occupations of the Dioscuri, the medical and the
military professions, is not a real discrepancy. The Dioscuri
were both soldiers and doctors, and so were the saints that dis-
placed them. But their medical character is more strongly
marked than the other. They become known as the " good
physicians " as well as the " good saviours." By one of these
titles (it is not quite clear which) Abgar addresses our Lord in
his letter ; either of the alternative readings is Dioscuric. In
the same way the saints at Milan, who began their successful
career by giving sight to a blind man, were known as "boni
medici." We will give the authority for this description of
Protase and Gervase a little later.

CHAPTEK VII.

That the Tivins are the Guardians of Truthfulness, and that
they are appealed to hy those tuho make contracts and take
oaths.

In the previous chapter we suggested that the fact that the
Dioscuri were everywhere credited with medical powers would
probably be explained by a proof that their medicine was
largely a survival of the mantic art, and that the mantic
elements (incubation and the like) were still prominent when
the Brethren ceased to be a pair of benevolent heroes and
became a pair of conventional Christian saints.

It might seem, however, to be more difficult to trace out
the reasons which make the Twins the guardians of public
faith. Amongst all their varied powers and attributes I do not
know one which at first puzzled me more. It was clear fr om
the Roman adjurations that Castor and Pollux were commonly^
appealed to in asseverations and in contracts, and that tha same
thing is evident from the Greek literature. Moreover we
showed in the tract Dioscuri in the Christian Legends, that
when Castor and Polydeuces were replaced in the East (as at
Melitene) by Nearchus and Polyeuctes, that the latter almost
immediately acquired a world-wide renown as a saint to swear
by and as one who was able to avenge a perjury. But how is
one to make the connexion between the modern man who
swears by Gemini and those early forms of the cult which we
have brought to light ? The solution, however, of this riddle is
not so very difficult.

It does not belong to the first period of the cult, but to the

56 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

time wlien the Twins have been recognized as children of the
sky, and have become associated with the sky -god, or thunder-
god, or sun-god as his assessors. And it is because of this
connexion that they become the guardians of public truth.
Men swore by God and S. Polioctus because they had sworn by
Jupiter and the Twins, and they swore by Jupiter because,
being a sky-god, he was able to see everything that went on ;
and the Twins, being assessors of the sky-god, shared his
knowledge : and in the case before us there is no doubt about
the saint's ancestry : Polyeuctes certainly goes back to Poly-
deuces, and the oath by the one goes back to the oath by the
other, and it is Pollux that is connected closely with Zeus, and
therefore proper to appeal to.

We must then think of a time when the cult of the Twins
has reached the stage where the Brethi'en are honoured with
their sire, the sky-god or thunder-god.

The proof that this is the correct explanation comes from
an unexpected quarter. We shall have to point out presently
the presence, and we may add, the prominenc e of the Tw ins on
the monuments of Mithra. They appear as a pair of children
Qr-_yovjng__men^^carrying torc hes. One of the^j[)air holds his
torch up, and the other holds hjs torch down, in harmony with
the common idea of the Twins as being a pair of opposites.
M. Cumont, who describes them carefully, calls them merely
Torch-bearers {SaSocpopoL), and gives their names as Cautes
and Cautopates, but without observing^ (what the names them-
selves might have suggested) that they are a pair of Heavenly
Twins, and that they are associated with the sky-god Mithra,
just as the Prussian Twinsjjf they are Twins) with Perkuno,
or the Greek Twins with Zeus, or the Twins of S.E. Africa
with Tilo. Now when we examine the powers that are ascribed
to Mithra, we shall find that one of his greatest functions is
the guardianship of truth and the avenging of perjury. We
will allow M. Cumont to explain this point to us. He is
referring to statements made by Xenophon with regard to
the Persian religion.

1 It would be more correct to say that he did make the suggestion, but
abandoned it.

VIl] TWINS GUARD TRUTH. 57

"Tout ce qu'oii pent tirer de Xenophoi], c'ust (|ue les nobles
perses avaient coiitume de prendre Mithra a temoin de la
verite de leurs paroles. Cette particularity, qui est confirmee
par d'autres temoignages, notamment par une anecdote rap-
portee a meme temps par Plutarque et Elien, sans doute
d'apres Dinon, est done a peu pres la seule donnee certaine
dont nous soyons redevables a la litterature prdalexandrine."
Monuments relati/s mi culte de Mithra, i. 22.

Here then we see that what one really swears by is the
sky-god, in the East by Mithra, in the West by Zeus or the
Trai'eTroTTTT]'; "HXio?. But in any case, the Twins are assessors
of the sky-god, whether he be Zeus or Mithra, and share his
knowledge and care for men, and it is therefore easy and
natural to call them to witness one's truthfulness and one's
fidelity ; apart from the fact that they are the children of the
sky, it is difficult to see how they could ever have acquired
such prominence in the defence of truth and the avenging of
perjury. It is interesting to remember that this is the reason
why oaths and adjurations are made in the open air. Thus
they swore in Rome by Deus Fidius under the impluvium of
the house^; and Plutarch in his Qaestiones Romanae (Qu. 28)
tells us that adjurations by Hercules and Dionysos (Liber
Pater) were made in the same way. For a similar reason
in the Gospel Pilate judges the Lord in tlie open air; and
according to the Acts of Pilate washes his hands before the
Sun. The Twins were far-seeing like their sire. This is espe-
cially noticeable in the Messenian Twins, Idas and Lynceus.

A more difficult problem is to determine why the custom
prevailed, at certain times and in certain places, of regarding
the oath by the Twins as peculiarly an oath proper to women.

' See Nonius, p. 494, 30.

CHAPTER VIII.

TJuit, in the earliest civilizatiun, one name coinmonly serves
for twins, a custom which soon requires modification.

We have already alluded to some West African peculiari-
ties in the naming of twins.

The clearest evidence that the children of a multiple birtli
were often given the very same name will appear (i) from the
historical and traditional references to cases where more than
one of a family possesses the same name ; (ii) from the existence
of slight modifications in a common primitive name, which
have clearly been introduced for the purpose of making a
distinction between the persons involved.

The traces of this custom of the common name of twins are
found in the Teutonic mythology : for example, Saxo Gram-
maticus tells us (Bk. v. 122) that:

" Westmar had twelve sons, three of whom had the same
name, Grep, in common. These three were conceived at once,
and delivered at one birth and their common name declares
their simidtaneous origin." It need hardly be pointed out, that
Saxo's statement applies with equal force to cases where there
has been a differentiation of a primitive name. For example,
when we are told in the Heimskringla, Haraldsaga (c. 18), that
" Harald and Asa had the following sons : Guthorn was the
eldest, Halfdan the Black, Halfdan the White (these were
twins)," we have the common name Halfdan supplemented by
the differentiation of the colour, and we could have guessed
them to be twins, without the definite statement of the author.

CH. VIIl] TWINS HAVE ONE NAME. 59

A similar instance will be found in Bede's Ecclesiiistical
History'^, where there is a ease of two Irish presbyters who go
to the land of the old Saxons, for the purpose of preaching the
Gospel of Christ. They were " one in name as they were in
devotion, for each of them was called Heuuald, but with this
distinction taken from the colour of their hair, that one was
called Heuuald the Black, the other Heuuald the White," As
their parents presumably did not know they were to have a
common devotion they must have given the name for another
reason. Comparing this case with the previous one, it is
legitimate to infer that the Irish priests were twin brethren.

The importance of these considerations will be evident ; for
there is a multitude of cases where gods, heroes, demi-gods, and
saints have common names, or names only slightly varied from
a common base. One has only to think of Cautes and Cauto-
pates in the Mithra cult, of Romus- and Remus, of Picumnus
and Pilumnus, ami a host of companion saints and martyrs of
the Church, to whom we shall presently allude, to see the
importance of the consideration to which the Teutonic cases
lead us. We shall have, for example, to discuss Acius and
Aceolus ; Can tins, Cantianus and Cantianella ; Ferrutius and
Ferrutio ; and a host of similar cases. And if we should find
that the hagiologist, in describing a martyrdom, says that two
persons were worthily endowed with similar names in view of
the common glory which they were to attain, we shall readily
annotate the passage with the remark that the reason for their
similarity of name may lie nearer to their birth than their
martyrdom.

For example, in a case just alluded to, that of Cantius,
Cantianus and Cantianella, the martyr-saints of Vicenza, a
sermon preached over them begins with the statement:

" Quam bene et iucunde tres martyres uno paene vocabulo
nuncupantur. Nee mirum si .similes sunt nomine, qui sunt

1 H. E. Angl. c. x.

- I take the liberty of writing the name in tliis form, which I have else-
where assumed to underlie the conventioual one. It is interesting to notice
that John Malalas the chronograj^her writes the name in this way. (See
Chron. Bk. vii. init. et passim.) Cf. the story of Xenagoras, that Eome was
founded by Eomus, a son of Ulysses and Circe. Dion. Hal. i. 72.

60 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

similes passione." They obtained the common name with the
view of suffering together !

One is inclined to suspect that the person who preached
the sermon and made the explanation of the names may have
known the real reason for the propinquity and similarity of the
names. But of this more anon.

Amongst savage tribes in West Africa, as we have already
pointed out, Ave find a tendency to fix the names of twins, but
apparently to distinguish one of the pair from the other.
According to Dr Nassau ^•

" Names of twins are always the same, in the same cognate
tribes. In Benga they are always Ivaha (a wish) and Ayenwe
(unseen). These names are given irrespective of sex... Among
the Egbas the first-born is Taiwo, i.e. ' the first to taste the
world,' and the other Kehende, i.e. ' the one who comes last.' "
I have suggested above that some such nomenclature may
explain the name Jacob. The Scripture itself suggests that
the by-form Edom for Esau is a case of colour differentiation-.

Sometimes, as amongst the Yorubas, the twins are named
after a totem god, or are simply called, as the god is, by the
name Ibeji, which means twins. Here we have a deity, whose
name suggests that at an early stage some twins had become
objects of worship ; and the same thing is suggested by the
name of the deity Hoho who, amongst the Ewe-speaking tribes,
presides over twins. On the other hand it must be admitted
that the evidence for any belief amongst the West Africans in
spirit parentage is very slight^.

We may perhaps group the names given to twins something
as follows :

(a) The same name given to both.
(h) A fixed name given to each.

^ Fetichism in West Africa, p. 206.

- In this connexion we may remember how Domitius Ahenobarbus had the
colour of his beard changed by the Dioscuri. See Suetonius, Nero, 1.

3 Dr Nassau (p. 207) quotes a West African j^aper as saying that "twins are
worshipped every month," a very important statement in view of a conjecture
which I made to the same effect in Dioscuri in the Christian Legends. And it
is also said that there is a temple near Lagos, where twins are worshipped
(Ellis, Yoniha, p. 81), but on these points we need some further information.

VIIl] TWINS HAVE ONE NAME. 61

(d) The same name plus a differentiating suffix.

(e) Varying names plus the same suffix or names that

rhyme.

(f) Varying names expressing the same idea.

Under (a) would come the early Teutonic names;

under (b) certain West African appellations ;

under (c) Teutonic cases like Halfdan the Black or White ;

under (d) such cases as Ferrutius and Ferrutio in the

Calendar; or Cautes and Cautopates in mythology;
under (e) cases like Iphikles and Herakles, or Protasius

and Gervasius ; or Floras and Lauras ;
under (/) cases like Idas and Lynceus in mythology ; or

Felix and Fortunatus in the Calendar.

But besides all these varieties there is evidence for a wide-
spread practice of not giving a specific name at all, but simply
speaking of them as the Great Twin Brethren, the Divine ^'
Brethren, the Twins, the Great Ones, &c. Such a custom con-
tinued late, and it must also have prevailed early ; for if it had
not done so, there would have been more likeness in the names
that prevailed in the Greek cities, many of which must owe
their cult to a common origin, as well as in the names of
martyred twins in cities not very remote from one another.

Before leaving this question of the right way to name twins,
we may allude to a point which Dr Frazer has recently recalled,
as to the relation of the Irish saint Bridget, to the sacred fire, -
and the holy oak. It is well known that Bridget is an ancient
fire-goddess, whose fire was guarded by a band of priestesses,
said to be nineteen in number, who take turns to watch the
sacred flame from day to day, leaving the twentieth day to
Bridget herself This ritual was kept up in Kildare till the
Reformation ; the name of Kildare shows that there was also a
holy oak in connexion with St Bridget's shrine. But Dr Frazer
points out^ that Bridget had two sisters, named like herself; -
" Brigit was a goddess of poetry and wisdom, and she had two
sisters, also called Brigit, who presided over leechcraft and

1 Early History of the Kingship, p. 223,

62 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. VIII

smithcraft respectively. This appears to be only another way
of saying that Brigit was the patroness of bards, physicians
and smiths." But there is no need to erase the other two
sisters ; the three are parallel to the tergemini named Grep at
the beginning of this chapter. And their care over the three
arts is exactly like the case of Jabal, Jubal and Tubal in the
book of Genesis. The proper parallel in extra-biblical circles
would be the case of the three Cabiri, who are known to care
for medicine, from their connexion with Asklepios, and for
smith's work, from being traditionally the children of Hephaestos.
The Brigits, then, are a triad ; probably a triad honoured
amongst the Brigantes, and closely related to Berecynthia. It
may be further noted, in passing, that it is reasonably certain
that the division of labour amongst Brigit's Vestals means a
division of the month, and therefore the number nineteen is
wrong, and must be corrected to nine, so that the month is
divided into three parts with every tenth day sacred to Brigit.
The nuns can then be counted on the fingers ; we have some-
thing like it in the case of the Corybantes who are known as
Daktyli, who are also the patrons of smiths and bards.

CHAPTER IX.

That the Calendar of the Christian Church is full of names of
saints and martyrs who have displaced the Great Tiuin
Brethren, and succeeded to their cult, tuith a proof of the
statement from some of the French Churches.

In the Dioscuri in the Christian Legends we started our
investigation from an observed assonance in the sound of the
names given to a pair of frequently occurring saints, viz., Florus
and Laurus ; and we were able to show that they were a pair of
Dioscuri, and that their Acts were tinged with Dioscuric tradi-
tions. And from this observation we were led on step by step
to the recognition of many more traces of the cult to which
Florus and Laurus succeeded. It is not necessary to follow the
same order ; we will take a definite country and establish the
same conclusion for the Churches of ancient Gaul by identifying
pairs of twin saints in many of the leading cities. In doing this
we shall have to lay down some rough rules for our guidance,
so as to avoid hasty conclusions and too rapid generalisations.
Before proceeding to this demonstration, it is interesting to
remark that one residual difficulty in the case of Florus and
Laurus has disappeared upon a closer enquiry : I mean the
difficulty as to the naming of two saints of the Eastern Church,
who profess to be of Byzantine origin, and who are popular
to-day wherever the Greek Church is in power, by names that
are Latin in form and in sound.

Those who have read Dr Burn's recent edition of the works
of Niceta of Remesiana will recognize at once that the province
from which Florus and Laurus came, and the town which is the
oricrin and centre of their cult, are not under the rule of the
Eastern Empire, nor attached to the Greek Church in the first

C4 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

instance. The province of Dardania and the city of Ulpiana*,
to which the Acta Sanctorum refer the saints in question,
present the same ecclesiastical features as Remesiana, the home
of Niceta. They pass from Western rule to Eastern rule, both
imperially and ecclesiastically, in the year 379, when " Gratian
entrusted to Theodosius the Empire of the East, and handed
over to him the Illyrian dioceses of Macedonia and Dacia."
(Burn, p. xlvi.) The fact is that the whole of this region is full
of remains of Latin Christianity, so that any difficulty which
might have been felt with regard to the Latinity of the names
of Florus and Laurus has disappeared-.

It is interesting, in passing, to observe that Dr Burn has
given many hints that the soil of the province was a favourable
one for the maintaining of old cults or the establishing of new
ones. Thus he quotes Gennadius as a witness for the com-
position of a book by Niceta of Remesiana, in which he relates
that a certain Melodius, father of a family, on account of his
liberality, and Gadarius, a peasant, on account of his bravery,
were placed by the heathen amongst the gods. One would like
to know some more about these people. Did they become
saints as well as deities ? And if deities, to what special
company were they affiliated ? Dr Burn speaks also (p. xxxii)
of the crude hero worship of the more ignorant villagers, and
of the difficulty the Christian bishops must have had to conquer
it. Perhaps they did not try very hard, but took the simpler
way of annexing and baptizing their enemies.

But now to return to the Calendar generally. Anyone who
will approach the Calendars of the great Churches with an open
and unprejudiced mind will be struck at once by the uncanny
appearance of a large number of the names entered. He will
find a rich collection of queer pairs and triads of names, such
as it is very hard to believe ever existed in ordinary life,
and which occur with a frequency far beyond that of ordinary

1 See Dr Burn's map of the district.

' Suetonius ( Vesi). 22) tells a story that a certain courtier named Florus
corrected Vespasian for saying plostrum instead of plaustnwi ; upon which
Vespasian retaliated next day by calling him Flaurus. The story may justify
litei-ally our statement that the names Florus and Laurus rhyme.

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 65

life, supposing them to be real and possible. He will find, for
instance, such saints as

Inna, Pinna and Rinima,
or Speusippus, Mesippus and Elasippus,
or Menodora, Metrodora, Nymphodora,
and will be obliged to ask why they had these assonant names,
and who they were that they should be thus grouped together.

The twin-like or triple names of which we have been
speaking above will be found all over the Index Sanctorum, and
unless we could assume that twins have a predilection for
sanctity the phenomenon is a perplexing one. Their frequency
outruns ordinary statistical expectation, their variety and dif-
fusion are surprising. The only reason why nothing has been
said on these peculiarities before the present time lies in the
fact that few people read the Acta Sanctorum, even in the
indices, and of those few the major part are blinded by traditional
beliefs. However, the fact remains, and a superficial reader can
verify it, that the Calendar is full of all the features that we
have enumerated above in the naming of twins, and we can only
draw the conclusion that a great number of twins have been
raised (ecclesiastically) to the peerage. We must be careful,
as I have said, not to make hasty identifications. It is, for
example, quite possible that my Bollandist friends have con-
victed me of a too rapid conclusion with regard to the Egyptian
martyr Dioscorus, and he may be a real person and a genuine
saint after alP. But really there are so many similar cases that
one less or more makes little difference to the thesis which we
propound as to the fundamental paganism of the Calendar.

Suppose now we restrict ourselves from the general enquiry,
and, as suggested above, try to get some idea as to the extent
to which twin names, and, presumably, twin heroes or demi-
gods who had the names, prevailed in the Calendar of the
French Church. The points to enquire into are :

(1) Twin-like features in the names.

(2) Statements in the Acta that they were brothers
or sisters, gemini or germani, and the like.

1 It certainly seems that I was misled in calling the prefect who condemned
him by the name of Lucianus, when the mss. show his name to have been
Culcianuri, and in drawing a mythological conclusion from the name.

H. 5

6G THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

(3) Dioscuric touches in the experiences of the
saints or in their miracles.

(4) Allusions to them as luminaries of the heaven or
in particular as related to the morning or the evening
star.

Here are some suggestive pairs from the patrons of French
churches :

Acius and Aceolus (modern names S. Ach and

S. Acheul).
Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianella.
Donatianus and Rogatianus.
Crispin and Crispinian.
Ferreolus and Ferrutius.
Speusippus, Mesippus, Elasippus.
Protasius and Gervasius.
Vitalis and Agricola,

&c., &c.

It will be seen that they cover a wide area: Acius and
Aceolus are honoured at Amiens ; Cantius and his company at
Etampes and Soissons : Donatian and Rogatian at Nantes ;
Crispin and Crispinian at Soissons ; Ferreolus and Ferrutius
at Besan9on ; the Tergemini at Langres ; Protase and Gervase
at Tours; Vitalis and Agricola in Auvergne. Several of the
pairs or triads are importations from Italy or the East ; thus
the Tergemini (Speusippus and his company) belong properly to
Cappadocia, from whence their cult has spread westward. But
this diffusion has its motive, not only in the worship of the
place from which they start, but in that of the places to which
they come. The triad were, no doubt, welcomed in Langres
because they were wanted there. In the same way, Protasius
and Gervasius are properly the saints of Milan, but their relics
were scattered over a wide area, and when S. Ambrose's friends
secured from him some memorials of the sanctities which he had
unearthed, it is not unreasonable to assume that, in some cases,
they also had, like Ambrose, twins of their own to convert.
The same thing may be said of Vitalis and Agricola, who
belong properly to Bologna ; of them we may have something

TX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 67

to say later on. Can tins, Cantianns, and Cantianella belong
originally to Aquileia, but they appear to have had a warm
welcome in France, and the reason can easily be imagined.

But now let us examine some of these pairs more closely.
It will be admitted that, in the main, the names suggest
Dioscurism. For the triads we need not hesitate ; the mention
of the horses in the case of the Tergeraini, and their chariots
as described in the Acta, together with the agreement in the
names and certain other mythological traits in their kinship,
render it quite certain that we are dealing with a Dioscuric or
Kabiric triad. And, as we have said, it is reasonably certain
that such a triad at Langres would not have become an
established cult if it had not been that something of the kind
was already in existence there. Langres is, therefore, what we
may call a Dioscuric centre.

As to Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianella, the parallelism
of these with Castor and Pollux and Helen strikes the mind just
as forcibly as the assonance of the names does the ear. The fact
that they come from Italy does not seriously weaken the claim
to Dioscuric honour of the place where their relics are found.
We cannot be as sure, say, of Soissons as of Aquileia; but, in
any case, Soissons is one of the heirs to Aquileia, and that takes
us some way towards Dioscurism in the French town.

But perhaps we had better examine some of these names
more in detail.

For S. Acius and S. Aceolus I can find no acts of martyrdom.
They are celebrated on May 1, and S. Salvius, Bishop of Amiens,
is credited with having buried them. Their remains were taken
from Amiens to S. Quentin and Abbeville. In the absence of
any Acta, we draw our conclusion from the similarity of the
names.

For Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianella it may be further
said that they are definitely two brothers and a sister: the
Acta Sanctorum do not say straight out that they are twins :
we have already referred to the sermon in their honour by
Ps. Ambrose (whom Baronius affirms to be Maximus), in which
the similarity of their names is explained by the common glory
of their martyrdom ! The martyrdom is said to have taken

5—2

68 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

place in Aquileia. The saints ride out of the city in a mule-
cart, to avoid persecution, and one of the mules stumbles at the
spot where the blessed Chrysogonus had been martyred. The
martyrologist makes great capital out of this mule-carriage,
comparing it with Elijah's chariot of fire. After their martyr-
dom the relics are taken to Aquileia, Milan, Etampes, and
Hildesheim in Saxony. Apparently Soissons also had a share in
them. From a poem of Fortunatus on the life of S. Martin, we
can gather the esteem in which they were held :

" Aut Aquileiensem si forte accesseris urbem,
Cantianos Domini iiimium veuereris amicos :
Ac Fortunati benedicti martyris urnam."

After the relics were removed to Etampes they were used for
rain-making. And it is interesting to note that, as late as 1249,
they were known as the Divi Fi^atres ; for there was a bishop
who doubted the genuineness of the relics, and was smitten with
temporary blindness, and according to some verses made upon
this sad calamity,

" Mox prece praemissa, lacrymis perfusus obortis,
Explicat inscriptos Divorum nomiue Fratrum
Fasciculos, sacrosque viris astantibus artus
Ostentat."

Fixitres Dii is the name for the Twins in Suetonius, Calig. 22,
where Caligula sets up his image between them as Jupiter
_Latiaris, and no doubt elsewhere.

On the whole the Dioscurism of the Cantiani is well made
out, and to a certain extent that establishes the Dioscurism of
the centres where the Cantiani are worshipped.

Let us turn, in the next place, to the saints of Nantes,
Donatianus and Rogatianus.

The Acts of these saints, who are said to have been martyred
at Nantes under Diocletian, are suspected by the hagiologists
to contain some genuine matter. Le Blant {Actes des Martyrs,
p. 76) regards it as a special mark of genuineness that promi-
nence is given to the worship of Apollo, which the officials
endeavour to make the martyrs take part in. The cult of
Apollo was being pushed by the government at this time.
That they are brothers is admitted ; it stands so in the

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 69

Martyrologiuni Hieronymianum : " In Gallia, civitate Namnetis
SS. Rogatiani, Donatiani, germanorum." Here we come across
the term " germani" for "brothers"; often it occurs under the
form "fratres germani," and one suspects that in not a few
instances it is a simple substitute for " gemini." When we
turn to the Acta, we shall find that the story is, in some
respects, built on the lines of the martyrdom of Nearchus and
Polyeuctes, whom we have shown in Dioscuri in the Christian
Legends to be a pair of heavenly twins. In the story of Near-
chus and Polyeuctes, the saints are friends and not brothers ;
here they are brothers but not twins. Polyeuctes is a pagan
whom Nearchus gains to the faith ; so is Rogatian, whom
Donatian captures. Polyeuctes is baptized, but only in his
own blood ; the same is the case with Rogatian. In the Acta,
Donatian is said to be the younger : he makes appeals to
his brother (germanuin), "qui ad fratrem licet aetate minorem,
seuiorem tamen ordine credulitatis, festinus acciirrit."

Finally, when they are cast into prison, they become duo
fidei luminaria, and their glory becomes the brightness of the
place. When their martyrdom is accomplished, we are told that
" beatus Donatianus lucratur germanum, et meruit germanus
martyrium." It is just like Nearchus and Polyeuctes. They
become the guardians of the city, and Gregor y of Tours tells us
that, when Nantes was at one time besieged by barbarians,
at midnight men robed in white came forth fromthe^ basilica of
the martyrs, and struck terror into the besieging hosts. The
Dioscuri did their duty\

There is some reason for supposing that they performed the

* This case must be added to the classical cases of Dioscurophauy, such as
the fight at Lake Eegillus, the defeat of the Cimbii, the battle at Pydna, Szc.

There is another curious case, which Mr Bass Mullinger points out to me,
where the Turks were chased by the Dioscuri. The account runs as follows :

" Fertur quoddam insigne miraculum, sed nos non vidimus, quod duo
equites armis coruscis et mirabili facie, exercitum nostrum praecedentes, sic
hostibus imminebant ut nullo modo facultatem puguandi eis concedereut; et
vero Turcae, cum referire eos lanceis vellent, insauciabiles eis apparebant.
Haec autem quae dicimus, ab illis qui eorum consortium spernentes nobis ad-
haeserunt didicimus. Quod vero pro testimonio adducimus, tale est : Per
primam et alteram diem, per totam viam equos inimicorum mortuos cum
dominis ipsis reperimus." Raymund, Hist. Hierosol. c. 5 (pl. civ. 597).

70 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

Dioscuric task of rain-making. The name Rogatianus reminds
one of the Rogation-days of the Church, which are the four days
preceding the Ascension, and are said to have been introduced
into the Church of Gaul in 470, as days of fasting for the
coming harvest. It is highly probable that they are merely the
continuation of a pagan lustration. They are said to have been
introduced by Mamertus, Bishop of Vienne; Mamertus is highly
praised by Sidonius Apollinaris (lib. 7, ep. 1) for his skill in
finding martyrs, and Sidonius compares him to Ambrose in this
regard, a very doubtful compliment. It means that there was
a wide-spread movement for finding Twin Saints to replace the
Twin Brethren. Amongst the finds of Mamertus, the chief
appear to be Julianus and Ferreolus. We shall come to them
presently, for Ferreolus is in our Dioscuric list. It seems likely,
therefore, that the movement which established Donatian and
Rogatian at Nantes is a bifurcation of the same stream of
tendency which led to the introduction of the Rogation-days at
Vienne and to the honour of S. Ferreolus. There appears to be
no reason for regarding these saints as anything but hagiologic
fictions.

As we have stumbled on S. Ferreolus in examining into the
story of Rogatianus, let us go on to enquire into the history of
this saint.

The name Ferreolus occurs frequently in the Gallic hagio-
logy, the principal cases being,

1. Ferreolus and Ferrutius, the martyrs of Besan^on,
who are commemorated on June 16.

2. Ferreolus and Julianus, who belong to Vienne
and S. Privat, and are celebrated on Sept. 18.

3. Ferrutius and Ferrutio, martyrs of Mainz (Oct. 28).

We begin with the martyrs of Besan^on, where a street is
still called in their honour Rue des Martyrs. They were sent
to the city by no less a personage than Irenaeus of Lyons; and
the Acta expressly say that Irenaeus despatched to Besangon
twin brethren, Ferreolus and Ferrutius, who were in fellowship
with one another, and were to be co-heirs of the future
kingdom. The saints found a grove a mile and a half out-

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 71

side the city, to which they used to retire. And it was here
that, in later days, their remains were discovered by a hunter
who was following a fox. They are described in the Acta as

" Caeli duo luminaria, gemini fratres, patriam illuminantes,
pacem gentibus conferentes " ;

and I think we need hardly go further with the enquiry, as it is
clear from the names, the statement of their twinship, their
going to heaven together, their worship in a grove, and their
comparison to the lamps of heaven, that we are dealing with
a Dioscuric cult, which by the way was an ancient one even in
the time of Gregory of Tours.

The second case is that of Ferreolus and Julianus, a pair,
of whom Julianus is in the greater honour, having the whole of
the second book of the Glory of the Martyrs devoted to him by
Gregory of Tours. The date of the celebration is Sept. 18 ^
We have the account of the discovery of the head of S. Julian
and the body of S. Ferreolus by the Bishop Mamertus, when
he was planning to rebuild the basilica of S. Ferreolus at Vienne.
The monks who were excavating came upon certain sepulchres ;
they were filled with astonishment ; a bystander, under Divine
inspiration, something like the old man at Milan who identified
Protase and Gervase, cried out to the excavators that if they
continued the work they would find the relics of Julian and
Ferreolus. Gregory of Tours proceeds to tell a string of
miracles wTOught by the saint. It is difficult to extract any-
thing Dioscuric from such a comprehensive list of wonders.
Where all wonders are wrought, none can be identified. Julian
evidently did his most and best. It is, however, worth noticing
that there is a case of perjury, where the saint strikes down
a man who was swearing falsely about some threepenny matter ;
so that perhaps Polyeuctes did not have a monopoly of the
care of Gallic truthfulness.

However this may be, the Acta tell us that Ferreolus was
designed to have Julianus as his colleague in heaven, so that
they played Castor and Pollux to one another : from the second
Passion of S. Julian we find,

1 A suspiciously Dioscuric day.

72 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

"Beatus Ferreolus tempore Cinspini consularis jam Chri.sti miles, et
necdum proditus, officio tribunicitie potestatis, habitu non cordc, specie iiou
aflfectu, apud praefatam urbem fungebatur. Cui videlicet Julianus, aetate
jam adultus, collega mox futurus in caelo, providentia divina solatium
praebebat in saeculo" ;

and to this we may add the verses which are said to have been
written over their church :

" Heroas Christi geminos haec continet aula,
Julianum capite, corpore Feri'colum" ;

we may take geminos in this effusion literally, in view of the
general Dioscurism of the situation.

It is interesting to notice that the Church seems to have
"^ been in want of military saints about this time ; it is fortunate
that there were the Dioscuri to draw upon. I am afraid this
will somewhat reduce the list of such saints, which Harnack
accepts as historical in his book on the Mission und Ausbreitung
des Ghristentums.

The third case to which we have referred, the martyrs of
Mainz, is also a military instance. This Ferrutius is celebrated
on the 28th of October, apparently with a companion named
Alban. It will be remembered that October 28 is S. Thaddeus'
Day.

Of the popularity of S. Ferrutius in Gaul it is hardly
necessary to speak further. But the student of Celtic place-
names will find that he has left his mark on the country-side.
The Celtic ending -acus was put on his name, and so we fiud in
- > Holder, Alt-celtischer' Sprachschatz, the following identifications :

Ferrici-acus. O. dorf F^ricy, dep. Seine et Marne,
arrond. Melun, canton de Chatelet.

Ferruci-acus. von M, Ferrucio. O. j. Saint Etienne
de Fursac ; dep. Creuse, arrond. Gueret, canton Grand
Bourg.

Here the French names Fericy and Fursac are traced to their
origin. We may fairly ask whether any of the places thus
defined were Dioscuric centres ? Something similar occurs
with the martyr Florus, whom we have shown to be a Dioscure.
All the French places named Fleury, Fleurac, &c., come from
his name with a Celtic adjective termination. So that Florus

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 73

did come West, as well as go North and South and East ! There
are six Fleuracs, three Floracs, about twenty Fleurys, &c. All
of them have Florus for patron, and Florus is a Dioscure.

Our next pair of saints are Crispin and Crispinian. Crispin -
is very well known (i) because he is the patron saint of cobblers;
(ii) because he helped the British to win the Battle of Agin-
court. But as for Crispinian, I am afraid he is forgotten^ It
is not very clear why a pair of Dioscuri (supposing them to be ,

such) should mend shoes, and we may suspect that this is a ) ' W^
relatively modern attainment. The military achievements are,
however, just what we should expect. Let us see, then, whether
we can find out anything about Crispin and his companion.

That they have companion names and are therefore closely
related is confirmed by the documents, which speak of them
as brothers, though not by any means uniformly. However,
S. Eligius, who is said to have decorated the shrine of the -
saints, says (lib. il. c. vii.) that Crispin and Crispinian were holy
martyrs and brothers (germani). Their headquarters is Soissons,
where they are said to have planted Christianity-. And it is
curious that there were, besides the cathedral, two other Crispin
churches besides a building in honour of S. Gervais ; while in
the diocese of Soissons there are said to be six other churches
in their honour. The Soissons Breviary is very suggestive in
its treatment of the saints, that they are not only brothers but -
twins. Examine the following sentence:

"Quaesumus, omnipotens Deus, lit nos geminata letitiahodiernaefesti-
vitatis excipiat, quae de beatorum martyrum tuorum C. et C.^ glorifica-
tione procedit : quos eadem fides et passio vere fecit esse germanos."

1 Not by Shakespere, who calls the day St Crispin's, St Crispian's, and "^
Crispin-Crispian. See Henry V. Act ii. Sc. iii. :

"And Crispin-Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From that day to the ending of the world,
But in it we shall be remembered."
- I suppose Agincourt would be in Crispin's diocese, as well as fought on
his day.

* There is a note in Camden's Britannia (i. 228) to the effect that there
existed at Stone-end, near Dungeness, a cairn in honour of Crispin and Cris-
pinian, who were shipwrecked at this point. This must be a misunderstanding
for a cairn in honour of C. and C, erected by persons who had been ship-
wrecked and who, therefore, made votive offerings to the heirs of the Dioscuri.

74 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

How very near the writer of these closing words was to saying
rjeminos !

The ritual goes on to speak of them as the two olive-trees
and the two lamps which stand before the Lord, and says of
them, in Biblical language, that they have power to cover the
heaven with clouds and to open the gates of heaven ; from which
we conclude that they are still the children of the sky. In
the next passage, from a hymn in the Breviary, we shall see
them bringing light to darkened Gaul :

" Quae mortis umbris exitialibus
Olim jacebas, nunc tibi, Gallia,
Aurora surgit, mox diei
Conspicuum paratura lumen.
Crispine, nostris tu regionibus
Noctem fugasti ; vox tua praeferens
Facem salutarem, profundas
Lvice nova pepulit tenebras."

What more could be said to prove that Crispin is Phosphorus ?
It would be superfluous to labour this point further.

We pass on to the case of the Tergemini. Attention was
drawn to these in the lectures on the Dioscuri : and it may
be assumed that the case is made out on their behalf \ It is,
however, of interest to examine their record from a Western
point of view, for, as we have said, these saints are an importa-
tion from Cappadocia, where they had been in the habit of
chariot-racing and the like. We have some early information
about their reception in Gaul. Their headquarters are at
Langres, where their sanctuary lay at a distance of two miles
from the city. In Bede's Mar^tyrology of the Saints we find
that they were actually martyred at Langres, Cappadocia being
apparently forgotten.

" Apud Lingones natale geminorum Pseusippi, Elasippi, et Melesippi ;
qui cum essent vigiuti quinque annorum, cum avia sua Leonilla et lonilla
et Neone, martyrio coronati sunt, tempore Aureliani imperatoris. Gemini
quidam ex una arbore suspensi, ligatis manibus sursum, pedibus deorsiun,

1 For an interesting Dioscuric touch we may remark that when Melasippus
has a vision of the Lord, he is addressed as follows :

"Melasippus, I have prepared immortal horses for thee and thy brethren.''
Cf. the winged horse which the Lord gave to S. Polyeuctes.

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 75

ita extent! ut putarentur ab ipsa membrorum compagc scjiarari ; ot post
haec in ignem praecipitati, nee tamen flammis laesi, inter verba orationum
siuiul migraverunt ad Dominum."

Note the martyrdom by hanging on one tree, and the existence
of a triad of martyred women side by side with the Tergemini^
Some copies of Bede go on to relate their martyrdom. In
reference to the names of the women, we may remember that
Helen was called Keovn'] in Rhodes (Ptolem. Hist. Nov., p. 189,
ed. Westcrm.), and according to the same authority she was
daughter of Helios and hanged herself on an oak^.

In the life of Ceolfrid, the abbot of Jarrow, which was
written by some anonymous person about the year 720, we find
that Ceolfrid's body was brought to the monastery of the
Tergemini at Langres^

"Cuius {i.e. Ceolfridi) corpus... portatum... in monasterium...ad meri-
dianam plagani civitatis (i.e. Lingonuni) .sepultumque in aecclesia
sanctorum geminorum quorum nornina sunt haec, Speusippus, Eleosippus,
Meleosippus, qui una geniti matre uno partu ibi antiquo tempore martyrio
coronati, et in eodem loco sepulti sunt, ubi et avia illorum nomine
Leonella sepulta est et ipsa per confessionem martyrii egressa de corpore."

Ceolfrid was buried here on Sept. 26, 71G. It is interesting
to see how completely the legend of the Dioscuri or Kabiri had
taken root, and how apparently indigenous it was regarded.

We need hardly go further with our list. The names of
Protasius and Gervasius belong rightly to Milan : they appear
at Tours by the importation of relics.

As for Vitalis and Agricola, they also are Ambrose's finds :
may we not say, Ambrose's creation? He unearthed them at
Bologna, in the Jews' graveyard. Part of the remains he trans-
ferred from Bologna to Florence, part went to Gaul, where
Namacius, the Bishop of Auvergne, wrought mighty wonders
with them. There is also a suspicion that Agricola, of the
same pair, was honoured at Rheims. Of these two the tradition
is that Agricola was the slave of Vitalis. So that here the
mention of twins is not to be found. But suspicion is aroused

1 This may, however, be due to faulty trauscriptiou.

'^ See A. B. Cook, Class. Rev., Nov. 1903. See also Eoscher Le.v.s.v. Leonte.

* Baedae epp., ed. Plummer, i. 402.

76 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

from the fact that Vitalis of Ravenna is the father of Protase
and Gervase of Milan. We are clearly in the same hagiologic
laboratory, and Ambrose is the chief demonstrator. In this
connexion it is interesting to quote some sentences from a
review of Harnack's Mission unci Aushreitung by E. W. Watson
(/. T. 8. Jan. 1904) :

" The bodies of the martyrs Vitalis and Agricola were found,
it is said, in a Jewish burial-place, and therefore there were so
few Christians in the city [Bologna] at the time of Diocletian's
persecution that they had no cemetery of their own. The story
is a replica of that of Protasius and Gervasius, and S. Ambrose
is concerned with both cases, and in both there is the guidance
of a vision : the doubtfulness of the matter is increased by there
being another S. Vitalis of Ravenna, the father of the Milanese
brethren. The point for us is that a story in its successive
reproductions becomes more marvellous, as Freeman has shown
in many entertaining notes to his Norman Conquest. Discovery
in a Jewish burial-ground was more wonderful than discovery in
a church."

However the bodies were discovered, they are closely mixed
up with the manufacture of Christian Dioscuri, and I suggest
they may perhaps discharge the same functions.

Nor must we forget that the cult is also proved for Paris
from the references to royal oaths by Polyeuctes, to which we
have alluded elsewhere ; this Dioscuric worship is confirmed
archeologically by the disc overy of a Pa gan altar in Notre
Dame, on which were represented Castor and Pollux.

We have now said enough to establish conclusively the
hypothesis with which we started, viz., that the cult of the
Heavenly Twins must have been universal in Gaul, and that it
was displaced by a cult of martyrs, of whom the rnajor part
must be held to be the creations of the hagiologic fancy.

The places where we have found, or at least suspected,
Dioscurism in France include :

^ Paris, Amiens, Soissons, Langres, Besan^on, Nantes,

Tours, S. Privat, Vienne, Etampes, Mainz, Fericy, Fursac,
Fleury, and Auvergne (? Clermont).

TX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 77

And it is extremely improbable that we have either exhausted
the matter or seriously over-stated it. For it is clear we are
only dealing with a few cases that we happen to have recognized
as notable transfers from Paganism to Christianity, and there
must be many more where the traces of identification are lost.
Then there is a number of cases where Dioscurism can be
proved on the testimony of archeology and where we ought to
look carefully to see what became of the cult ; and in particular
there is the wide field of Mithraism, in which we have shown
the prominence of the Dioscuri along with the Sun-god. These
youths, with the raised and lowered torches, standing for the
morning and evening star, perhaps with an oblique reference of
a more general character as the Day and the Dark, or Life and
Death, are not to be thought of as merely a conventional
representation of one of the signs of the Zodiac; the evidence is
conclusive that they are more than that, they are objects of
worship. And we ought, therefore, to expect that on the side of
Mithraism, which was, perhaps, the keenest competitor of
Christianity, we should find an absorption of the Dioscuric
ideas by the dominant religion. But what of Mithra himself?
If Christianity absorbs and veneers the Dioscuri, ought not
Mithra also to be similarly treated ? The answer is in the
affirmative. Look for Mithra in the Calendar and you will find
him there. Under the thinnest disguise Mithra appears at Aix
in Provence as a saint of the name of Mitraeus\ The evidence
is from Gregory of Tours, in his book on the Glory of the Con-
fessors, c. 71. The account relates how a certain Childeric, in
or about the year 566, alienated a farm belonging to the church
at Aix, and how the bishop prayed to Metrias to punish the
impropriator of ecclesiastical property ^ which he did by throwing
the chief offender into a fever and taking all the hair off
his body. Metrias is actually written Mitrias in some MSS. ;
according to Gregory he was a very holy man and an athlete
(inclytus athleta Metrias)'^. But he knows nothing about his

^ The name is variously spelt.

2 In fact he told Metrias that if he did not avenge him speedily, he should
have no more candles and no more psalms.

^ Apparently this does not mean that he was a martyr. He is not regarded
as such. It belongs to his previous state of existence.

78 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

story, except that he was a slave. Perhaps we can add some-
thing to his information. If the interpretation we have made
is correct, then Aix must have been a centre of Mithraic wor-
ship. So we turn to Cumont, Monuments et Mysteres, t. n.
p. 43fi, where we shall find it said of Aix {Aquae Sextiae) that
a portion of a Mithraic monument was found in the neighbour-
hood of the city and presented to its museum in 1839. So that
we need not be surprised that in the days of Gregory of Tours
the patron saint of the place was named Mitreas. For Aix
is one of the Mithraic centres ^

A comparison of our Dioscuric centres with the map of the
Mithraic centres in Cumont will show that Dioscurism is a
feature of Gallic religion, quite independently of the Mithraic
movement. Mithraism in Gaul is not a wide-spread cult, it
follows the Roman armies, and is j^ar excellence a soldier's
religion. But the worship of the Dioscuri is a religion of the
people, and existed amongst the Celts from the earliest ages-.

But perhaps we have now said enough to establish our
position that the Church in Gaul took over the Twins and
made saints of them, and that in many cases the saints are the
Twins and nothing more.

Before leaving this point I may allude to a little brochure
by M. Albert Dufourcq, which is entitled La Christianisation
des Follies, and has the general heading, Science et Religion,
Etudes 2)ou7' le temps fvesent. M. Dufourcq has attempted to
defend the substitution by the Church of her martyrs for the

1 It will be asked whether Cautes and Cautopates, who appear so often in
votive inscriptions, shared the forced conversion of Mithra? The nearest I
can get to Cautes is a saint named Cottus in the Mart. Hier., where he appears
on the same day (May 22) as Castus and Cassius, a pair of Campanian saints,
and with Rogatus and Rorjatianus, who are evidently a doublet of Donatianus
and Rogatia]ius (who come on May 24, two days later), and perhajDS the original
form. Moreover my suspicion as to the Dioscurism of Cottus is confirmed by
finding in the Greek calendar a pair named Karridios and KarrLdiavos, who
are described as 1x7101 avrddeXcpoi. But I can find no records of the deeds of
any of these worthy people. Cumont gives a list of Persian and Mithraic
names in which Sisicottus stands side by side with Sisimithres. It should be
remembered that the Sun enters Gemini on May 21.

- Cf. Diod. Sic. IV. 56, for the honour paid by the Celts to the Twins:
' AnoSei^eis 5e tovtuiv <pipov<n, SeiKvvvres tovs wapa. tov QKeaPOi' KaToiKoOvras,
crejSo^^fOfS fidXiaTO. twv dewv rods AtoaKopovs.

IX] TWINS IN THE CALENDAR. 79

ancient cults on the ground of necessity, along with the quiet
assumption that the martyrs must be real. He is very angry with
myself in an article on my Dioscuri in the Revue de VHistoire
des Religions, for l)aving gone a step beyond his investigations,
which are more in the interests of religion than they are of
science; the language in Avhich he describes me as a conjurer
{Robert Hoadin) and a second-hand hagiologist {hagiographe
d'occasion) is sufficiently striking. It appears I am at once too
clever and too ill-informed. The only reply I can make to such
denunciations is to try to learn something from M. Dufourcq's
facts and ignore his prejudices. Perhaps he may live to expand
the former and to outgrow the latter : and I recommend him
to model his controversial style more closely on that of my
learned Roman Catholic friends (other than himself) who have
found it necessary to dispute my theories.

CHAPTER X.

That the Calendar of the Italian Saints is also tainted

luith Dioscurisni.

The foregoing chapter was a long one, and it will hardly
be possible to bestow the same attention on all parts of the
world outside France, unless our remarks are to swell to the
size of a reduced edition of the Acta Sanctorum. It will be
noticed, however, that amongst the Dioscuri of the French
Church there were several cases of foreign importation, and
especially, as might have been expected, of importation from
Italy. We shall, therefore, spend a little time upon the Italian
Twins.

It is quite natural that we should look for traces of the
Gemini upon Italian soil, for, over and above the wide diffusion
of the worship of Castor and Pollux \ we have many traces
that the cult of the Twins existed in a variety of forms in the
Italian cities, and certainly Castor and Pollux have no monopoly
of the country, any more than they had in Greece, the variety
of whose Twin-cults we have already had occasion to notice.
When we find such names as Picumnus and Pilumnus, Mutunus
and Tutuuus amongst Latin household gods, we must recognize
the tendency from which they arose. And the variety of the
cult from place to place in early times can easily be indicated.
For instance, at Praeneste there was a cult of the Twins in an
independent form ; for we are told by Servius in his comment
on Verg. Aen. vii. 678, that Praeneste had its Divi Fratres. The

1 According to Albert, Le Culte de Castor et Pollux en Italie, p. iii., "Partout
en Italie on retroiive les temples de ces dieux"; " Eien de jjIus frequent ni de
plus vari6 que les representations figurees de Castor et de Pollux."

CH. X] ITALIAN SAINTS. SI

story is a cuiious one, and introduces the sister of the Twins.

For this reason I transcribe some sentences :

" Praenestc.ibi erant pontifices et dii indigetes .sicut etiam Romae ;
erant autera illic duo frati'es qui divi appellabantur ; horum soror, dum ad
focum sederet, resilien.s scintilla ejus uterum percussit, unde dicitur con-
cepisse."

We can hardly be wrong in recognizing that the Twins and
their sister were honoured at Praeneste in an independent
manner ; if it had been simply the Roman religion over again
Servius would hardly have alluded to it. It is the independent
parallel to the Roman religion to which he draws attention.

There are places in Italy where we should expect the
worship of the Twins in its conventional form to be active and
long-continued. For example, Verona ought certainly to be
such a centre : for was it not in this city that the Dioscuri
intervened to help Marius to defeat the Cimbri*? We have
shown in the previous chapter that Aquileia had a cult of the
Twins and their sister (Cantius, Cantianus, and Cantianella).
It is interesting that it appears to have shared with Vicenza
and Verona the services of another pair of great brethren, Felix
and Fortunatus. From the names we should suspect these to
be twins ; and their Acta say expressly in the account of their
trial and martyrdom at Vicenza that they were brothers :

" Devenerunt hue ad nostram civitatem quidam germani fratres, qui se
Chri-stianos profitentur."

The inscription in their honour over the altar at Vicenza
was to the following effect :

" Hie requiescit corpus S. Felicis et caput S. Fortunati, martyrum
ac fratrum."

1 Plut. Marius, 26. At Verona is preserved the famous votive relief of Ar-
genidas to the Dioscuri ; where we have the cult represented in so many different
forms, the heroes standing, the urns of the dead heroes entwined with serpents,
and the sacred beams or SoKava which were their Spartan sj'mbol. But this
relief was found at Este.

These ^oKava are composed of a pair of upright beams, connected by a cross-
beam in the form of the letter H ; and they correspond to the unfinished brick
wall of the Babylonian zodiacal signs, in the sense that they show the Twins to
have been builders. Miss Harrison points out to me that the 56Kava become
actual objects of worship. See Plutarch, De Frat. Amore c. i. ; to. -n-aXaia tQv
AioffKoCpwii d(f>idpijf/.aTa oi ZTrapriarat doKava KoKovcn' ^ari 8^ Svo ^v\a irapdWrjXa
Svffl irXayiois ewe^fvy/jL^va, which suggests Uvo crossbeams.

H. 6

82 THE CT^LT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

Conversely, the head of S. Felix and the body of S. For-
tunatus were at Aquileia. And a part of the relics of
S. Fortunatus were, I think, transferred to Verona.

Here we are not expressly told that they were twins, but
then those who canonised them did not, perhaps, want to tell
us too much. So they said gerniani and not gemini. In any
case they may be called a pair of divine brethren, which is
really all that is wanted.

But now let us examine a more curious and interesting
case, for which we must go in the first instance to Cappadocia,
as we did in the case of the Tergemini.

Ruinart, in his Acta Martyrum Sincera, p. 5e32, gives the
account of the martyrdom of three Christian teachers, who had
been sent by Vigilius, the bishop of Trent, to convert the pagans
in his district. The names of the three are Sisinnius, Martyrius,
and Alexandei-, of whom the tradition says that the last two
were brethren. They are also said to have travelled from the
East and to have been hospitably received by S. Ambrose, who,
presumably, sent them to Vigilius.

The names are peculiar. We should hardly expect a saint
to be called Martyrius in advance^: so the second name is
wrong. We shall show reasons presently for believing that his
name was Sisinnodorus, and that he was the twin brother of
Sisinnius. But let us keep for the present to the Acta. The
name Sisinnius is of Persian origin. According to Cumont,
Mon. II, 85, a great number of Persian names begin in this
way, as Sisamnes, Sisimithres, Sisines, Sisicottos, Sisimakes, &c.
But the meaning of the name is obscure. It agrees, however,
with what the Acta say of the Eastern origin of the saints-.

The date of their martyrdom is said to be 397, and the
celebration May 29.

The story is that Sisinnius had succeeded in building a
church in one of the lower valleys of the Alps ; and it chanced

1 Fortunatus in one of his poems calls him Maturius, which would evade
the difficulty. But this will not do, for Vigilius, in writing the account of the
martj'rs, speaks of the prophecy in his name, "adrisit quod vocabatur nomen,
et meritis cumulavit ; statuit natale vocabulum ut origine, sic passione venturum."

2 There is a Christian bishop of Isaura Nova named Sisamoas, probably of
the fourth century. See Miss Ramsay in Joiirn. Hell Soc. for 1904, p. 272.
Moas is probably a Lycaonian deity.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 83

that the pagans on one occasion were performing a cult for their
fields, a festival in honour of Saturn, in which they carried
about a malum lustixile, and took up contributions of animals,
during which ceremonies the Christian teachers and their
converts provoked them by refusing to take part in the pro-
ceedings, and there was a riot which led to the desecration of
the church and the murder of the teachers. Sisinnius, in
particular, was dragged about like a beast with a cow-bell
round his neck ; and finally Sisinnius and Martyrius were burnt
on a pyre made of the beams of the desecrated church. But
their twin and fraternal bodies having been cast into the
flames', it came to Alexander's turn to be seized and tortured.
The story is based on two letters of Vigilius, Bishop of Trent,
one written to Simplicianus, Bishop of Milan, the other to
John Chrysostom. One would like to believe that a tale so
well told as this of Vigilius was trustworthy, and there is much
verisimilitude in the account. On the other hand there are
features that provoke mistrust. In the letter to Simplicianus,
Alexander and Martyrius are said to be brothers: "Alexander,
Martyrii consanguinitate germanus." In the letter to Chrysostom,
the bodies of Sisinnius and Martyrius are spoken of as twins
and brothers. It looks as if the writer had forgotten the
relationships of the triad. Moreover, it does not sound at all
likely that three Cappadocians should be sent by an Italian
bishop to convert an Alpine village. The parallel which might
have been quoted from the Tergemini at Langres has dis-
appeared ; 01', rather, gone in the opposite direction"''. And
now comes the weightiest objection of all to believing the story
in the form in which it comes down to us. We have evidence
from the East, to which region the Acta have assigned Sisinnius,
that Sisinnius was a Dioscure. The argument is extremely
interesting and curious.

There is a rare tract by Leo Allatius entitled De Graecorum
Jiodie quorundam opinationihus epistola, in which he discusses
many curious customs of the modern Greeks and discloses a
good acquaintance with their folk-lore. Amongst other things

^ " Praemissis in ignem geminis atque germanis ante corporibus."
- Theodore of Tarsus might, perhaps, be quoted against me.

6—2

84 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

he tells how two young men named Sisinnius and Sisinno-
dorus rescued their sister from the machinations of a horrible
ghoul which obsessed and worried her. The sister's name
was Melitene, and, in the expectation of offspring, she had
built herself a tower and shut herself in it, to escape from
the ghoul that wanted to devour her child. The ghoul had
already eaten half-a-dozen of them\ While she was living in
the tower the two saints of God, Sisinnius and Sisinnodorus,
who were her brothers, came, in the course of a military expe-
dition, into the neighbourhood of the tower, and decided to pay
their sister a visit. After much pleading, she opened the door
of the tower and let them in. The ghoul seized the opportunity
and got in also, having apparently secreted itself in the throat
of one of the horses that the brethren were riding. When
midnight came, the ghoul resumed its activity and killed
Melitene's child. After this the creature makes its escape.
What follows is in true folk-lore manner. The brethren give
chase on winged horses and pursue the ghoul over Mount
Lebanon : they ask the pine-tree whether it has seen the
creature. The pine-tree pretends not to know and is cursed.
Then they ask the olive-tree. So the olive-tree tells what it
has seen, and gets a blessing. Finally they catch the ghoul
hiding on the sea-shore, and demand that she shall disgorge
the seven children that she has eaten. "Yes," says the ghoul,
"when you disgorge your mother's milk." So Sisinnius prays
to God, and promptly meets the challenge by the required
evacuation, gets the children back and a phylactery, in addition,
to ward off future troubles.

Now, in this story it is implied that Sisinnius and Sisinno-
dorus are already canonised, for they appear in the tale not only
as a pair of cavalry officers, but as the saints of God, and it is
equally clear that one of the motives of the folk-lorist is the
story of the Twins who liberate their sister, hidden in a tower ;
in other words, they are the Dioscuri, as, indeed, their names
suggest-. Such a story was responsible for the tale which

1 It is a common trait in folk-lore. The dragon does it. (or tries to) in the

Apocalypse.

2 We may recall the capture of Helen by Theseus, and her liberation by the

Twins.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 85

Jerome of Prague tells from Lithuania of the Signn of the
Zodiac liberating the Sun, who was imprisoned in a tower.
The foundation of the story is in the Veda, as well as in the
Greek literature ; it must be a very early bit of mythology as
well as a very late and persistent bit of folk-lore ^

So far, then, we are clear as to the meaning of the Eastern
element in the Western martyrdom ; it is Dioscuric, and for
that reason we suspect that the second martyr, Martyrius,
ought to be Sisinnodorus. The martyrdom at Anagnia in the
diocese of Trent is now parallel to a number of similar canonisa-
tions that were going on at this time all over France and
northern Italy. The necessity for the canonisations arose out
of the strong hold that the Twins had taken in northern Italy
and the lower valleys of the Alps. There is reason to believe
that the case differed from that of the French cults described
above. In France the Twins, for the most part, ruled by them-
selves : in northern Italy they were, in many places, the assessors
of Mithras. There was a Mithraeum at Trent, and a Mithraic
inscription has been found at Anagnia (Anauni), to which place
Vigilius had sent his preachers. Here Mithra was before Christ,
but perhaps after Saturn, to whose cult the Mithraic Chronos
was readily attached. Hence the necessity for the canonisations
of which we have been speaking. The starting-point for them
appears to be Ambrose's coup d'etat (if we ought not rather to
say coup cVeglise) with Protasius and Gervasius. If he imitated
his own successes, as it is pretty certain that he did, and with
added marvels, why should not neighbouring bishops imitate
him also ; and so the wicked Dioscuri be chased out of the
world and safely housed in the Church ? The period following

1 Perhaps we had better transcribe the account of the liberation of the Sun,
as given by Aeneas Sylvius (Pius II.), c. 26. " Profectus (so. Hieronymus)
introrsus aliam genteni rejaerit quae solem celebrant et malleum ferreum rarae
magnitudinis singulari cultu venerantur; interrogati sacerdotes quid ea sibi
veneratio vellet, responderuut olim pluribus mensibus nou fuisse visum solem
quern rex potentissimus cajjtum reclusisset in carcere munitissimae turris, signa
Zodiaci deinde opem tulisse Soli, ingentique malleo perfregisse turrim &c. "
This shows the popular belief in Lithuania at the beginning of the 15th century.
For "Sun" read "daughter of the Sun" and for "Signs of the Zodiac" read
' the Heavenly Twins."

86 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

the date 386, when Protase and Gervasc were found, was
no doubt a moving time for the artificers of ecclesiastical
legends'.

We must now spend a little time over the case of the
Milanese martyrs, for the conclusions at which we have arrived
have provoked some strong contradictions on the part of the
defenders of the integrity and good faith of S. Ambrose.
Nothing that was said in Dioscuri in the Christian Legends has
provoked so much hostility as the criticism upon S. Ambrose
and his saints, not even the identification of Jesus and Judas
Thomas with a pair of twins worshipped in Edessa, though the
latter discovery is, from a theological point of view, of much
greater moment. We must try and explain, as briefly as
possible, why the objections which have been made to my
solution of the problem of Protase and Gervase are invalid. In
particular I shall have to refer to an especially well-written
and temperate criticism published in the Nuovo Bullettino di
Archeologia Cristinna by Pio Franchi di Cavalieri-', as well as
to an excellent review by Hippolyt Delohaye in the Analecta
Bollandiana for 1904. Let me say at once that I am quite
prepared to admit one or two minor errors and inaccuracies. As
stated previously, the case against my treatment of the martyr
Dioscoros is probably a good one. He may be a real person
and not a myth. But the solution of the problem does not turn
upon minute points like this, which are quite unessential to the
main argument". Neither docs the conclusion depend upon
such minor points as M. Pio Franchi makes, as that if Ambrose
had really copied his saints from the Dioscuric model they
would have been robed in red, and not in white. In view
of the tradition in the Apocalypse, it is difficult to see how
martyrs could be dressed in anything but white, nor do they
cease to be substitutes for the Heavenly Twins because they
have changed colour. S. Ambrose was at liberty to dress his

1 It was in 396 that Ambrose discovered the remains of Agricola and Vitalis :
just one year before the martyrdom of Sisinnius, and the distribution of his
relics.

2 I.e. t. IX. 1903, pp. 100—120.

■' My reference to Dioscoros does not take ten lines, and does not affect the
argument on Protase or Gervase.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS.- 87

fighting men in white, if he preterred : he was in harmony, at
all events, with the armies of heaven, which followed the Lamb
dressed in white and riding white horses. Why should not
S. Ambrose's saints wear white? Their identification with the
Twins does not turn upon the colour but upon much more
definite considerations.

Perhaps it will assist M. Pio Franchi's imagination if I give
him a fresh instance of the appearance of Protasius and
Gervasius as Dioscuri (one more case of the persistence of
Dioscurophanies in time of trouble), in which he will be able
to examine the colour of their raiment, with an assurance that
the figures in question really are the Heavenly Twins.

In the year 1266 a.d., the saints appeared in battle on the
side of the Poles who were hard put to it, in a conflict with the
Ruthenians. The Polish king came to the conclusion that
arms without prayer were insufficient, and he and his wife
Kinga addressed themselves to the saints with the following
result, according to the Acta Sanctorum:

" Oranti enim ante puguam Kingae, duo in Candida veste splendidissimi
iuvenes adstitis.se memorantiir, qui secuturi mox proelii felicem exitiim
spopondcre, cosqve fuisse Gervasium et Protasinm^ quorum triumpho
illustris erat certaminis dies, communis persuasio constanter declaravit."

It will not be questioned, I suppose, that the popular
tradition is here the direct continuation and obvious survival
of the appearances of the Dioscuri with which the ancient
histories are so thickly strewn. And they do not cease to be
Dioscuri, because they appear in white, and because their
names are now Protase and Gervase.

It is, however, urged against me, and this is one of the
main objections, that S. Ambrose ought to be judged from his
own statement of the case, and not from the report of a pseudo-
Ambrose writing at the end of the fifth century, say one hundred
years later. The object of this limitation of the documents is
the exclusion of the definite statement that Protase and Gervase
were twins, and, if need be, the subtraction of the vision which
Ambrose saw. The matter, then, stands as follows, from the
point of view of the objectors : Ambrose says nothing about
twins, but someone else says it a century later. The intro-

88 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

duction of the twins is therefore a legendary accretion, caused
by the similarity of the names of Protase and Gervase. Well,
at all events it is conceded that we were not wrong in recog-
nizing a twin-like feature in the names of Protase and Gervase.
But, it is said, they were not so named because they were twins,
but they became twins because they were so named ! Unhappily
the solution is rendered impossible by the discovery of so many
similar and parallel cases, in which we have proved that the
names are due to the twins and not the twins to the names.
If the reader will go over some of the cases which have been
discussed in the previous pages, as well as those in the Dioscuri
in the Gliristian Legends, he will see the absurdity of isolating
one single pair for special treatment, simply in order to defend
the character of one honoured name in the history of the
Church. We must use the same method all round, where the
phenomena are substantially the same.

M. Delahaye, I think, sees this, and attempts to get rid of
some of the cases adduced, so as to reduce the weight of the
cumulative evidence. He wishes to persuade me that Marcelius
^ and Marcellianus are real persons, and that, if I visit Rome,
I shall find the church in which they were deposited. Well,
I have been in Rome, and know where to look for them and
their church : it is just beyond the Forum, not far from the
Arch of Titus\ Two other saints also have a church not far
^ - from the same position, viz. Cosmas and Damian, who can be
conclusively shown to be substitutes for the Dioscuri, brought
' to the Forum, no doubt, on account of their Dioscuric ante-
cedents. If Cosmas and Damian were brought there for public
purposes, and in succession to the ancient guardians of public
faith, what is wrong in my explanation that another pair in
the same neighbourhood, who are certainly sufficiently twin-like,
should be brought there for the same purpose ? Apply the
same treatment to the similar cases.

Meanwhile we have gained a great deal in the admission

1 Their shrine is described as " ecclesia pervetusta Eomae, quae ab amphi-
theatro veiiientihus non procul ab area Titi et Vespasiani ad laevam." Indeed
it is said that when their bodies were first brouj^ht to Rome they were deposited
— in the Church of Cosmas and Damian.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 89

that Protase and Gervase were recognized as twins a hundred
years after their discovery. Then, from this time on, they arc
at Hberty to discharge Dioscuric functions. For example, it is
well known that the Twins were patrons of the charioteers in
the arena, and that it was part of their function to attend the
races, and take part in them. Their statues were commonly
placed at the entrance to the amphitheatre, and as they took
an interest, based on personal experience, in the chariot-racing
and boxing, it was inevitable that the boxers and racers should
seek their assistance and support. What if S. Protase should
have inherited from Polydeuces an interest in single combats ?
The athletes would then have found their patron, or rather,
would not have lost him. What if S. Gervais discharged a
similar function for the charioteers ? Can we predict what he
would develop into ? There is a remarkable case in the French
calendar of a saint named Fiacre, whose name has become
attached to cabs, and who is the patron saint of the French
cab-drivers. When we order a fiacre, we are doing a religious
act ! something like the profane act of taking a hansom-cab in
England, a machine which is named after its inventor, one
Hansom, as the French one is after its patron saint. In like
wise the name of Gervais became a popular one for cab-drivers as
well as their machines ; all the race of Jarvises and Jarveys' and
Garvies in England, Scotland, and Ireland are named after the
saint, and so is the carriage which they drive, which is known
in the later English literature as a " jarvey." When we consult

1 The references in Murray's Eii/jUslt, Dictiomiry do not take us back as far
as we could wish for the origin of the term Jarvey. We are told that Jarvey is
a by-form of Jarvis or Jervis. That it means, 1, a hackney coachman ; 2, a
hackney coach. Under 1, a ref. to Serjeant Ballantine, E.rper. ii. 19, "The
driver was called a jarvey, a compliment paid to the class in consequence of
one of their number having been hanged."

Dr Murray informs me privately that the name is especially common in
Dublin, and that it struck him long ago as being used more respectfully there
than here. He heard a fellow-traveller, an Irishman, repeatedly address their
carman with "Take us to such a place, Jarvey," as if it were the man's Chris-
tian name. The explanation he gave was, that "we say jarvey to every carman."
This was as far back as 1864. Dr Murray also says that if he had known that
S. Gervais could be made out to be the patron saint of charioteers (which we
have shown to be a legitimate inference from their Dioscuric character), "I
should, most certainly, have suggested him as the name-father of the Jarvies."

90 THE CULT OF THK HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

tht! etymologists, they do not know anything as to the raison
d'etre of a Jarvey, whether man or machine, except that it is
said that the name is given in honour of a celebrated brother
of the craft who met his death by hanging. They do not
discern Gervais the Martyr behind the condemned Jarvie, though
they would be quick enough to make the connexion between
the saint and the Fiacre^

At all events it is admitted that the general public knew
that Protase and Gervase were twins, even if it took them a
hundred years to make the discovery, and it may be readily
inferred that they knew what twins they were. They were
not merely making a deduction from the similarity of the
names of the saints, for such a deduction would not tell them
that Gervais was patron of carriage-drivers.

But now let us come to a really strong argument of Pio
Franchi's, of which I will confess that nothing in his whole
paper so set me thinking and came so near to convincing me
that I was wrong. The argument was drawn from the mosaic
representations of the saints at Milan itself, which go back
very nearly to the time of S. Ambrose himself, and which
represent them, one as bearded, and the other as bare-faced, in
which case you would say at once that they are not twins and
were never meant to be thought of as such^. I confess this
impressed me much. Nor did it make much weight on the
other side that Pio Franchi pointed out, with great frankness,
that in the Ravenna mosaics", which must also be very early,

^ Observe I do not say S. Fiacre was a Heavenly Twin, with a predilection
for the racecourse. I have not proved that ; he is said to have come from
North Ireland or Scotland. If anyone can show that he had a brother named
Farquhar, then I am prepared to accept him as a twin. One of the kings of
Scotland had sons named Farquhar, Fiaker, and Donald. S. Fiacre's Acts do
not help us much. The only thing that he does of a Dioscuric nature is to save
people from drowning, of which there are some good cases. He is called in the
service-book "infirmorum baculus, anchora naufragorum," and, by the way,
his Acts do speak of him as a morning-star. "Certe rutilat sicut stella matu-
tina in coelis, sed sibi devote famulantibus patrocinii et beneficiorum radios
extendit in terra." One would like to know more of S. Fiacre.

" See Ratti, It -piTi^ atdico ritratto di S. Amhnnjio in Amhrosiana. Milano,
1897. (A collection of papers in honour of S. Ambrose.)

* The mosaics of S. Apollinaris and S. Vitalis. He might have added the
Neapolitan representation of Protase as young and beardless. See Ratti, /. c.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 91

the saints are represented as e(|ual and similar'. For after all,
the question was, what did they think at Milan itself? And
even if Ravenna be the birthplace or the reported scene of
the martyrdom of the saints, it is Milan that makes their
history. For a short time this objection had great weight
with me, and I think it was admirably stated by Pio Franchi.
I think, however, that I can convince him from his own mosaic
that he is wrong.

To begin with, what do we know of the artistic re})rescnta-
tion of twins and of their description in literature ?

We may go back to Greek art, and we shall find that on
the chest of Kypselos, one of the Heavenly Twins had a beard
and the other had not-. And the same distinction will be
found on a sarcophagus at Aries'. We may examine the
monuments of Amphion and Zethus, and we shall find that one
of them is rough and the other is smooth. When we turn to
the Bible, and examine the case of Esau and Jacob, we are told
that they are differentiated by the hair ; Jacob was smooth and
Esau hairy. And if we turn to the legends of the Masai people
in East Africa, recently brought to light by Capt. Merker, we
shall find that Esau and Jacob are replaced by a Kabiric triad,
in which the practical difference between them is that Esau
No. 1 has a long beard, Esau No. 2 a moderate beard, and Jacob
no beard at all. It is much the case of the mosaic at Milan.

In the same way if we were examining the case of the
Babylonian Dioscuri, known as Gilgamesh and Eabani^, we

p. 53; and there are many similar pictures, of varying antiquity, to which
Ratti refers.

1 I suppose, then, that Pio Franchi wishes us to beheve that the Eavenna
mosaics go with Pseudo-Ambrose, and the Milan mosaics with Ambrose himself.

- EiVt Se iiri Tjj \dpvaKi AiocrKovpoi, o trepos ovk e^w ttw yiveLa, fJ-^aij 5' avrOiv
"Ekivt). Pausanias v. 19. 2.

^ Albert, Le culte de Castor et Pollux, p. 108. " Sur tous ces bas-reliefs,
C. et P. sont figures aux deux angles toujours dans la meme attitude, avec la
meme costume et les memes attributs, c'est a dire le cheval, la lance et le
chlamyde. Kemarquons seulement que sur le sarcophage d'Arles, par excep-
tion, I'un des deux freres est imberbe et I'autre barbu."

* See Jensen, Mythcn ximl Epcn, p. 121. Nirarod Epos, Taf. 1 :
" Mit Haar bedeckt ist sein ganzer Leib :
Er ist. ..an Haupthaar wie ein Weib :
Der... seines Haupthaars reckt sich wie Weizen."

92 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

shall find that Eabaui is ditfercntiated from Gilgaiiicsh by the
length of his hair.

It appears to be the common method of making the dis-
tinction in folk-lore as well as in popular art. And it follows
that Pio Franchi has misunderstood the meaning of the beard
in the mosaic ; it is the way to distinguish one of the Dioscuri
from the other, and the fact that the distinction is habitually
made in this way, confirms us in our belief that the legends of
the Dioscuri are behind the legends of Protase and Gervase.
The difference between the Milan mosaic and that of Ravenna
means that the one artist is differentiating his twins and the
other is not.

On Pio Franchi's own showing, then, the Dioscuric elements
go back to the time of Ambrose, and are not to be credited to
a later and legendary hand. M. Pio Franchi's mistake (and
I almost followed him in it) was due to a want of recognition
of the traditional in folk-lore and the conventional in art\

But it is further urged, and Prof. Ratti makes a great
point of this in tlie volume of Ambrosian Commemorations,
\ ' that not only does Protase have a beard, but that the beard is

A ' white. In other words, the saints are not twins, nor even
brothers I But here again it would have been well not to
draw too rapid a conclusion, in view of the fact that all the
other monuments make them equal and similar. The expla-
nation may lie in another direction. Suppose, for instance, the
Twins had become the traditional figures for Life and Death,
how would an artist of early days have depicted them ?

Prof. Ratti thinks the mosaics in question are nearly co-
eval with S. Ambrose, and that they were expressly designed

1 I have not said anything in this connexion about the triad of Prussian
deities ; because it is not yet clear what they stand for. According to the
Chronicles quoted by Grunau, they are respectively old, middle-aged, and
~ young ; the middle-aged one being certainly Perkuno, the Thunder-god ( = Thor).
The difference between the three is largely made in this case from the beards.
Moreover, it seems clear that Perkuno has some connexion with the Twins : for
in the Lithuanian folk-songs he is said to liberate the daughter of the Sun,
which is the office of the Twins {Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie, 7, 79 n.). But what
the connexion is, or how far it applies to the old Prussian triad, is still obscure.
Is it possible that in this religion the Twins changed character, and became the
patrons respectively of Life or Death ?

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 1)3

to exclude the belief that Protase and Gervase were twins. I
accept the admission that, in the earliest days of the cult,
people wanted to believe that they were twins : so that either
the names suggested it, or there was further information on
the point to be had.

Enough has now been said on this point, and I hope the
evidence of the mosaic has been cleared up. Those who are
interested in tracing the connexion between the Heavenly
Twins and the Holy Oak will be interested to know that there
is some suspicion that Protase and Gervase were worshipped - ^
at a holy oak in Milan. The Acta Sanctorum make the naive
admission {I.e. p. 702) that it is still in the memory of old men
that there was a church not far from the Exchange which bore
the name of Protasii ad Monachos, but originally was known as -^
8. Protasii ad Quercum, because there was a tall oak in the
neighbourhood (olim quippe procera ibi quercus in propinquo
stabat).

We may here recall a statement which was made on a
previous page^ to the effect that one of the titles by which the
Dioscuri (and the saints who displaced them) Avere known was
that of " boni medici," or good physicians. We anticipated the (^/
evidence, so far as to state that this was especially true of --
Protase and Gervase, the martyrs of Milan. One side of their
activity was medical ; certainly that does not surprise us, for
all the saints do cures ; but they are actually known by the
name of " boni medici," and the title is engraved deeply on the
cidt. For example, the Ambrosian Liturgy has for its introit
on the day of S. Protase and S. Gervase the words :

"Bonos medicos habentes patriae nostrae, gaudete fratres', beatos
Protasiiun et Gervasium, Martyres Domini et Ambrosium."

And we can see that the allusion to the good physicians is not
a mere chance reference to any special miracles wrought by the
saints, if we consider that the very words were wrought into
the ecclesiastical vestments and the linen cloths used in the
sanctuary. There are extant a number of catalogues of these
vestments, the writing of which goes back to the eleventh and ^

1 See p. 54.

- ShoiUcl uot the comma be placed after "gaudete"?

94 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

twelfth centuries. Amongst these we find such expressions as
the following :

" Panui linei super altare v ; unum ex is cum bonos medicos...."
Here the words " bonos medicos " are found worked on the
altar-cloth.

On another fragment of a catalogue of vestments, we have
as follows :

" Panni linii vii [i] cum bonos medicos srciptum [scriptum]."
And a third fragment has :

" iVtaiora pallia xxviii et minora xxxviiii. Bonos medicos,"

These altar-cloths reflect the opening sentence of the Mass
for the day of S. Protase and S. Gervase ; but they do not
merely reflect the words, they emphasise and draw attention
to them ; that is, the expression " boni medici " furnishes the
key-words for the right understanding of the saints.

Thus while S. Ambrose greeted the saints as his military
allies, the liturgy of his church conserved the memory of their
medical skill ; both points of view belong to the same mytho-
logical origin.

There is another point which has come up in Pio Franchi's
criticism, to which we might, perhaps, give a moment's
attention.

According to Dioscuri in the Christian Legends, Marcellus
and Marcellianus are twin brethren ; the Acta say so, and we
follow the Acta in such an admission. It was pointed out that
their pagan father attempted to turn them away from the
faith. He cries out in protest :

"0 filii ! baculus senectvitis meae, et geimnwn lumen, cur sic mortem
diligitis ! "

Here we italicised the words geminmn lumen on account of
the fitness of the expression to the case of a pair of Heavenly
Twins. But Pio Franchi objects that it is merely a quotation
from the book of Tobit and therefore has nothing to do with
Castor and Pollux. I am sorry not to have recognized the
origin of the passage which is certainly from the Latin of
Tobit X. 4, I thought I knew my Tobit^ ! It is interesting to

^ The passage runs as follows in the Vulgate; it is the wail of Anna over
her absent son: "Heu hen me, fili mi, ut quid te misimus peregrinari, lumen
oculoruni nostrorum, baculum senectutis nostrae," &c.

X] ITALIAN SAINTS. 95

find a pagan father deterring his chihhen from the Christian
faith by means of a quotation from the book of Tobit. This
part of the Acta certainly belongs to the historian and not to
the events ! But Pio Franchi does not notice that the historian
(or, if you prefer it, the father of the saints) has inserted in the
text of Tobit the word geminum before lumen. This word
certainly does not come from Tobit, and so the problem stands
where it did before ; for it is in the added word that the mind
of the editor is to be sought. Can there be any doubt now as
to the motive that prompted the addition ?

But we need not pursue the matter further, either as
regards Marcellus and Marcellianus, or Protase and Gervase.
The secret is out, in either case. They are twins and heavenly
twins ; even a second-hand hagiographer, as M. Dufourcq would
say, can draw the conclusion.

It will be very difficult to restore S. Ambrose's reputation
after recent investigations : Dom Morin has taken from him
the authorship of the Te Deum, and I have taken away his
character for truthfulness. We may be sorry for both results,
but we must do our best to endure them. There is no doubt
that S. Ambrose added immensely to his popular reputation
by his discoveries. He is the prince of ecclesiastical body-
snatchers. We have shown above how Sidonius Apollinaris,
when he wished to compliment S, Mamert on the finding of
the relics of twin saints, compares him to S. Ambrose. All the
great cities of northern Italy went to Ambrose for sanctities,
and he was to them as a spring of water whose waters fail not.
However much some of his modern defenders try to minimise
his skill, with a view of saving his credit, and to reduce his
visions and miracles to a basis that may be acceptable to the
twentieth century, the real verdict must be that of Ruinart,
that there was no one to equal him in the business. " Felix
inter alios fuit in eiusmodi thesauris efifodiendis sanctus Am-
brosius Mediolanensis antistes."

And now let us move further East, and see how the great
Twin Brethren held their own in the Greek and Syrian
Churches.

CHAPTER XL

That 8. Cosmas and S. Damian were a pair of
Heavenly Twins.

We have already had some suggestions that the East was
^ moving as fast as the West, if not faster, in the attempt to deal
with the surviving cults of the pagan world. We showed, for
example, how Cappadocia had displaced the three Kabiri by the
Tergemini, and that these had become local saints at Langres
at a very early period. We also showed that some district in
the East, probably Cappadocia, was responsible for the canonisa-
tion of Sisinnius and Sisinnodorus, and that there was reason to
suspect that these saints were welcomed in North Italy. But
^ of all the great creations of saints, none is equal to the success^
which the Eastern Church had in the manufacture of S. Cosmas
and S. Damian, and in putting them into circulation. We shall
devote a little space to these two great healers and trace their
lineage, so far as it may be possible to do so. In the Dioscuri
in the Christian Legends I did not discuss Cosmas and Damian,
because my enquiry into them was incomplete, and as there was
nothing in their names to suggest the Heavenly Twins, I wished
to take more time to work out the identification fully.

There is, however, no doubt on the point. It is easy to
demonstrate (1) that they are twins, (2) that they displaced
Castor and Pollux at Constantinople and elsewhere, and (3) that
they discharge all the functions that are expected from a pair
of "great brethren." The hagiologic literature represents them
as a pair of twins. A reference to the Analecta Bollandiana
(viii. 151, 152) will explain how they appear in the literature
of the saints :

"Tempore illo mulier quaedam benedicta...concepit et peperit duos

geminos."

CH. Xl] COSMAS AND DAMIAN. 97

Gregory of Tours, in his Glory of tlie Martyrs, c. 98, begins
his discourse about them as follows :

" Duo vero gemini, Cosmas scilicet et Damianus, arte medici, postquam
Christiani eftecti sunt, solo virtuturn merito et orationum interventu, in-
firmitates latiguentium depellcbant ; qui diversis cruciatibus consummati,
in coelestibus sunt conjuncti^ multa miracula iucolis ostendeiites."

That allusion to their union in heaven, following on the state-
ment that they were twins, looks as if Gregory knew the
characters he was describing, and could have written this book
for me, if he had wanted to.

We learn, also, incidentally, from Gregory how early and
how well-established they were in Rome. For in his tenth
book of the History of the Franks he tells us of an inundation
of the Tiber, and how the Pope (Gregory I.) ordered a solemn
litany to be performed, in which the clergy were to gather
in seven leading churches and to make procession to a central
place. The clergy of the sixth ward (regio) were to meet at
SS. Cosmas and Damian, those of the fourth ward at SS. Protase
and Gervase. At this time, then, the end of the sixth century,
the church of SS. Cosmas and Damian must have been one
of the leading churches in Rome.

That is the way the West knew them. The Greek Church
knows that they were brothers, but does not, I think, say
expressly that they were twins. What we gather from the
Greek accounts is that the cult of S. Cosmas and S. Damian
was known to them in thre e forms . According to one of
the traditions, they were a pair of Asiatic Christians who
practised medicine without fee (hence th^ir title o f Ana rgyri,
or Unmonied) and wrought all kinds of cures and miracles.

According to the second account, the scene of their activity

js_Rome, where they used to appear in visions to their patients,

who evidently practised incubation in some well-known building.

According to the third tradition, they were from Arabia.
The Greek Church accordingly keeps for them three festivals,
July 1, Oct. 17, and Nov. 1. The accounts vary as to whether
they were martyrs or not. The Roman saints (July 1) appear .
to have provoked the jealousy of their teacher in medicine,
who beguiled them into a mountain in search of herbs, and

H. 7

98 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

then stoned them to death. The Arabian saints (Oct. 17) used
•^ to travel from place to place and heal the sick freely, bub in
the year 292 they chanced to come to a city of Lycia along
with three of their brethren, and the governor, whose name was
Lysias^, threw them first into the sea and then into a furnace.
When these arts failed, he crucified them.

The saints who are celebrated on Nov. 1 are said to be from
Asia, of noble and virtuous parentage, brought up to the healing
art, which they practised freely on man and beast. They die
in peace, and are buried in a place called Phereman, which no
one appears to have succeeded in identifying. These thre^
traditions always speak of the saints as Cosmas and Damian,
and call them brothers ; it is evident that a common tradition
has bifurcated. The starting-point cannot be Constantinople.
It jaust be some point further East, and a little examination
of the legends shows that it is either Aegae in Cilicia, or some
point further afield. >

That they displaced Castor and Pollux is not what we
should at first have expected, for in the legends of the sa ints
they are especially recognized as doctors. One does not imme-
diately associate Castor and Pollux with medicine, nor Cosmas
and Damian with the works ascribed to the Twins. But the_
original Twins were skilled in medicine also, as well as in
ships, &c. ; while Cosmas and Damian would never have found
their way into the Roman Forum unless they had been ablejto
avenge perjury and punish breach of faith". Moreover, we have
from Constantinople direct evidence on the point in jthe story
which we have already told of the w icked G reeks who in-
cubated in the church of Cosmas and Damian on theJiypothesis_

1 A common name for the Antichristian governor.

^ There is, however, an alternative theory, so far as Eome is concerned, viz.
that they came to Eome as twins simply to displace twins, so that, while at
Constantinople they displaced Castor and Pollux, in Eome they followed Eomu-
lus and Eemus. The evidence for this is an actual inscription in the church, of.
■sj S. Cosmas and S. Damian, according to which Urban the Eighth records how

Felix the Fourth had turned a temple, " Geminis urbis conditoribus super-
stitiose dicatum," into a church, " SS. Cosmae et Damiano fratribus." See
Trede, Das Heidenthum in der rnmischen Kirche, iv. 280. This makes the date^
oXthe arrival of Cosmas and Damian in Eome about 530 a.d. But is it not the
temple of Eomulus, the son of Maxentius, and not^of^ Bomulus and Eemus?

Xl] COSMAS AND DAMIAN. 99

that it was the temple of Castor and Pollux, and were reproved
by the saints for their impertinence.

But we can show in another way, and from an experience of
our own, that they discharged other Dioscuric functions. In
the year 1903 I visited the city of Egin on the upper Euphrates,
one of the most beautiful cities in Asia Minor, and one of the
worst devastated by the hideous massacres of the unspeakable
Turk. On the return journey we took a raft, floated on goat-
skins in the manner shown in the Babylonian monuments, with
the object of coming down the Euphrates to Kebana Maden.
The river just below Egin runs into a canon, and the stream
becomes a succession of rapids. The shooting of these rapids is
one of the pleasures of the journey. Just before we passed into
the canon, I noticed a ruined building on a cliff, and asked
what castle it was. The reply was, " It is no castle, it is the
ruined church of S. Cosmas and S. Damian." It was evident
that there had been a shrine of the saints towards which men
prayed before shooting the rapids. The attitude of mind which
leads to the establishment of such shrines is exactly expressed
in what Mr im Thurn tells us of the Indians in British Guiana\
" He [the Indian] always sees a spirit in any instrument that
does him harm. When he falls on a rock, he attributes the
injury to it. If he sees anything in any way curious or ab-
normal, or if, soon after, an evil befall him, he regards the thing
and the evil as cause and effect. Just as some rocks, viz., the
more peculiar, are more malignant than others, so it is not
every river, but every bend and portion of a river that has
a spirit ; spirits of falls and rapids are still more to be dreaded,
therefore people are more frequently drowned there." And
again he notes'^, " Before shooting a cataract for the first time,
on the first sight of any new place, striking rocks, &c., the
Guiana Indian arrests the ill-will of the spirits."

It is easy to see that something of the same kind must have
gone on amongst the boatmen of the upper Euphrates. They
must have formed the habit of averting the danger of the
passage of the canon by appeals in the first case to the spirits
of the stream, in the second place to the great Twin Brethren,
i Im Thurn, Indians of British Guiana, pp. 370, 377, 379. ^ p. 330,

7—2

100 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

and last of all to Cosmas and Damian, who take their place.
We thus discover, not only that Cosmas and Damian were at
home on the upper Euphrates, but that they were discharging
there, what one would not at first have expected, the function
of protecting those who travel by water, which is one of the
chief duties of the Twin Brethren.

We have now proved the points which we set before us,
that Cosmas and Damian are twins, that they displace the
Heavenly Twins and discharge their functions.

So exact was the correspondence between them that the
saints sometimes appeared, to those who incubated for healing
in their church, in the form of men riding on horses, and with
stars over their heads\

The cult of Cosmas and Damian has been shown to exist
inland, as well as on the sea-coast at Aegae. And the ques-
tion arises whether it has started from Aegae, or from some
point further inland.

We may, perhaps, get a little light on the subject from one
or two considerations. The cult at Aegae is easily explained:
Aegae was a centre of the worship of Aesculapius, with whom
and with whose methods Cosmas and Damian have so much in
common, and I half suspect that it was a centre of the worship
of the Twins, like so many other places in that corner of the
Mediterranean. So the prominence of Aegae is explicable.
But then there are other pairs of holy Anargyri besides Cosmas
_and Damian. A glance a,t a Greek calendar'* will show traces
of the worship of C3a-us and John, and an examination of their
Acta sjiows the same features as those of Cosmas and Damian.
Their proper home is in Egypt, where they appear in various
places; but the most honoured shrine is near Alexandria, where
Cyrus is still worshipped as Abu Kir (the English know it
as Aboukir), and gives his name to the sanctuary which appears
to have been originally known as Menuthis. Clearly Cyrus
and John are the Egyptian equivalents of Cosma s and Damian.
and of what lies behind Cosmas and Damian.

^ For this and many other interesting points see Diibner, De Incubatione,
pp. 68—80.

2 e.g. Jan. 31. Cyrus and John, the miracle-working anargyri.

June 28. The return of the relics of Cyrus and John, the holy anargyri.

Xl] CYRUS AND JOHN. 101

Now, when we examine the legends of Cyrus and John,
we fi nd that they are^not of Egyptian origin. We are told^
that John, indeed, belonged to Alexandria, but Cyrus was a
soldier who had come from Edessa. As we may be sure the
two saints travelled together^ and were natural as well as
spiritual brothers, we may assume that they came either from
Edessa or from somewhere in that region. If the reference to
Edessa is correct, then, bearing in mind the proof tliat has been
given that the Edessan Church in its first period regarded
Jesus and Thomas as twins, we might suggest that Cyrus and
John was a substitute for 6 Kupfo? koI ©eo/za?. If, however,
we do not take Edessa, the birthplace of Cyrus, too literally, as
meaning the actual city, but interpret it as meaning some place
in the neighbourhood of that famous city, then we might think
of the city Cyrrhus" as the point from which the cult of Cyrus
and John emanated, and explain in that way the singular Cyrus,
who is evidently the predominant partner. Or we may take
Cyrus and John as real people, practising medicine on the lines
of Aesculapius and the Twins, and simply say that they came
from the north-east angle of the Mediterranean.

The probability seems to me to be against the reality of the

^ See Diibner, I. c. p. 89.

2 That they were brothers appears from two passages quoted by Diibner
(I. c. p. 95) from Sophronius's account of the miracles of Cyrus and John.
KPpos e^^t^s dva(paiv€Tai 'Iwdvvrjv avv avrw top ddeXipbv eirayo/xefos. KCpos ■^v 6
deairicTLOs 'ludvvrjv rov dde\(pbv de^ibv iTrayofievos. Since Sophronius is said to
have written his account as a return for medical treatment which he had
himself received, we might at first assume that tradition located Cyrus and
John in Alexandria at the beginning of the seventh century. But this date
would be too late, and would be a misunderstanding. Perhaps the saints
appeared to him in a dream, while the good Sophronius was incubating. Their
cult had enjoyed two hundred years' run, at the very least, before Sophronius
began to write about them.

^ This suggestion was first made to me by my friend Mr Sanders, of the
American mission at Aintab, who thinks that the original sanctuary of Cosmas
and Damiau at Cyrrhus is now covered by a Moslem ziaret. For a confirmation
of this we may refer to the miracles wrought by Cosmas and Damian as given in
Wagnereck, Syntagma Historictim de Sanctis Anargyris C. et D., p. 496, where
a woman from Cyrrhus is healed and where it is expressly stated that the bodies
of the saints lie at Cyrrhus : e/c tujv KvpecrT-nKwu nepG>v ttjs dvaroXiis, '4vda to.
ri/xLa Xii^pava tQjv davnaaruv tqvtwv dyiuiv koI dipairovTuv rod Xpiarov Ko(X/j.d Kai
Aafiiavov dirbKuvTai.

102 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

existence of Cyrus and John, for we are sure that Cosmas and
Damian are a fiction, and Cyrus and John are only a feeble
copy of them.

That Cosmas and Damian do not themselves come from
Edessa, I regard as almost certain. The Twins in Edessa were
displaced in another way. And although it can be shown that
Cosmas and Damian secured a certain foothold in the city at
an early date, it was only a ySr;/za ttoSo'?. They had a martyrium
on the north-east of the city, of which I have not been able to
find any traces remaining. And 1 suspect that their healing
virtues were transferred from this martyrium to a mosque in
the neighbourhood known as Hekim Dede (the Physician Saint)
where the Christian women still take their sick children for
ablution in the fountain (or did, up to the time of the great
massacres), which intimates the existence of an ancient sanc-
tuary. It may be worth while to examine for traces of the
shrine of Cosmas and Damian in the literature of the place.

The Chronicle of Edessa has an entry under 28th October,457,
in which we are told that upon the death of Mar Hibha, the
Bishop of Edessa, Nonnos succeeded to his place, and that the
said Nonnos built a chapel to John the Baptist and a leper
house outside the Sun Gate : and that he also erected in the
same neighbourhood a martyrium to Cosmas and Damian.

From this we may conclude that the worship of Cosmas and
Damian was now introduced into Edessa for the first time ; if
this be correct, the period is too late to allow of the diffusion of
the cult from Edessa as a centred It is more reasonable to
suppose that it has reached the city late and from without.
For this reason I am inclined to believe that the cult reached
Edessa either from Aegae'^ or from some other centre between

1 The saints were at home in Aleppo by the beginning of the fifth century,
for Eabbula saw a blind man healed in their church. See Overbeck, Life of
Eabbula, p. 170.
- > - Lucius, Die Anfcinge des Heiligenkultes, pp. 259 — 261, tries hard to prove
that C. and D. only displace Asklepios and not the Twins : and that, therefore,
Aegae is the centre of diffusion. But this will not do, in view of the proof that
we have given that C. and D. discharged other than medical functions, and
that they are actually described as Twins. As to the case of Zenobius and
Zenobia, who are brother and sister (? twins) and belong to Aegae, where
Zenobius does miraculous healings, that does not prove anything against the

Xl] S. POLYEUCTES. 103

Aegae and Edessa, such as Cyrrhus. The reference of the
martyrologies to Cyrus, the Alexandrian Dioscure, as coming
from Edessa may be due to a reminiscence of Cyrus, Bishop
of Edessa, who came to the office in 489. That is as far as
we can get with the evidence before iis, and I allow that the
conclusions are not as definite as one could wish. Perhaps we
may obtain some fresh light on the matter from another quarter.
Meanwhile we may say that we have established the
existence of the cult of the Twins and the reform of the cult in
Asia Minor. Over and above the references which we have
already given, there is the very interesting and important case
of Polyeuctes, whom we have shown to be a mere substitute for
Polydeuces^ {pace Corneille and M. Aube). So that we have
the same tendency at work in Armenia, and apparently at an
early date, for we learn from Gregory of Tours that the cult of
Polyeuctes was great in Constantinople and in Paris in and
before his day. 1 do not think that there is anything that
I wish to add to what I have said elsewhere concerning
Polyeuctes. He was honoured at Caesarea in Cappadocia as
well as at Melitene^ ; but it seems probable that Melitene is the
original home of the cult. In the year 1903 I visited Malatiya,
i.e. the modern city which answers to the ancient Melitene,
from which it is removed by a distance of some miles. A few
notes may perhaps be useful on the results of the visit. The
ancient Melitene is now known by the name of Eski Scheher,
and is almost deserted. The walls of the ancient city are in
a good degree of preservation, but inside them there was little

twinship of C. and D. : it looks like another attempt to get rid of the Dioscuri
in Aegae. They must have been honoured along with Asklepios. And cf.
Euseb. Piep. Ev. i. 10, p. 39, quoting Sanchouiathon : oi eina. iraloes SuSe/c
Kd^eipoi, Kai 6 i'Sios avTHv dSeX^os 'A(TK\-qTn6s.
^ See Dioscuri, p. 55.

2 The old Syriac martyrology of a.d. 411 has three references to the worship
of Polyeuctes, as follows :

Jan. 7. At Melitene. Polyeuctes.
Jan. 22. At Nicomedia. Polyeuctos.
May 20. Timotheus and Polyeuctos, the confessors.
This martyrology has been shown by Achelis to have for its chief source an
ancient Arian martyrology of Nicomedia. Its early date justifies what we said
above as to the antiquity and early diffusion of the cult of Polyeuctes.

104 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. XI

but planted fields, gardens of tobacco, &c. There were two or
three old mosques, one of them very fine, which had undergone
some restoration recently at the order of the Sultan. I could
find in it no Greek inscriptions or Christian signs, though there
were plenty of non-Moslem elements in the building. Upon
enquiry from the natives, I succeeded in finding the ruins of
the old Christian church. It has sunk a good deal below the
level of the fields. At first sight it appeared to be Armenian,
for there were Armenian inscriptions and crosses lying about ;
on entering the church itself, one found Byzantine slabs with
Greek crosses and inscriptions, usually in the form

Tc >rc

N I KA
as we have it on Byzantine coins. Sometimes it was simply

Tc XC
as on a fine slab, with a cross and floral ornaments.

The altar stone was lying in situ close to the short stone
pillar upon which it had formerly been supported. Close to it
stood an ancient pagan altar. There was no inscription on it,
but only a very simple carved device. The evidence was
sufficient that the Armenian church had been formerly a Greek
church, and the Greek church had been originally a pagan
sanctuary. There was no trace, that I could find, of any
occupation of the place by the Syrians, who were at one time
very strong in Melitene. A pagan sanctuary, but of what deity
or deities? Was it the church of the Twins, i.e. of S. Polyeuctes?
I had no means of determining.

On returning to Malatiya, I consulted the Armenian priests
on the matter, but got little information. One of them, how-
ever, knew the story of S. Bolioctos, as he called him, and
proceeded to tell it to me. His suggestion was that the church
of Polyeuctes was not to be looked for in Malatiya, i.e. in Eski
Scheher, but in the monastery of Ordoos, where S. Thaddeus
was buried. The value of which hint, to myself, lay in the fact
that S. Thaddeus is a Dioscure, and in all probability the first
substitute for S. Thomas. But it runs counter to the Armenian
Acts of Polyeuctes which make Melitene the place of his
martyrdom. In any case, the old Greek church in Melitene
replaced a pagan sanctuary.

CHAPTER XII.

That the Heavenly Twins luere worshipped at Edessa, and were
displaced there, in the first instance, by a cult of Jesus and
Thomas.

The most importaut matter that was opened ap in Dioscuri
in the Christian Legends was the proof that Edessa was a
centre of the worship of the Heavenly Twins, and that when_
the city became Christian the Twins were d isplaced by Jesus
and Judas Thomas, the latter of whom was assumed to be the
tvvin brother of Jesus.

The starting-point of the investigation was the observation
of a peculiar feature in the Syriac Acts of Judas Thomas, which
persisted in speaking of Thomas as the twin of our Lord, and
in making them perform actions which are the conventional
deeds of the Dioscuri. The case was strengthened by an
observation of the extent to which the scribes had tried to get
rid of the statement that Judas was the twin of Jesus, by
substituting for twin an almost equivalent word which means
abyss, Tehoma for Taimia, by which correction they made
nonsense of the text'. Even in the Greek translation of the
Syriac Acts it was often possible to trace the original Syriac
peculiarity.

From this point it was argued that the worship of the
Twins must have been at home in Edessa, and the confirmations
were abundant that they were honoured there as the Morning

' The Greek Synaxarists got out of the difficulty in a simpler way, by
making the language metaphorical. Thus my Synaxaiion for Oct. 6th com-
ments upon our Lord's statement, " I am not Judas, but the brother of Judas,"
as follows: 'Eyih Sev el/xai 6 Qajfids dXX' el/xai. d8e\(p6s toO Qu/nd Kara x^-P'-"' ^^^
goes on to say that anyone who abandons all for Christ will become not only y
His brother but the co-heir of His kingdom.

106 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

and Evening Star, The chief support came from the side of
literature (as in the Orations of Julian), of archeology (from the
parallel features of the worship of Mithra), and from the actual
coinage of the Abgar dynasty (on which the stars of the great
Brethren are constantly to be seen^). And it was further
shown that the most striking monuments of Edessa are a pair
of lofty columns, which were held to be votive column s in
honour of the Dioscuri, and to contain an inscription to that.
effect.

Now, with regard to these points, for which reference must
be made to Dioscuri, no serious exception has been taken,
unless it be with regard to the decipherment of the inscription
on the pillars, which Mr Burkitt inclined to think hazardous.
Whatever was said with regard to the Dioscurism of the Acts
of Thomas has been confirmed by the observation of fresh
allusions beyond what I had recorded. But with regard to the
inscription and its decipherment there has been natural hesita-
tion, and I have now to go over the ground again and see what
fresh light can be thrown upon it. I will transcribe a few
sentences from Dioscuri to introduce the matter, premising that
when I wrote on the subject first I was dependent upon the
transcription and decipherment of Professor Sachau, plus a
casual examination, and that since writing upon it I have had
the opportunity of seeing the inscription again for myself, and
that a photographic copy of it lies before me.

" Everyone who has visited Ourfa (Edessa), that city of
saints, scholars and martyrs, wall remember its most conspicuous
feature, the two colossal pillars which rise skyward from the
citadel, and which are admittedly known to the native popula-
tion as the Throne of Nimrod. Of these twin pillars the more
southerly is inscribed in archaic Syriac characters, near the
middle of the column, with a statement that someone, whose
name has not been deciphered, made this pillar and a statue for

^ The primitive man does not know that the Morning and Evening Star are
the same star; nor does the population of Asia Minor know it to this day. I
made some enquiries, but never found a case to the contrary. In the same
way, among the Maoris of New Zealand, the Morning and Evening Star are
said to be the eyes of the two children of Maui. See Polack, Manners and
Customs, I. 16.

XIl] THE TWINS AT EDESSA. 107

Queen Shalmath, the daughter of Ma'nu. The statues, for we
should probably read the word in the plural, have disappeared
though they might very likely be recovered by excavation
round the base of the pillars on which they once stood."

The principal thing to correct in this statement relates to
the position of the inscription, which was said to be half-way up
the shaft of the column, and which Sachau says he tried to read
with a telescope. As a matter of fact, the inscription is at no
great height, not more than about 12 feet from the base of
the column. The height of the successive courses of the
masonry is about 19 inches. The inscription is on the 7th
and 8th courses, i.e. between 11 feet and 12 feet 8 inches.
The height of the drum of the column is 18 inches, and of the
square base on which it stands 18 inches. The number of
courses is 27, and if we allow three courses for the super-
imposed capital, we get a height of 47 feet 6 inches, which with
the base makes close on 50 feet. So the inscription is certainly
not half-way up the column. A large piece of the column has,
with considerable skill, been cut out, and the triumphant "No
God but God" has been written below the erasure. The
successive courses of the column, where not cut away, are round
like millstones. Where the stone has been cut away there
must have been either something in the inscription or an
objectionable carving which provoked the hostility of the
Moslems.

It is difficult to make a photograph of the inscription, as
the column is near the edge of the cliff on which the citadel
stands ; and the inscription looks over the cliff towards the city.
According to Professor Sachau's reading, we were informed that
someone had made the pillars and the statue (or statues) for
Shalmath the queen, the daughter of Ma'nu.

At this point Sachau, whose copy read,

proposed to amend the reading to

and to translate it, " made this pillar and statue, the image of
Shalmath." To this I took objection on the ground that the

108 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

expression was pleonastic, and proposed to read instead, "the
statue of the Figures for Shahnath," on the ground that
the term was the old Edessan term for the Heavenly Twins.
The exact spelling of the word in dispute I conjectured to be
very near the Mandaean form yCA:srX» - for the name of the
third sign of the Zodiac. We must now try to read the
inscription from the photograph.

Before doing so I must draw attention to an important
collateral discovery that has been made between my two visits
to Ourfa (Edessa) in 1890 and in 1903. A mosaic was dis-
covered in 1901, in the middle of the court of the Great Khan,
outside the north gate of the city, which is evidently by the
same hand as erected the column. It has been carried off to
Constantinople, where it has been relaid by an Italian artist in
the floor of the Museum^ I have a tolerable photograph of it-.
The mosaic consists of six portraits, and Syriac names are
attached to them. Besides this there is an inscription in Syriac
by the artist or the person who employed him. According to
my reading the names are :

Aphtliusa.

Bar Garmu.

Garmu.

Shumu.

Asu.

Shalmath.

Bath Laha (?for Bath Alaha).

The portrait in No. 5 is the portrait of Shalmath, and is the

lady described in the inscription on the pillar. Moreover, the

name in No. 1, Aphthusa, is the missing name to be restored on

the first line of the inscription on the column ; as can easily be

verified^.

^ The tomb, itself, has unhappily been filled in.

^ A few letters are cut by the edge of the photograph : from a rapid exami-
nation of the mosaic at Constantinople, I think my transcript is correct.

2 Sachau read ^ • o • av2>.-^ or -^ • o«\a.^

and conjectured y^2^on \j\'=\ -^ .

His first reading was very nearly right, and only needed the addition of a single
letter.

rdiooii\J^-^

Ctsn-ii^ T>=3

CVin-lis^

cvsncoc

OXIOt^

\\*-r,\ V.

^i«ir7i\ «v=3

XIl] THE TWINS AT EDESSA. 109

The long inscription on the mosaic reads :

i.e. "I, Aphthnsa, the son of Garmu, have made this house^ of
eternity for myself and for my children and for my heirs for
ever."

The inscription can be compared with that on the shaft of
the column, and the connexion between them will be evident.
They begin in exactly the same way and have a similar motive.
Someone has made something for somebody. The handwritings
seem at first sight to belong to different periods, but that is
due to the material. It is not easy to write Syriac in mosaic.

Here, then, we have the unexpected good fortune of actually
finding the people spoken of in the inscription. Shalmath is
here, and her portrait ; and Aphthusa is here, and his picture
also ; his father too, and perhaps his mother and wife. The
names betray, what we might have expected from the Abgar
Ma'nu dynasty, that they are not pure Syrian. Such names as
Garmu, Asu, Shurau' are not easily paralleled amongst the
Syriac population. It is, however, highly probable that in-
vestigation might bring traces of them to light. For example,
a few miles out of Ourfa there is a beautiful village, named
Garmousch, which I visited in order to see a splendid copy of
the Armenian Gospels in the church. This must have been a
Syriac village in the old days, and I suspect that its name is
made up out of the Garmu of our inscription. Probably the
same name is involved in "T^' ^Vy^^ - (= Sa/x-v^tyepa/tio?) which

1 The nearest form I can get to this is Bar Shuma in Sachau's eighth
inscription from Edessa.

110 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

occurs in the Edessene literature and inscriptions. I notice
that in Addai, p. 31, we have among the princes of Abgar,
"Abdu and Garmai, and Shamsgram, and Abubai and Maher-
dath." Here Garmai, or Garmi, must be the same as our
Garmu. We get the same name in Beth-Garmai, the place
from which came Simeon, who translated Eusebius' Ecclesias-
tical History. The actual name Garmu is found amongst the
Sinaitic inscriptions, and in composition as well as in the
simple form. For instance, we have Garm-Alaha, which
appears in a Latin inscription as Garmalla (see Lidzbarski,
Nordsem. Insch. p. 252). I do not know what this curious
compound can mean. It looks as if Garmu were originally the
name of a deity, but perhaps the literal translation hone or
' member of God may be justifiable. Bar Garmu would still
have to be explained.

Of the other names, Bathlaha is the most striking ; daughter
of God is a strong assertion of celestial kinship ; but it has its
parallel amongst the Syrian names of later date, where we find
Barlaha as a proper name\ It is possible to find Assyrian
parallels to some of these names, but on the whole their
V affinities appear to be with Nabatean and Palmyrene, But
however this may be, we have discovered a family sepulchre
of the royal family, or one of the leading families at Edessa.
^ They call it, in Hebrew style, their House of Eternity -. And
the future life, if I have deciphered rightly, they call the Days
of Eternity.

Now let us return to the column and transcribe the inscrip-
tion by the aid of the photograph. A glance shows why a
part of the inscription was illegible. A portion of the stone
has been cut away, so that we have not only a large piece

1 It occurs on an inscription from Salona in Dalmatia as the name of a
Syrian priest of the cult of Jupiter Dolichenus : see Ephem. Epig. 2. 529.

2 The same term in another inscription copied by Sachau from a cave to the
west of the castle, which is dated in the year 805 [ = 494 a.d.], runs as follows :
"In the mouth the former Teshrin of the year 805 was completed The House of
Eternity in the days of Mar Elias the Abbot and Mar Abraham the Deacon and
Mar John the Deacon and the rest. Praise be to our Reviver. Amen."
Sachau notes that the same term is found in the Palmyrene inscriptions.

XIl]

THE TWINS AT EDESSA.

Ill

sliced off the column, but also a number of sunk holes, where
some apparatus appears to have been suspended.

1=3

Hole

■V=a

f<C=^ + + + 2^ a^^'=n

Column cut
away

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

«i^-i

Tin

Thei-e are no diacritic points to distinguish n from n : but
in most cases we can tell easily what to read. In the third
line we must certainly complete ^n-n^, "I have made";
perhaps the complete line may be read ^n^a^^^ cv:=n-ii^ -ira.
The fifth line shows no sign whatever of the conjectural reading
TOovixA- which Sachau proposed, and which I followed with an
explanation. It seems that the reading is m^'TiN^ or, perhaps,
^<^4ii»Ai»., the second letter might conceivably be i, but as
it reaches the top of the stone, I conclude it is meant to be
\ The attempt to read the inscription as 'r«i_i;x>V. - (= the
Figures) must be abandoned. But what does it mean as it
now stands ? The explanation lies in the following direction.
There is no need to resort to conjectural emendation nor to
alter the reading of the stone ; the word is the Syriac "^iiXn. =
young man, which is the Hebrew D^y and apparently the
Assyrian Alam. It is therefore something to do with "the
youths," and in all probability a dual formation. The dual
has disappeared from the Syriac, but if the form were similar
to the Arabic dual, it would be ~-^irTaAs=>., which is very near to
what we have on the monument. The inscription says straight
out that it was " the statue of the [two] youths." The problem
is, therefore, solved, and only needs a little illustration. The

112 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH, XII

main point that requires elucidation is the use of the word
'Alim for a Dioscure. We expected, as was stated in Dioscuri,
that the Syriac equivalent for the Twins would be Salme, or
something similar. It is, therefore, interesting to note that
from very early times the Dioscuri had been understood by
this title 'Alim. Prof Zimmern, writing in Schrader's Keilin-
schriften u. Alte Testament (ed. iii. p. 363), discusses a curious
duality in the old Babylonian description of the moon ; the
waxing and the waning moon appear to have been identified
with Sin and Nergal, and the duality was expressed by calling
them the Great Twins, which again, by another identification,
became the Zodiacal sign. So Zimmern puts the case, and it
might be thought that the transformations needed a little
more explanation. This, however, does not concern us here.
What does concern us is that Zimmern shows, from the cunei-
form inscriptions, that these two aspects of the lunar pheno-
mena were expressed by calling the moon-god Ellame, i.e. the
Twins. And then Zimmern adds the following pertinent note :
" The word Ellame {IllamS) belongs perhaps to d*?!? (young
man), so that Ellame as a dual would mean 'the two young
men,' i.e. the Dioscuri." In the same way he explains two
other transformations of the Babylonian Nergal \ where he
bears the names oi Ahnu and Alamu, i.e. the young man and
the young woman. It was interesting to find that Zimmern
had come so close to the explanation which we had ourselves
arrived at, that the 'Alime are the Dioscuri.

With this we may perhaps leave the inscription, though
there is room for further study of its incomplete portions.

We need not hesitate to say that the proof that Dioscurism
wa s a part of the State religion at Edessa is reasonably com-
plete, and does not need any further defence.

1 As I have said, it is not easy to follow Zimmem in his study of the trans-
formations of the Babylonian Nergal; but it leads him to one very pretty
Biblical emendation in Cant. G^", "fair as the sun, clear as the moon, terrible
as the Dioscuri," reading ni7i"13 for DIPJIJ.

CHAPTER XIIL

That the Edessan displacement of the Heavenly Twins can he
paralleled in Western documents and traditions.

However startling the Edessan displacement of the
Heavenly Twins may seem to iis, it will not be possible to
limit the statement that Jesus and Thomas were twins to
Edessa. It occurs elsewhere, and we can hardly draw any
conclusions as to its meaning until we have first taken pains
to collect all the facts. And one of the facts to be pondered
is that the same feature occurs in Western documents and
traditions. It is possible that such documents and traditions
may find their parentage in Edessa, and that the Edessan
beliefs may find their explanation in the Ebionite character of
the primitive Edessan Church : but we must first examine how
far the beliefs spread, and in what form they occurred. We
may perhaps open the matter in the following way.

Some time since, I think it was in the autumn of 1901,
my friend W. C. Braithwaite was showing me a vellum leaf
of an old book, which he had purchased from a London book-
seller. On looking at it I was surprised to find that it contained
a peculiar form of the legends for S. Thomas's Day, the opening
sentences of which ran as follows :

" In festo saiicti thome lectio prima. Thomas discipulus X didimus

nominatur et iuxta latinam lingiiam xj5i geminus ac similis saluatori.
audiendo incredulus, uidendo fidclis fuit."

The account goes on to describe the mission of S. Thomas
to the Parthians and the Indians. But what is strange is that
S. Thomas is explained in Latin as Christi geminus, Christ's
twin. This cannot be a transcriber's mistake, for the explana-
tion continues with ac similis saluatori, that is, he was the
H. 8

114 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

- double of the Saviour; and it follows from this that the
" Gh'isti " in the first line belongs not to " discipulus " but to
the following " didymus," the expression " Christi didimus "

' being translated into " Christi geminus." From which it is
easy to infer that " disciptdus" has been added to relieve the
difficulty, a well-meant correction, but one which does not go
far enough; or if we leave '"discipulus" in the text, we must
edit a comma after it. Here then we have the Edessan belief
stated almost in the words of the Acta Thomae. We may now
pass on to the lectio secunda, which opens as follows :

"Hie est thomas qui interpretatur abyssus uel geminus; quod grece
dicitur didymus ; quae utraque interpretatio bene congruit statui eius.
Didimus enim recte uocatur, propter dubium cor in fide resurrectionis
dominiccxe. Abyssus qvioque dici potuit, cum altitudinem dominicae
uirtutis resurrectione celebrata fide certa penetrauit, &c."

Here the lesson introduces the text of S. Thomas' name ;
he is called Thomas, which means " abyss " or " twin." It is
the common explanation of the Onomastica and of mediaeval
writers^ But it will be noticed that the writer evades the
natural meaning of twin and proceeds to allegorize : his ex-
planation is, he was called " twin " because he was of two
minds about the resurrection. Evidently, when a man runs
into allegory over a simple statement like this he has some-
thing to run away from. He then proceeds to allegorize the
abyss, which was natural enough. It will be remembered that
the substitution of abyss for twin was one of the tricks of the
transcribers of the Acts of Thomas. However, when one has
secured one's abyss, it is natural that one should make a
mystical interpretation.

This leaf then contains matter for thought ; it shows that
the Legenda Sanctorum contained in the West until quite
a late date the statement that Thomas was called " Twin "
because he was the twin brother of Jesus. We must try and

1 Thus Ordericus Vitalis, Hist. Eccl. (ed. le Prevost), says (i. 306): "Thomas
abyssus et Didymus interpretatur geminus, quia Saluatori similis est, redimitus
multimodis uirtutum cbai'ismatibus." The language shows that the writer
understood by geminus the twin of the Lord; for he explains that he was very
like the Saviour.

Xlll] THE TWINS IN THE BRKVIARV. 115

find out some more about the history of this curious tradition.
The leaf contains at the beginning legenda for S. Lucy's Day:
her celebration belongs to Dec. 13, and S. Thomas to the 21st.
So that it is a leaf out of the Aurea Legenda, or perhaps out
of a Breviary.

The matter which we have quoted turns up in the Breviary,
and strange to say with the same peculiarities. For example,
in an Italian breviary, belonging also to my friend Braithwaite,
and dating from the fourteenth century, we have the Thomas
lections in the following form, which may be compared with
what we have given above.

" Thomas hebraice, latine abyssvis uel geminus interpretatur et graece
didimus nominatiir quia utraque interpretatio eius statui congruit. Didimiis
recte uocari potuit, propter dubium cor in credendo efFectum dominicae
resurrectionis ; abyssus, quia altitudinem dominicae uirtutis in resur-
rectione certa fide penetrauit, et iuxta linguara Latinam, Christi geminus
similis saluatoris, audiendo incredulus uidendo fidelis."

Here we have the same statement made as to the
twinship of Thomas and his likeness to the Lord. And the
evidence can be multiplied. Down to the fourteenth century
we find the belief in circulation. The observation is a very
striking one. For certainly no such belief can have been
invented in the middle ages, and as we have found it existing
in the first ages of the Eastern Church there must be a
continuous line of documents or of traditions bringing the
belief in question down from the earliest times almost to our
own day. And we can take some steps into the earlier period
in which the statements of the Breviary and the Legenda
Sanctorum were current. If, for example, we turn to the works
of Isidore of Seville, in the beginning of the seventh century,
we shall find a treatise called De ortu et obitu patrum. The
history of S. Thomas will be found amongst the rest of the
worthies whom Isidore chronicles, and in the following form^ :

" Thomas apostolus Christi, didymus nominatus, et iuxta Latinam
linguam Christi geminus, ac similis Saluatori, audiendo incredulus, uidendo
fidelis. Hie Euangelium praedicauit Parthis et Medis, et Persis, Hyrca-
nisque et Bactrianis, et Indis tenentibus orientalem plagam, et intima

1 Isidor. Hisp. I, c. 184.

8—2

116 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

gentium penetrans, ibique praedicationem suam usque ad titulum suae
passionis perducens : lanciis en,im transfixus occubuit in Calamina ciuitate
Indiae, ubi et sepultus est in honore." •

Here, then, we have the origin of the lectio prima from
which we started our enquiries, with the variation of aj)ostolufi
for discipulus, and we must, as before, alter the punctuation,
' putting the comma before Christi and not after it. Probably
we should also remove apostolus. The burden is now removed,
to some extent, from the Breviary and Legenda Sanctorum
and laid on the back of S. Isidore. But where did Isidore
get the statement that Thomas was Christi geminus ?

Will all the traditions go back to Edessa, or shall we be
obliged to admit that they occur independently in different
parts of the Church ? It is clear that we have a very important
enquiry before us, and one which is far-reaching, beyond the
scope of the present book. We may say, however, that if
the tradition is entirely Edessan, it probably came into the
y West through diffusion of the Thomas legends in the form of a
translation. I do not mean that there are no other transfers
of literature and tradition, but that the Acts of Thomas are
' the most popular and wide-spread contribution which the
Syrians of the East made to the legends of the West.

Nor do I mean that there are no other traces in the Syrian
Church of the twinship of Jesus and Judas Thomas. There
is more to be deduced from the documents of Edessa which
points to the same conclusion. But these features will probably
not be found outside of Mesopotamia,

The explanations that '^hori\&?, = ahyssus = geminus Christi
must have been thoroughly diffused in the early Syrian Church.
I will show this for the equation of Thomas with abyssus by a
curious reference in Ephrem's commentary on the Diatessaron'.

Ephrem is discussing the Betrayal by Judas, and he says,

" Venit iniquus Judas, ut magnam suam abyssum consummaret, quod
Dominus mite modo declarauit, ostendens, se esse bonum et fontem
misericordiae, dicens, Judas, num osculando, &c."

Here Judas, who fills up the abyss of sins, is Judas Thomas,
' and Ephrem has made a mistake something like the one of which

1 Ed. Mosinger, p. 235.

— X

XIIl] S. JAMES A DIOSCURE. 117

he so often is guilty, where he confuses Mary Magdalene with
the Blessed Virgin. Judas is Judas Thomas, who is Judas the
abyss, and so he fills up the abyss of his sins. The explanation
of the name of Thomas must have been a commonplace in
Edessa. We knew already that Thomas to the Syrians was
Judas Thomas ; that explanation is in the Syrian New Testa-
ment as well as in the Apocryphal Acts. It is now further
demonstrated that Judas Abyssus was also known in early
Syriac. We should therefore have little difficulty in main-
taining an Edessan origin for the whole of the equation
Thomas = geminus = abyssus.

In the same way the statement made in the Latin legends
that Thomas was similis saluatori can be explained at once by
a number of passages in the Acta Thoniae, such as " Why
art thou like to God thy Lord ?" " Thou art as like to Him
as if born of Him," and indeed the whole of the dramatic
action of the story turns on the assumed likeness between
Jesus and Thomas.

It is not generally known that there are other Apostles
suggested by traditions as twins or even as twins of Jesus,
and apparently with the same object of explaining the meaning
of Thomas in the apostolic lists : thus we have something very
like a case of Jacobus Thomas to set over against the Syriac — 7>
Judas Thomas. In the apocryphal correspondence between
Ignatius and S. John, the former expresses a wish to pay the
latter a visit at Jerusalem, where he hopes also to have the
opportunity of seeing S. James the Just, of whom he hears the
report that he is in every respect as like to Jesus as if he had
been his twin brother :

"Similiter et illuin iienerabilem Jacobum qui cognominatur Justus;
quem referunt Christo Jesu simillimum uita et modo conuersationis, ac ___
si eiusdem uteri frater esset getnellus."

And that he really means to describe S. James as the twin
of Jesus, appears from his further remark, that " when I see
him, they tell me that I shall see the very corporeal aspect of
Jesus Himself"

" Quem, dicunt, si uidero, uideo ipsum Jesum secundum omnia corporis
eius lineamenta."

118 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

Clearly someone, not necessarily the author of the apocryphal
letter, but at all events someone not very remote from him,
has had a belief in a Jacobus Thomas on the same line as the
Edessans had in Judas Thomas. Shall we say that he intro-
duced the belief in order to get rid of Judas Thomas ? The
objection is at once made that from the standpoint of ortho-
doxy nothing is gained by the substitution. It would be easier
to say that there were more attempts than one to explain
Thomas and to find his companion. In each of the two cases
before us Thomas is assumed to be the twin of Jesus, but a
different choice is made in the two cases as to which of the
brethren of the Lord is involved. It is not easy to refer the
belief in Jacobus Thomas to Edessa. Yet the writer of the
Ignatian Apocryphon plays on the likeness of Jesus and James,
much in the same way as the writer of the Acts of Thomas
does with Jesus and Judas.

This part of the apocryphal Ignatian correspondence is
very late and deserves no serious attention except for this one
point, that it shows the persistence of the attempts at the
explanation of the twin, whether in Edessa or elsewhere. Nor
are these, by any means, the only traces of the matter in
tradition and in folk-lore. The question of the limitation of
the belief that our Lord had a twin brother to the Church of
Edessa and to traditions derived from thence becomes more
difficult as the tradition itself becomes more diversified and
wide-spread. And it will probably be best to reserve the subject
for a more detailed treatment in another volume.

The Edessan belief in the twinship of Jesus and Judas
Thomas must, in any case, belong to the earliest period of
Christianity in that city. It must, for example, be earlier than
the period from which there has come to us the Doctrine of
Addai, at least in its present form. It seems to imply that
Thomas is the Apostle of Edessa and not Addai, and, if so,
then it will follow that the original form of the Abgar legend
in which Christ promises to send one of His disciples to Abgar,
after His Ascension, relates to the sending of Thomas. We,
therefore, are suspicious that the original form of the message
was, "I am going up to my Father, who sent me, and when I

XIIl] ADDAI THE BROTHER OF JESUS. 119

have gone up to Him, I will send to thee one of my brethren,
who will cure the disease which thou hast and restore thee
to health." This suspicion was provoked in the first instance
by finding that Jacob of Serug, in his Homily on Abgar, makes
the quotation in one place in this form. The Homily is entitled,

On the Apostle Addai and King Abgar,

and is quoted as follows by Assemani in Bibl. Orient, i. p. 318 :
" after the ever blessed bridegroom was exalted to Heaven, He
resolved, as He had promised, to send, out of love, someone to
Abgar, and he chose for that purpose [Addai], one of His
brethren :

Here, Addai is called " one of the brethren of Jesus," which
is certainly a striking form of description, especially since
Addai has already been described as an Apostle. I first came
across the reference in Michaelis (ed. Marsh, IV. 369). Michael is
begins by saying that " Jacob, Bishop of Serug, who was born
in the year 4.52, describes Adaeus as brother of Christ." He
goes on to discuss the probability that Addai may be a real
Apostle and equivalent to Judas Thaddeus the Lord's brother.

The manuscript from which Assemani was quoting is
Codex Nitriensis, v. fol. 268. There is no need to transcribe
the text of the extract more fully : Jacob of Serug appears in
the rest of the passage to imply nothing beyond the ordinary
Syrian tradition that Jesus promised to send one of His dis-
ciples to Abgar (as the Doctrine of Addai also describes the
message), and fulfilled the promise by sending Addai. The
question whether the substitution of the word " brethren " for
"disciples" in a single clause of the Homily is a survival from
an earlier form of the story, seems to us one that cannot be
solved without further evidence from other quarters. Even
Jacob of Serug ought to be allowed to make an occasional slip
or to use sometimes an unfortunate expression, unless it should
turn out that the same suspicion to luhich we liave drawn
attention should recur front other quarters: and then his curious
language luould become significant.

CHAPTER XIV.

That there is a suspicion that Thomas luas also in Dioscuric

honour at Antioch.

It was pointed out in Dioscuri in the Christian Legends
that Antioch was one ofthe centres where the Dioscuri were
honoured, and that Tiberius had set up, outside the temple of
Dionysos, two columns in honour of the Theban Twins, Amphion
and Zethus. And it need not be supposed that this was the
first occasion of the worship of the Twins at Antioch. We could
point out that it was a common worship at that corner of the
Mediterranean. It was extant in Seleucia, the seaport of
Antioch, at Aegae, just across the bay, and I suspect at Rhossus,
just below Seleucia. And there is no reason to suppose that the
cult was unknown in such a great city as Antioch. Moreover,
we have some statements from John Malalas, to whom we owe
the previous statement about the columns set up by Tiberius
in honour of Amphion and Zethus, which suggest that the
worship was extant also in the days of Seleucus. For we are
told that Seleucus was so grateful to the high-priest Amphion
for his favourable auguries that he erected a pillar in his honour.
Notice the recurrence of the name Amphion in connexion with
the pillar. Either this means that there has been a misunder-
standing over a pillar erected to one of the Dioscuri, or the high-
priest, as often happens, bore the name of the deity upon whom
he attended. In either case the existence of the cult is involved^
unless we choose to say that both the coincidence in the name
and in the erection of a votive pillar is an accident, which
I should be slow to believe. It is more likely that it is really
a votive pillar, with an inscription to Amphion the Dioscure,
the immortal one of the Theban pair. Moreover we have the

CH. XIV] S. THOMAS AT ANTIOCH. 121

evidence of Seleucid coins for the worship of the Dioscuri at
Antioc h'. Assuming, then, that the Dioscuri were worshipped
in Antioch, we have to find out what became of them when
Antioch became a nominally Christian city. Did they turn
into saints or into martyrs ?

A reference to Dioscu7'i, pp. 48, 49, will show that my
suspicions had been aroused by the peculiarly celestial and
sidereal language employed by 8. Chrysostom (or occurring in
a sermon attributed to him), from which I inferred that
" Chrysostom had some knowledge of the previous ecclesiastical
history of the saint whom he was celebrating." This would not
necessarily mean that Thomas was a Dioscure at Antioch ; it
need not be Chrysostom's sermon, though it appears to be
sufficiently attested, and even if it were, he might have known
that Thomas had sidereal functions in other places than Antioch,
and might have discoursed on them elsewhere. But the language
employed is so suggestive, that it opens up a train of thought
on the very line which we just now were discussing, and sets
us asking, quite apart from Chrysostom, what became of the
Antioch Dioscuri ? Did they lea ve n o offspring, and was their Jy
cult torn up altogether by the root ? It is not usually the case ^\
in the great cities or centres of the ancient world^ It was not
so in Rome nor in Milan nor in Constantinople, nor in Paris
nor in Alexandr ia.

Let us for a moment fix our attention on the opening words
of the panegyric of S. Thomas. The preacher asks how he
shall introduce the subject. " Shall I preach Thomas as living ?
But the tomb proclaims him dead ! Shall I discourse of him
as dead ? The facts are against me ! The fact is, he is both
living and dead, both mortal and immortal ; man-like he died,
but like an angel he courses through the world. He is ' down'
in his lying and ' up' in his gladness-. No place could hide
him away ; he is the illumination of the whole world. He
rests in a tomb and rises like the sun." The tomb was clearly
close at hand.

_ -a

1 As on the c oins of Seleu cus II. (b.c. 240 — 226) : see Imhoof-Blumer, Monn.
gr. p. 427.

^ Kai KUTU Kelrai Kai avw eiKppaiveTai.

122 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

Then follow the sentences quoted in Dioscuri, where the
preacher dips into the nineteenth Psalm and asks if he shall
compare Thomas to a sun or a star.

The language is certainly Dioscuric ; and we are again led
to ask whether there is any evidence that Thomas was held in
especial honour at Antioch.

The Panegyric Orations of Cbrysostom follow the order of
the Calendar, and were, I suppose, delivered in that order and
at Antioch. The catalogue of them in the fifth volume of
Savile's Glirysostom runs as follows :

Sept. 4 (Antioch). In sanctum martyrem Babylam oratio prima.

In beatum Babylam oratio secunda : et contra

Julianum et gentiles.
Oct. 4 (?) In sanctas martyres, Bernicem et Prosdocen uir-

gines, et matrem ipsarum Domninam.
Oct. 6. In S. Thomam Apostolum et contra Arrianos :

et in eum qui in Thracia tyrannidem arri-

puit et caesus est, cum et ipse asset Arrianus.
Oct. 8 (Antioch). In sanctam Pelagiam martyrem.
Nov. 18 (Antioch). In sanctum martyrem Romanum.
Nov. 19 (Antioch). In s. mart. Barlaam.
Dec. 20 (Antioch). In S. Ignatium archiepiscopum Antiochiae

Magnae, Romam abreptum et ibi martyrio

affectum ; indeque rursus Antiochiam de-

latum.
Dec. 20 (Antioch). In S. Philogonium ex aduocato factum epis-

copum, &c.
«&c., &c.

On looking at this table we can see that Chrysostom is
following an Antioch Calendar, and celebrating the saints who
were martyred in Antioch or the immediate vicinity; six out of
the eight festivals were Antioch commemorations. The case
of the martyred girls and their mother on Oct. 4 is not quite
clear. They fled to Edessa (which Chrysostom describes as
a rustic but religious place) to preserve their chastity. Being
pursued, they flee to Hierapolis and drown themselves in the
Euphrates. I suspect that they are an Antioch family.

The only remaining case on our list is S. Thomas ; and it is
fair to conclude that it was one of the great festivals in the
Antioch Calendar ; if so, it may have been brought there from

XIV] S. THOMAS AT ANTIOCH. 128

Edessa, or conversely. So much is clear from the fact that
Chrysostom selects him for panegyric along witli Babylas,
Ignatius and the rest.

We have now established the early cult of S. Thomas at
Antioch, and we have suspected that Chrysostom knew of an
earlier form of the cult than the one actually practised in
his day.

And now we are going to make some hazardous conjectures,
which, if they do not commend themselves to critical judgment,
may be left on the high-piled heap of hypotheses which have to
be rejected on account of their too great rapidity and insufficient
sense of proportion.

If the reader will turn to the ecclesiastical history of Evagrius
Scholasticus, he will find two successive sections describing two
Antioch saints, named respectively Symeon the Silly (aaXo'i)
and Thomas the monk, who also pretended to be Silly (©tw/ia?
lxova')(o^ Kal avTO'i 7rpoa7roii]ro<i "^aXo^).

The word used is a striking one ; it is not classical Greek,
and at first sight one hardly knows what it means. And the
sense of surprise is increased on finding the successive mention
of two Antioch saints under this title. Evagrius has not much
to say of the freaks of S. Symeon (he was always pretending to
be immoral and really wasn't) ; and his information about
S. Thomas is even less to the purpose, as well as more scanty.
All that he knows is that Thomas came to Antioch from Coele-
Syria, founded a monastery for which the Church at Antioch
made an allowance, and quarrelled with the Church steward,
who struck him on the face. This is the last time, said Thomas,
for either of us that such a thing shall happen : whereupon
they both promptly died ; and when they were dead it was
found out that Thomas was a saint. And then comes the
important statement that his festival is still kept up with great
magnificence at Antioch {ov kuI rrjv en'icnov eoprrjv /u-e')^pL(;
rjfidSv 7ralBe<; ' AvTio')(^€a)v fieyaXoTrpeTTCOi; ajovcriv).

We may accept the evidence of Evagrius as to the existence
and splendour of the festival ; but who believes the festival
to be that of an idiotic monk ? And if it is a festival kept by
children, that only means that it is the religion of their fore-

124 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

fathers. Clearly we must find some more about the mad monk
aud about the companion idiot with whom Evagrius associates
him. Who is the monk Thomas 6 ^aXo'i ?

The answer is that he is

Thomas Salus Antiochiae,
and his name has been misunderstood and a legend made
out of it.

Symeon the Silly is also a guardian or genius of Antioch.
And now let us see whether we can identify the saints and
confirm the hypothesis. The city of Antioch was founded, as
Malalas tells us, upon a human sacrifice, which was repeated or
commemorated annually; and the virgin who was immolated at
the building of the city became, as in all such cases, the Life
and the Protection of the city. We have a similar state of
things in the neighbouring city of Laodicea, where the human
sacrifice was replaced by the annual offering of a stag. The
day of this sacrifice at Antioch is the birthday of the city ; and
we know the date, it was the 21st of May (Artemisius). This
festival will certainly have a successor in the Christian Calendar
of Antioch. Let us, then, look for it.

On the 24th of May we find the festival of Symeon Stylites
Junior, who lived on a pillar outside Antioch, and who was
constantly engaged in an aerial ministry to the people of
Antioch and their needs. His life is extant in Greek, and
written with great diffuseness for those who wish to follow his
stereotyped fortunes and mechanical miracles. He held a great
place in the affections of the Antiochenes, and I have no doubt
that when he died in 596 he was regarded as one of the great
patron saints of the city. That is, he was at all events a
candidate for the title of Salus Avtiuchiae. With him the
hagiologists record the story of his mother, and they tell us that
when she came to die she desired to be buried in the sepulchre
at Daphne where the blessed Thomas had been laid. And it is
generall}^ agreed that this is the Thomas whom Evagrius
mentions after his Symeon the Stupid. It follows, then, that
Antioch at one time possessed a S. Thomas with a tomb and a
famous festival, and that he was regarded as the Genius of the
city ; and that at some time near the end of the sixth century

XIV] S. THOMAS AT ANTIOCH. 125

S. Symeou Stylites Junior got his place and his honour, after
which Thomas was forgotten except that a certain cult of him
was still extant among the junior Antiochenes in the time of
Evagrius. Thus Thomas succeeds the Virgin Genius of Antioch,
and is himself succeeded by the Stylite. Now what Thomas is
this ? Can it be any other than the great Apostle ? And if so,
does not his festival begin to show parallel features with the
worship at Edessa ? His festival at Antioch in Chrysostom's
time was on October the 6th. This is the regular Greek date.
But since the birthday of the city is May 21st and the celebra-
tion of Symeon on May 24th, there must have been another
Thomas festival somewhere about that time. Now the Sun
enters Gemini on May 21st\ We suspect, then, that S. Thomas
was both the Genius of the city and a Dioscure. And it need
not seem strange that Thomas should discharge, in this way,
a double function. This is not at all an uncommon thing, as
Leucius points out, when cults are displaced by festivals of
the saints. In Seleucia S. Thekla displaces Athena and Sar-
pedon ; at Aegae we have shown reason to think that Cosmas
and Damian succeed to Asklepios and the Heavenly Twins;
S. Demetrius of Thessalonica occupies the place, apparently,
both of Demeter and the Kabiri, and so on. It must be
admitted that the hypothesis of a special cult of S. Thomas
at Antioch is beset with difficulties. Antioch is a Greek city,
and the question may be asketi whether a patron saint or
presiding Genius of the city would be likely to be called Saliis
in Latin instead of Ti;^?; or '^wrrjp in Greek ? Then there is
the further difficulty about the assumed tomb of Thomas at
Daphne. Is it likely that such a belief could have existed
without having left a strong mark on tradition ?

1 How sacred this day became in the mediaeval Church may be seen from a
rule of King Eene in 1474, quoted by Ducange, s. v. Gemini, in which certain
masses are ordered to be said, " et les vigiles solemnelles des trepassez, J e jour
devant Gemini a vespres. Id est vicesima dies Mali, nam sequenti sol Geminos
intrat." Sometimes the Twins are actually called S. Gemini.

CHAPTER XV.

That S. Ambrose became a Dioscure.

In a previous chapter we defended the position that
S. Ambrose was the creator of the Milanese saints, Protase
and Gervase, whom he evolved out of the locally-worshipped
Dioscuri, and with whose aid he wrought wondrous miracles
to the great discomfiture of the Arians. We have now to show
how he was mastered by his own creations and annexed to
their company ; for, after his death, Ambrose himself discharged
Dioscuric functions, as we shall now proceed to explain.

It was natural that Protasius and Gervasius should become
the protectors of the city of Milan, just as, for example, Donatian
and Rogatian protected the city of Nantes. And that they
undertook this part may be seen from an inscription which is
said to have been found in the place of their martyrdom (? the
Church of S. Protase by the Oak), according to which we are
informed that :

"...D. Joseph Vasques de Acunha, huius arcis praefectiis, hanc co-
lumnam ct subjectum ipsi lapidem, in quo S. Martyr Protasius, huius
civitatis et arcis defensor, securi percussus creditur."

Here we are told the tradition of the place and manner of
death of S. Protase, and the subsequent duties which devolved
upon him.

But, strange to say, we find in the middle ages that Protase
and Gervase neglected their duties, and S. Ambrose took them
over. It comes frmn Ambrose having grouped the Twins on
either side of him, as Caligula did when he set up his image
between them as Jupiter Latiaris, The thunderbolts grew to
Ambrose's hands. The hymn-writers depicted him so ;

" Tu verbi vibrans jaculum
Ut fulmen sternis Arrium,"

CH. XV] S. AMBROSE A DIOSCURE. 127

And so it came to pass, on a certain occasion, when Milan
was threatened by a German army, and the Milanese were, y^'
apparently, getting the worst of it, S. Ambrose took the field,
clothed in white and riding on a white horse, with a whip in
his hand, and turned back the invading hosts. God had
sent him to restrain the madness of the invaders, for as the
Chronicler says :

"Deus, tantorum malorum refrenator existens, misit beatum Am-
brosium, qui in albis cum scutica in manu visibiliter hostes victoria
potitos percussit, ex quo perdideruut vires et superati sunt."

Such was the story which was told of the fight at Parabiago ^
hL.1339, and it will be conceded at once that it is a Dioscuro-
phany. Elsewhere he is described as " albo insidens equo," and
" coriaceo minax flagello." These manifestations ought to have
been made by Protase and Gerva,sej_but„theyjhad retired. into
the background, and their traditions belonged to 8. Ambrose.

And indeed he had begunjo discharge these military duties f
quite early. Paulinus tells us of two occasions where he took
the field ; one was in the case of the Florentines, another when
he promised victory to Mascezel. Commonly on these occasions
it thundered amazingly. On one occasion he appeared with
a drawn sword, and with a terrible gaze menaced the emperor,
who was besieging the city. It is curious that in sacred art
the sword is the symbol of Protase and the scourge of Gervase.
Did Ambrose borrow these tokens ? In the case of the whip,
we may say " Yes " ; it was Gervase's whip, and went along
with the white horse. There can be no doubt about S. Ambrose
really having used the whip, for it was preserved at Milan,
wrapped in silk, and the faithful used to be permitted to
touch it and kiss it. At certain times it was carried through
the streets in a procession. I suppose that when Protase is I
represented with a sword and Gervase with a scourge, the
artists are drawing upon the legends of their death which
are found in the Ps.-Ambrosian letter to the bishops of Italy.
But the legend that Gervase had been scourged to death would
not suffice to transfer the whip to S. Ambrose ; the scourge
had an earlier history, and was the sign that Gervase was a
charioteer; then, in later days, it indicated the mode of his

128 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

death, while on anothei' line of development of tradition, it
became S. Ambrose's riding-whip ^

We have shown briefly that S. Ambrose appeared on
suitable occasions as a Dioscure, and discharged Dioscuric
functions. This does not convict him of any fraud or fiction,
for the appearances ^re posthumous, but it is one more proof,
if proof were needed, of the diffusion of the Dioscuric beliefs
in the Milanese quarter. Everything tends to confirm our first
judgment as to the real inwardness of the discovery of the two
martyrs.

Before leaving this point, we may ask the plain question
whether, in spite of the contentions to the contrary, S. Ambrose
does not himself definitely say that Protase and Gervase were
brethren. I mean that, without interpreting his language
about the martyrs being the stars of a beautiful night, and
so on, we can appeal to statements which may be his own,
and if so, would decide the point finally.

For example, it is known that the Ambrosian Breviary has
some hymns from Ambrose's own hand, and amongst these,
there is one in which he speaks in the first person as follows,
on the very subject of the recovery of the bodies of Protase and
Gervase :

" Grates tibi, Jesu, novas
Novi repertor muneris,
Protasio Gervasio
Cano repertis fratribus."

According to this hymn, Ambrose speaks of the recovery
of the brothers, Protase and Gervase. So it stands in the
edition of 1679 : but the Milanese scholars tell us that in
earlier editions and in the MSS. it stood with a variation in the
last line,

" Martyribus iuventis cano."

And Professor Ratti approves this last reading.

It is certainly curious to find the controversy introduced

1 In the volume of Ambrosiana the history of the flageUum of S. Ambrose
has been traced with great care by Calligaris through the whole period of the
middle ages. The idea that it represented the expulsion of the Arians, as Christ
drove the traders from the Temple, is too far-fetched to be tenable.

XV] S. AMBROSE A DIOSCURE. ' 129

into the hymn ; and when we examine the two forms, and
mark the syllables that are in stress, we shall see that the
form which is approved at Milan is non-rhythmical and im-
possible, while the one which they reject has its rhythm perfect,
as thus :

"Grates tibi, Jesu, novds

Novf repertor muneris,

Protdsio Gervdsio

Cano repertis frdtribus."

I have a strong feeling that the original form mnst be
very nearly like this, and that Ambrose did not write the non-
rhythmical line that he has been credited with. And that the
metrical form must be adhered to is conceded by the Milanese
musical editor (Garbagnati), who has published the liturgical
melodies for the Ambrosian hymns as an appendix to Colombo's
edition of the hymns themselves', and accented the lines as we
have done, with the necessary adoption of

"cano, repertis fratribus."

But a further test of the correctness would be to examine
all the Ambrosian hymns in the breviary, and see whether
Ambrose is likely to have begun a stressed iambic line with a
dactyl. We may grant, if you please, the theoretical possi-
bility of such a metrical feature in a music which is evolved
out of a series of iambic dimeters, even though we may be
reasonably certain that stress will soon become the master of
quantity. Upon examining the hymns, however, which are
attributed to S. Ambrose, we find not a single case of a line
heginnitig luitk a dactyl, outside the doubtful case which lue are
debating. On the other hand, there are plenty of anapaests ;
we have counted as many as twelve cases. The anapaest easily
survives in the accented verse. Here are one or two instances :

" Procedat e thalamo suo."
" Gemlnafe gigas substdntiae."
"Nobis tyranntts ad oppidum."
&c.

It is probable, then, that the editors of the hymns, other than
the musical editors, have been restoring the non-Ambrosian

1 Gli inni del breviario Ambrosiano, Milan, 1897.

130 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. XV

form. But, as I have not been able to study the MS. tradition
of the hymn, I will not press the argument. There is some-
thing to be said on the other side, for the hymn is, in part at
least, a versification of Ambrose's letter to Marcellina. We
merely suggest that the correct metrical form may, after all, be
the original.

If this Avere the true form, we should have Ambrose himself
to appeal to as to whether Protase and Gervase were twins ;
and we could then go on and confirm their equality from an
expression in a hymn of S. Paulinus, who is almost as good
an authority as S. Ambrose himself \

For Paulinus, in describing the paintings in the basilica of
Fundi, intimates that the altar contains relics of apostles and
martyrs :

"Hie pater Andreas et magno nomine Lucas
Martyr et inlustris sanguine Nazarius ;
Quosque suo deus Ambrosio post longa revelat

Saecula, Protasium cum. pare Gervasio.
Hie simul una pium conplectitur arcula coetum
Et capit exiguo nomina tanta sinu."

It will be difficult to make the expression " cum pare "
quite colourless ; one thinks at once of " par nobile fratrum."

^ Paulinus of Nola, ed. Hartel, voL i. p. 293.

CHAPTER XVI.

S. Michael as <i Diosciire.

It is significant of the high rank that the Dioscuri took
aniongst the gods and demi-gods in the ancient world, and of
the persistence of the popular worship of them and of the
legends associated with them, that in one case they seem to
have been displaced, not by a martyr or a pair of martyrs, but
by one of the archangels.

There was a sanctuary to S. Michael on the European side
of the Bosporus, which commemorated a somewhat indefinite
angelophany, which the local legends filled in with such detail
that we are able to recognize that it was really a Dioscurophany.
For the popular imagination transferred the appearance of
S. Michael to pre-Christian times and coupled it with the
voyage of the Argonauts. They said that it occurred at a
time when the voyagers were threatened by a certain King
Amykus, and in their defence flew a celestial being with wings
like an eagle, who was, it may be presumed, no other than the
great archangel. Now, whatever may have been the original
meaning of the shrine of S. Michael on the Bosporus, it is
clear that we have here a survival of the story of the conflict
between the Argonauts and the Bebryces, and especially of the
single combat between Amykus, the king of the Bebryces, and
Polydeuces, the Dioscure, so admirably told by Theocritus.
The scene has been shifted from the Asiatic side of the
Bosporus to the European, but we must not expect exact
geography, any more than harmonious chronology, fi-om folk-
lore. It seems clear that Polydeuces has here been replaced
by Michael, or, if we prefer it, that Michael has been credited

9—2

182 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

with the doughty deeds of Polydeuces. The only difference
is that in the Argonaut saga Polydeuces is still the human
hero, with hard fists and battered body, while in the later
legends he is deified and so has to descend into the arena from
a superior region and in celestial array. Otherwise the parallel
is sufficient, and on the Bosporus we are entitled to regard
S. Michael as a Dioscure. The evidence for the foregoing
statements will be given presently. Meanwhile observe this,
that Lucius, who treats of the matter in his Origins of the Cult
of the Saints^, in trying to find out what deity is likely to have
been displaced by S. Michael, misses the mark as completely as
he did when discussing S. Cosmos and S. Damian, or S. Thomas
of Edessa. Lucius moved about in a Dioscurized world without
realizing it. But he felt that the displaced champion of the
Argonauts must be a friend of sailors, and because there was a
worship of Serapis in Pontus and at the entrance to the Black
Sea, he concluded that the shrine of S. Michael was a
Serapeum, as though Sei'apis was likely to have fought for
the Argonauts.

Now for the evidence. We are told by Sozomen (H. E. ii. 3)
that Constantine built a temple to Michael in a place whose
former name was Hestiae, but later Michaelion. This place
lies on the right hand of those who navigate the Pontus to
Constantinople (and appears, therefore, to be on the European
side of the Bosporus) ; it was about 35 stadia from the city by
water, but if you went round the bay the distance would
be more than 70 stadia. It was generally believed that
Michael the archangel had appeared at this point at some
early time, i.e. before Constantine's day.

Sozomen goes on to tell tales of marvellous healings in
connexion with the shrine, where the archangel appeared as
a heavenly Power, and gave advice or conferred grace, as
might seem best. Now turn to Malalas, and we shall find
that he has an account of a Power, as he calls it, which
protected the Argonauts on their way to the Black Sea^
They first sailed to the Prince's islands in the Sea of Marmora,
from which they made for Chalcedon on the Asiatic side, with
i p. 268, - Malalas, Chron. iv. 78.

XVl] S. MICHAEL A DIOSCURE. 133

the intention of working through the Bosporus. At this
point Amykus began military operations against them ; the
Argonauts were terrified, and took shelter in a bay, which was
thickly wooded. While they waited here they saw in a vision
a Power descend as if from heaven, with eagle-like wings on
his shoulders. He foretold to them that they should conquer
Amykus. So they put on courage and won the victory, and
erected a shrine to their celestial visitor which they called
Sosthenes, because they had been saved from danger (or was it
that they called the angel Sosthenes ?).

We may feel quite safe in saying that we have here the
right to identify Amykus with the king of the Bebryces, and
the story is late folk-lore for the legends which we read in the
Argonautika.

But we have still the difficulty that the shrines are on
opposite sides of the Bosporus. The difficulty can be lightened
and perhaps wholly removed by observing that Procopius
describes shrines of Michael', restored by Justinian, on both
sides of the Bosporus. And not only two shrines, apparently
on opposite promontories, but more than two, with some
difficulty in the geographical identifications.

Thus he tells us that there was a place which the old men
called Proochthoi (Trpoox^oL), where apparently the strait was
narrow. On the European side in the district called Anaplus
{'AvdirXov^) (which must mean the opposite side to the current
that flows down the Bosporus along the Asiatic shore) there
was a shrine of Michael, and another on the Asiatic side.
Sailors going up the Bosporus would naturally pray to the
one, and coming down the Bosporus to the other. And there
is another shrine which Justinian restored at a point called
Mocadion {M(Ofca8t,ov). I do not know whether I can identify
these shrines. They were as necessary to sailors of the old time
as lighthouses to the moderns. And it is extremely unlikely
that any voyagers would have ventured into the Euxine without
putting themselves under proper protection for the dangers
which were before them. And, as I have said, it hardly seems
sufficient to refer all the care of the sailors of the Black Sea to

1 Procop. de Aedif. i. 8, 9.

lodt THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. XVI

Serapis, when we know that elsewhere it was certainly in other
and more experienced hands. It is the allusion to the king of
the Bebryces, which enables us to affirm that the Twins had
charge of the sailors to and from the Black Sea.

Before passing from the point, we may allude to the
intensity of the Dioscurism of the story of Jason and the
Argonauts. It has been always recognized that amongst the
half hundred sturdy seamen who explored Colchis, Castor and
Polydeuces occupied the front rank ; but it is not so generally
observed that almost every known pair of Dioscures in the
Greek world was on board. For example, Idas and his brother,
the far-seeing Lynceus, were on board ; Amphion appears to
have been there, and surely we may recognize his counterpart
in Zetes the Boread ; later legend told how Amphion and
Zethus were represented on the mantle which Jason wore, as
though one should say they were not Argonauts and yet they
were on board. Hercules was in the company, and there are
two suggestions of an Iphiklos, which look like a displacement
of the twin Iphikles. One of these Iphikli is said to be the
offspring of Phylakos and Phylake, who are known in twin-land
from Delphi and its associations. Further, there are traces of
the family of Aktor, unless the names and legends mislead us.
Possibly the explanation of this multiplied reference to twins
and the families of twins lies in the antiquity of the Argonaut-
saga, which, in its earliest form, would state that the Great
Brethren were on board, and then would become subject to
expansion.

We have elsewhere alluded to the foundation of a city
CHvLo-x^ela) in Colchis by the charioteers of the Dioscuri ;
their cult is also betrayed by the numismatics of the Black
Sea. The city Olbia, in particular, appears to have been
under their protection and to have had them in honour.

CHAPTER XVII.

TJiat the island of Delos was probably a twin-sanctuary.

In a previous chapter we pointed out that one of the
earliest steps in the modification of the taboo against twins
was the establishment of a twin-sanctuary, to which the twins'
mother and her offspring could be exiled. These twin-towns
were open also to others, but if a man, for example, were to
visit the sanctuary and marry the woman that was in exile,
he was obliged to come under the taboo from Avhich the woman
suffered, and could not leave the sanctuary again. He was
himself in exile, by the fact of visiting the exiled.

And it becomes an interesting enquiry in connexion with
the general question of the origin of sanctuaries (of which we
unfortunately know but little) whether it will not follow that
a general sanctuary will arise out of the particular sanctuary
resulting from the taboo on twins, in which case we should
expect to find that there was a historical juxtaposition of twins
and rights of asylum ; where the former were in evidence, the
latter would also have a tendency to appear.

For example, if reason should be brought forward for be-
lieving that Komulus and Remus escaped death by drowning in
the Tiber, not by the kind offices of a she-wolf, but by being
taken into sanctuary, we should at once be able to throw light
on the tradition that one of the first things done by Romulus,
when founding his city, was the establishment of an asylum
for slaves and fugitives upon the Capitoline Hill'. It is, at

' Livy, lib. i. c. 8.

136 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

all events, natural that we should look for sanctuaries in places
where twins have been successfully reared.

In a previous passage we suggested that it might be a
suitable subject of enquiry to try and find some of these twin-
sanctuaries ; the hypothesis being made that the development
of human civilization in Europe would, at one time, have
presented features of coincidence with what we actually find
at the present time in West Africa, and it was suggested in
a note that perhaps this might be the explanation for certain
twin-like names attached to early cities. It might, perhaps,
be the case that the Apollo Didymaeus of Branchidae, who was
the Apollo who took possession of an earlier sanctuary named
Didymi or Didyma, might cover an earlier cult of the Twins
by a later cult of the Sun-god. But perhaps we can find an
easier case to discuss, and one not so encumbered by difficulty.
Let us then take the case of Delos.

We have already shown that Delos was originally a centre
for twin-worship. The White Maidens of the North were
honoured there, whose names were Hyperoche and Laodike.
We showed how these, in later times, became a pair of male
twdns. And we have also evidence of the direct honoui^paid
to the Dioscuri in the island. But we are not confined to
heroes or demi-gods. Delos is well known to be the centre of
the cult of Apollo and Artemis. Two facts come out clearly ;
the deities were born there, and they were the twin children
of Leto. We may, therefore, take Delos as the point of de-
parture of the worship of Apollo and Artemis.

But this is not all ; they are said to have come there as to
a sanctuary, when Leto was trying to escape from the wrath
of Hera. According to the myth, all the other islands of the
Aegean refused sanctuary to Leto : this is another way of
saying that Delos was an island sanctuary; and since it is
reasonably certain that the Hyperborean twins were honoured
there before the time of the rise of the worship of Apollo, we
may infer that Delos was not only a sanctuary, but a twin-
sanctuary. This appears to be the base of the mythological
story of the flight of Leto. How strongly the cults of the
island of Delos were affected by reminiscences of twin legends,

XVIl] TWIN SANCTUARIES. 137

may be seen by the variant form for the maidens from the
North, Hekaerga and Opis, of whom Claudian writes^ :

"Jungunt se geniinae, metuenda feris Hekaerga,
Et soror, optatum numeii venantibus Opis,
Progenies Scythiae" ;

but, although they are clearly a variant of the White Maidens,
their names pass over as titles to Artemis and even to Apollo,
who appear as Hekaergos and Hekaerge'-', while Artemis is
honoured under the name of Opis. The bond between all
these names is the idea of twin-birth, which is commemorated
in the island of Delos.

In passing we may suggest that sufficient stress has not
been laid by the mythologists on the fact that Apollo and
Artemis are twins, and probably displace twins. Their cult
ought to show some, at least, of the features which we are
in the habit of recognizing where twins are honoured. For
example, it is explicable on this hypothesis wh}' Artemis is
called Phosphorus, and why she is invoked to open the eyes
of the blind. It is also clear that the perplexing recurrence
of the care for those who travel by sea in the cult of either
Apollo or Artemis may be traced to the demi-gods or demi-
goddesscs whom they displaced ' : and that women swore by
Artemis, as well as by the Heavenly Twins, can easily be
demonstrated. For further suggestions that Apollo and Artemis
ai'e twins displacing twins, note that Phoebe is one of the
feminine twins at Sparta ; hence Phoebus for Apollo and Phoebe
for Artemis; also that Artemis becomes Phylake, after the
Delphian twins Phylakos and Autonoos.

If we have demonstrated that Delos was a twin-sanctuary,
we may now return to the subject of the worship of Apollo at
Miletus. Is there any proof that Miletus was a twin-town that
goes beyond the suggestion furnished by the ancient name
of Didymi and the title of Didymaeus ? In the first place
observe that the cult of Artemis is as much at home in

^ Claudian, De Cons. Stilich. S. 253.
2 Clem. Alex., Strom, p. 674.

■^ " Ihr Einfluss auf das Meer und die Schififfahit sollte mehr anerkannt
werden als gewohnlich geschieht." Preller, Gr. Mijth. i. 317.

138 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [<JH.

Miletus as that of Apollo, so that here also the suggestion is
that twins displace twins, and not merely that Apollo displaces
them. In the next place the worship of the Kabiri, probably
directly imported from Phenicia, is one of the leading cults^
i n M iletus, so that it looks as if the triumph of Apollo had
not been altogether undisputed. The evidence of the inscrip-
tions may be taken as conclusive that the seafaring people of
Miletus continued the ancient religion and did not abandon it
for the worship of Apollo, however nearly related the two cults
may have been. So we shall suggest that Miletus was an
ancient centre of Dioscuric or Kabiric worship, and that
Didymi was a twin-town.

The mention of Miletus in connexion with the Kabiri
leads naturally enough to the most important of all the centres
for the worship of seafaring people, the island of Samothrake.
Here the Kabiri were honoured in such fashion that they could
hardly be distinguished from the Greek Dioscuri : but there
were curious variations in the cult: sometimes the Kabiri were
two, of whom one was older than the other, and sometimes
they were three. In the latter case, one form of honour was
by the names of Axieros, Axiokersos, and Axiokersa, of which
no satisfactory explanation has yet been given : yet it seems
clear that they represent two brothers and a sister, apparently
the results of a single birth.

It is interesting to observe that the sanctuary of Samo-
thrake was of the first order, and continued to quite a late
date. It was to this sanctuary that Arsinoe fled, and in
remembrance of its shelter she decorated the island with many
beautiful buildings. It would not take much to persuade me
that the sanctuary rights were connected with the primeval
taboo upon the twins who became the deities of the island at
a later day. But for this more evidence is required than we
at present possess.

We shall be safe, at least, in suggesting that a search
should be made for twin-towns, and for asylums developed out
of them. In the case of Delos and of Didymi, the argument
was not very difficult, the cult of twins being so well established
in a variety of forms, and the sanctuary rights being traceable

XVll] TWIN SANCTUARIES. 139

in the case of Delos, while the name betrays them in the case of
Didymi. But what shall we say of such cases as Amphipolis
or Amphissa ? The latter was a great centre of twin-worship,
and Pausanias^ was unable to decide whether the ''AvaKTe<i
7ratSe9, who were honoured there, were Dioscuri, Kabiri, or
Kuretes. It seems reasonable in such cases not to take dfxcjil
in a local sense in the name compounded with it, but to give
it a dual meaning. In which case Amphissa would be a twin-
town. In that case what would become of Amphipolis ? The
common explanation is that it means the city which has the
river Strymon all round it. Would anyone suspect that a
place called Round-town had a river curving round it ? I
trow not. And it is at least a matter for enquiry whether
the name has not been entirely misunderstood.

Let us pass on to a more difficult case, that of the sanctuary
of Apollo at Delphi. The first thing we notice is the plural-
formation of the name, for Brugmann is probably wide of the
mark in making a locative case out of it. So far the parallel
is with Apollo of Didymi. May we say that there was a
twin-sanctuary at Delphi before Apollo came ou the scene, and
that the name of the place betrays it ?

We have already shown how the cult of the male twins at
Sparta covers a cult of feminine twins, and that their names
were Hilaeira and Phoebe ; they passed, at a later date, for the
wives of the Great Brethren, and the tradition was that they
lived next door. But this was a convenient way of getting rid
of them. Hilaeira and Phoebe were earlier than Castor and
Polydeuces, and, therefore, d fortiori, earlier than Apollo and
Artemis. And it follows that, when Artemis appears as Phoebe,
she is displacing one of the great White Maidens. If her
brother takes the name of Phoebus, it must be inferred, as
in her case, that there were twins in the background ; the
sequence being something like this :

Hilaeira and Phoebe

Phoebus and Phoebe

Apollo-Phoebus and Artemis-Phoebe

1 X. 38. 7.

140 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

The name of Phoebus, then, betrays a displaced cult, just
as Apollo Didymaeus does.

But, fui'ther, we have evidence from Delphi itself of the
sanctity of twins who were honoured there, and in one of the
cases, at least, before Apollo came. The sanctuaries of Phy-
lakos and Autonoos were amongst the holy places of Delphi,
because the two heroes had, upon a certain occasion when
Delphi was attacked, defended the holy city. We need have
no doubt of this being a Dioscurophany. But note what
happens ; Artemis is found to have the title Phylake, which is
the feminine form that corresponds to one of the Delphian
twins. So that here also we may imagine a line of traditional
cult, something like the following :

Phylakos and Autonoos

I
[Apollo-Phylakos] and Artemis-Phylake.

Phylakos is then an earlier cult than Apollo, and not a
later sanctuary introduced into the sacred enclosure.

The other pair of Delphian twins are Hypcrochos and
Laodikos, who repelled the Gauls at the time when Delphi was
threatened by them. We have already pointed out that these
are only the males that correspond to the White Maidens of
Delos ; thus they stand along with Apollo and Artemis who
have been shown to be themselves a displacement of the same
Delian cult. It follows, then, that although at first sight the
Delphian Apollo appears to be independent both of the Twins
and of his own twin-sister, he is closely connected with both ;
and having shown that Apollo is again a twin displacing twins,
we are entitled to claim Delphi as a twin-sanctuary.

This brings us to one more case, an extremely interesting
one, but far more difficult to establish. We allude to the case
of Daphne by Antioch. That Daphne was a sanctuary of the
first order is well known. The very cypress-trees in it were
taboo, as Procopius tells us. And for the fact that it was a
sanctuary, we have the evidence of the writer of the second
book of Maccabees, who tells us that Onias made it his place of
retreat :

Koi (ra(f)ais eVfyi'coKcbs' 6 'Oveias dnTjueynev d7roKex^(t)[}r]K.u>s etr aavXou tottov
€7rl Ad(f}i>T]s Trjs Trpos 'Airtop^et'as Kei[ievi]s (2 Macc. 4^^).

XVri] TWIN SANCTUARIES. 141

This sanctuary is said to owe its taboo to Seleucus Nicator,
who copied it from the sanctuary at Delphi. And this may
very well be the case, that Seleucus introduced to Antioch
the cult of Apollo in the Delphian form. But we have shown
already that the Twins, in some form or other, were honoured
in Antioch from its first days, probably as Amphion and
Zethus. Now did Seleucus take over this cult or bring it with
him ? If he took it over, there was probably a twin-sanctuary
at Daphne already, and all that Seleucus did was to Delphize
the sanctity, in which case we are at liberty to place the Twins
in the holy enclosure at Daphne along with Apollo : and if, on
the other hand, Seleucus introduced the Twins, as he is said to
have introduced the worship of Apollo, the chances are that
they are all on the holy ground together, as they were at
Delphi ; in that case Daphne, while not a twin-sanctuary of
the first or natural order, becomes a twin-sanctuary of the
second or reflected kind. With that restriction we may group
it with the other sanctuaries that we have identified. The
attachment of the Seleucids to the Dioscuri we have already
shown from the coins. In fact it is a continuous worship at
Antioch, and of the fii'st importance. And it is not so difficult,
now, to believe that S, Thomas may have displaced the Great
Brethren at Antioch, as he did at Edessa.

But we must not travel too far afield and will therefore
simply repeat the theses of this chapter;

(a) Analogy suggests that twin-towns existed in
early times.

(6) Such sanctuary-centres for twin-mothers would
easily become general asylums,

(c) We find such twin-towns and sanctuaries
suggested in the case of Rome, Delos, Didymi, and
Samothrake : perhaps even at Delphi and Daphne.

(d) And we suspect there are more of the same
kind to be recognized.

CHAPTER XVIII.

Kahiri, Kuretes, and Koryhantes,

It seems hardly right to leave the subject without some
further allusion to the three cults that are parallel to that of
the Heavenly Twins, and often confused with it. I refer to
the rituals of the Kabiri, Kuretes, and Korybantes. To the
Kabiri we have several times made allusion, but the ancients
tell us that the Kuretes and Korybantes were also parallel
to the Dioscuri. There is an excellent supplement to Preller's
Greek Mythology, which deals with the relations of the several
cults ; but there are one or two points which it seems proper
to mention here. First of all it should be remarked that the
Kabiri and Korybantes are female as well as male, and thus
illustrate our doctrine of the appearance of the Heavenly
Twins in both sexes. Accordingly, we find that Strabo, after
enunciating the identity of the Kabiri and the Korybantes,
goes on to quote Pherecydes as an authority for the belief that
Hephaestus wedded a certain Kabira, and from her begat three
Kabiri and an equal number of Kabiridae. I suppose this
means that there were two rival triads : the well-known triad
of the Kabiri, and the unrecognized triad of feminine Kabirae.
It is in the highest degree probable that these female Kabiri
are the forms known to us as the Greek Charites ; and it agrees
with this assumption of the Dioscuric or Kabiric character of
the Charites, that they are displaced by the cult of Apollo and
Arterais\ just as we have shown the White Maidens of Delos

1 Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, p. 291. " The ancient threefold goddesses,
as all-powerful Charites, paled before the Olympians, faded away into mere
dancing attendant maidens."

CH. XVIIl] KABIRI, KURETES, KORYBANTES. 143

and the Kabiri of Miletus to be displaced. In fact their dis-
placement may be inferred, as Miss Harrison has suggested,
from the fact that in Greek art they are represented as dancing _
round the altar of Apollo, or mounted upon his outstretched
hand ; the latter is, according to Miss Hari'ison, a sure sign
of a displaced cult. So that we may take the Charites as an
instance of the lost female triad, which we naturally suspected
to be in evidence somewhere.

There seems to be further testimony (Mi this point from
Northern and Western Europe. We have suggested in a
previous chapter that the three Irish Brigits belong to this —
class. There is also a case of three evidently mythical young
women amongst the companions of S. Ursula, known by the
names of

Einbett, Warbett, and Villbett,

to whom the critical attention may be pointed.

As to the confusion between the Kabiri and the Kory-
bantes, it is frequent. For example, it is quite certain that
the local deities of Thessalonica were Demeter and the Kabiri. ^
Demetrius of Thessalonica displaces them all ; but the Kabiri,
who were spoken of, consist of three brothers, two of whom slay
the third. When Clement of Alexandria' refers to this bit of
Dioscurism, he tells the story of the Koryhantes,

el BeXfis Be eTronTevcrai koi tu Knpv(3a.vTCiiv opyta, tov Tpirov d8e\cf)ov
(iTroKTeLvavTes oi'rot, ttjv Ke(ji(i\Tji> tov veKpov CJ)oivlki 07reKaXi/\//'ar/^i'.

The Kuretes are also involved in a similar confusion, as we
may see from Pausanias' description of the demi-gods worshipped
at Amphissa :

liyovcri TeXerrjv Afi<f)i(T<Te'is AvuKTajv KoXoviifprjv Traihuiv ' oiTives 8e Qeioi'
elalv ol'AvaKTes iraiSes, ov kutu ravrd eariv elprjfievov' (A pev AioaKovpovs
01 be Kovprjras, o'l 8e, rrXeov ti enicTTacrOai vopl^ovres, Ka^eipovs Xeyovai.

Amongst the interesting parallels between the Eastern and
Western Twin-cults and their derivatives, it is worth while
remarking that the same differentiation which we found in
the case of the Dioscuri, took place in certain quarters with
the Kabiri. Thus in Thebes they were regarded as a pair, — >j

1 Strom. V. 12,

144 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENI,Y TWINS. [('H. XVITl

one of whom was old, and the other young ; the elder being
comparable with Zeus, the younger with Dionysos. In Samo-
thrake there was a tradition that Zeus was the father of the
three Kabiri, who are three in number, two boys and a girl, all
born of Electra ; we are here very close to the Greek myth of
the Tyndaridae.

On the great altar of Pergamum a pair of Kabiri have been
identified along with Cybele, but here too one of them is older
than the other. The pair are engaged in slaying a bull-headed
giant ; one of the pair knocks him on the head with a hammer,
the other stabs him with a sword. The hammer should be
noted ; it is the mell of Thor, and the hammer with which the
Lithuanian twins liberate the imprisoned Sun-god. It means
that the Kabiri are the children of the Thunder-god. But in
another myth they are the children of Hephaestus ; and this
shows us he is a thunder-god in his own right, and not merely
the slave of Zeus, when he forges thunderbolts. His position
is much more like that of Zeus than is commonly supposed.
No doubt all the developments run back into the two state-
ments that

Twins make rain :

Twins produce thunder and lightning.

Hence they are the Children of the Sky, and the Children of
the Thunder- god.

And when the Kuretes are represented as clapping cymbals
over the newly-born Zeus, it is open to a suspicion that they
are really imitating thunder and not simply trying to deafen
the gluttonous Kronos, and prevent him from hearing the voice
of his infant son. They are the rain-makers of an earlier age.

We see also why the legend reported that the Kuretes were
really the children of the Zeus whom they were supposed to be
protecting.

For further information as to the relations between the
Dioscuric and semi-Dioscuric cults we must refer to the text-
books on mythology.

)4v

CHAPTER XIX.

On the symbols of the Dioscuric cult.

We may be reasonably certain that a cult, so widely diffused
and so persistent as that of the Heavenly Twins will develop
symbols of it s own, and that t he reverence paid _to_ the, twins
will be reflected upon the symbols, so that these_^vilLthemselves
become objects of Avorship. A religion of this kind is bound to
have an amulet of its uwn : and we may therefore suspect that
the Dokana {hoKava), or sdcred _cvo.^s-.beams which express the
Dioscuri, will have a superstitious reverence paid to them and
will acquire a religious value. The parallel is very close with
the worship of the cross, which has been superimposed upon the
Christian religion, with the result that the sign itself has been
credited with power to avert evil and to assure good, and con-
sequently has become a direct object of worship.

Now in Sparta it is well known that the sign of the Dioscuri
is the BoKava, but it is not yet as clear as one could wish it to
be, in what way the sacred cross-beams were arranged and what
was the resulting conventional figure of them.

In the votive tablet of Argenidas, now at Verona in the
Museo Civico, we have an Anakeion or Temple of the Dioscuri
('AvaKe<;), whose front is marked by the sign of the Dokana ;
the beams, if we may assume the relief to contain the whole of
the representation, are simply arranged in the form of the
letter H, and the figure is repeated, so that we have side by
side the delineation H H. But here we are not quite sure that
the artist has treated the subject fairly : for, in the first place,
Plutarch tells us (De amove frat. § 1) that the cross-beams were
double, in which case we ought to have a representation of the

H. 10

146 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

form N H : and in the next place, it looks as if the repetition
- of the symbol were a mistake of the artist, who did not realize
that one such sign stood for the pair of Dioscuri. If the sign
with double cross-beams be the correct one, we could then com-
pare it with the unfinished brick wall which is the sign of the
twins in Babylonia ; but we need more information on this
point from Spartan and other monuments. It has something
to do with building, but what the particular thing is that is
being builded is not so clear. And it is quite possible that the
Verona monument is right, as far as Italy is concerned, and
that it varied its Dokana from the traditional Spartan form.

Suppose, now, we pass from Verona and the votive relief
of the safely-returned Argenidas, and examine the Milanese
" mosaics of S. Protase and S. Gervase, which are recognized to
go back nearly to the time of S. Ambrose. We shall find
that the garments of the two saints are marked by a mysterious
symbol, which the Mil£\nese scholars have not succeeded in
explaining.

These markings, according to Prof Ratti\ have the form of

^^ the letter H, when lying on its side, or rather, of a double T.

They make one think, says Ratti, of the well-known passage in

Ezekiel (ix. 46) where the sacred Tau is placed on the foreheads

of the faithful ; one has only to imagine that they have been

removed from the forehead to the raiment for aesthetic reasons.

Unfortunately this hypothesis broke down at the start, for the

■^ same marks turned up elsewhere, and not always on Christian

figures or monuments, so that the hypothesis that they stood

for the ordinary Christian sign had to be abandoned. And no

other solution seems to have been propounded, deserving of

attention. We propose an alternative explanation to that of

Prof Ratti, viz. that the signs are the taboo-mark of the

• Dioscuri-.

At the start, we are confronted with what might seem to be
a fatal objection. The hypothesis would explain the marks
with sufficient exactness, but unfortunately the Milanese artist

1 In Ambrosiana, p. 31.

2 I use the term taboo-mark, which may apply to men or things. Cain, in
the book of Genesis, has such a taboo-mark. It was, no doubt, conventional.

XIX] ON THE SYMBOLS OF THE DIOSCURIC CULT. 147

has not confined them to the robes of Protase and Gervase, but
he has also bestowed them on Naborand Felix. And while they
might be appropriate in the former case, there has not been a
suggestion that Nabor and Felix come from the same mint as
Protase and Gervase. Let us see what can be said against
such an objection. It is clear that if it can be sustained, the
occurrence of the supposed Dokana on the garments of Protase
and Gervase will be much less important, for it could be argued
that the artist was merely using conventional modes of orna-
mentation, and if, on the other hand, it can be shown that the
signs are applicable also to Nabor and Felix, we shall have an
extraordinary confirmation of the justice of our view with
regard to S. Ambrose and his discoveries.

What then do we know about Nabor and Felix ? We know
that they were the popular saints of Milan in Ambrose's day:
the people frequented their shrine in crowds, nor does it appear
that the new saints banished the old ones ; it was by excavating
in the neighbourhood of their shrine that Ambrose found the
other two whose miracle-working bodies made such a stir.
The earlier pair were not really Milanese martyrs, but had been
brought there from outside, perhaps from Lodi, but who they
were or what they were is an unsolved problem of the hagio-
logists. Their Acta are evidently mere rubbish, without a
grain of truth, unless it should lie in the suggestion that they
were saints who had come over from the ranks of the military.
The pair are honoured in a number of distinct and distant
centres, but no one knows anything certain about them. Some-
times other saints are joined with them, as Nabor, Felix and
Fortunatus, or Nabor, Felix and Victor.

Let us then begin with Nabor. The first thing that strikes
us is his name. It is not Latin, nor Greek nor Celtic ; and we,
therefore, suspect that the saints have come from without,
bringing their names with them. As we have already seen
something of the way in which foreign cults are imported into
the West, we begin to enquire more closely and more easterly
into the mysterious Nabor. And we find that it is, almost
exactly, one of the names under which the imported Mithra
was worshipped in the West. The student of Mithraic inscrip-

10—2

THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

tions knows how often the Mithraic dedication turns up in the

form

deo invicto Nabarze [var. Nabarde] ;

Nabarze, then, is a Persian name localised, and it means,
^ _ according to Cumont, the warrior, the strong one, for which the
Persian word is given as Nabard\ It corresponds closely, in
meaning, to the Dioscuric Aziz of Edessa, and the coincidence
in form with the Milanese name is so close that we are entitled
to say that the worship of Nabor in Milan was a thin disguise
for the worship of Mithra. Milan was a notable centre of
Mithraic worship, and had its own Mithraeura, for which a
Christian substitute had, no doubt, to be found".

But if this be correct then Felix also must belong to the
Mithraic worship, and stand for one of the torch-bearers : he
- will be a Divine Felix, something like the deus puer' bonus of
Edessa. But where is there any suggestion of such an identifica-
tion ? I answer that it lies on the very surface of the hagiology.
We will proceed to explain in what sense this is true.

When we try to find out about Felix, we shall soon detect
that the tradition of the martyrologies presents us, in the early
times of which we are speaking, with four or more Felixes upon

- Italian soil : one, the saint honoured at Milan ; the second, who
appears as martyred on the Ostian way along with a companion
named Adauctus ; and the third, S. Felix of Nola ; the fourth we
have already found with his double Fortunatus at Vicenza and
elsewhere. There is also a tradition of another shadowy Felix,
who is said to be a Roman presbyter. It need scarcely be said
that these traditions are not independent, and a little criticism
soon reduces their number by showing common matter in the
traditions, and brings to light a very important point with
regard to the Dioscurism of the group. The question is,
whether the Milanese Felix, who does not really belong to
Milan, is the same as Felix of Ostia, or Felix of Nola, or Felix
of Aquileia, or whether he is someone else.

^ Cumont, Mon. i. p. 208, note 6. iV^a?)a?-rf signifie en persan, "combat,"

- et Nabarza "le fort, le courageux"; Geza Kiiuu, Arch. Epig. Mitt. vi. (1882),
p. 107.

2 See Cumont, No. 190 = C.I.L. v. 5795.

XIX] ON THE SYMBOLS OF THE DIOSCURIC CULT. 149

Now suppose we turn to the martyrology of Ado, and look
under Auh". 30, where we shall find the commemoration of Felix
and Adauctus. The accoimt begins, in a strain with which
we are growing familiar :

"Fuere autem duo fratres nomine et opere Felices, ambo presbyteri.
Horum senior Felix, &c."

Then the account goes on to describe how Felix the elder
used to make the pagan idols fall down by blowing upon them,
and how he was finally brought to trial and condemned. As he
was going to his martyrdom he was joined by an anonymous
person who wished to sliare his confession, and the story tells
how this mysterious person was named by the Christians
Adauctus, because he had been added (auctus) to the crown of
S. Felix.

Observe that the second brother has been forgotten, or to
put it more probably, he has been replaced by an anonymous
stranger. But that he was a martyr also appears from the fact
that he is canonised upon another day. We turn to the Acta
Sanctorum for Jan. 14, and we find him introduced as
follows :

" Post haec alius sanctiis vir venerabilis, memorati martyris [Felicis]
germanus junior, adductus ad Draccum."

Here we see the origin of the name Adauctus, which is
simply a misreading of adductus, and we recognize in the Roman
presbyter who is being described the second Felix. We have
now got rid of the shadowy Roman Felix and of Adauctus ; and
we have added another Felix to the martyr on the Ostian way.
Tillemont tried to get rid of the second Felix, but the Bol-
landists maintain rightly, against Tillemont, that there are two
brothers so named ; they put Felix No. 2 under Jan. 14, and
quote his Acts in a form which makes Felix No. 2 allude to the
death of Felix No. 1.

But, if we are right, and the Bollandists, in this sudden
resuscitation of the second Felix, we go one step further : we
not only say that Adauctus is Felix, but, bearing in mind what
we discovered about the naming of twins, we affirm that the
possession of a common name implies that they were born at

150^ THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH.

the same time\ The supposition, then, that there was a pair
of divine Felixes is sufficiently confirmed, and we need not
hesitate to say, in view of the discovery, that Nabor and Felix
are unitedly a Mithraic survival. The secret of Ambrose was,
that it would be worth while to have a pair of twin martyrs of
their own in Milan, in addition to the traditionally imported
pair or triad of martyrs, who stood for Mithra and his torch-
bearer, and who had been brought from some place further south.
Remembering that we had already demonstrated the
fraternal character of the pair, Felix and Fortunatus, and
observing further that in some religious centres we have a
combined worship of Nabor, Felix and Fortunatus, we are now
able to state the conclusion that any early Italian martyr whose
name is Felix should be suspected of Dioscurism, and the
suspicion amounts almost to a demonstration where the Felix
in question is found associated
I (a) with a Mithraic companion, as Nabor ;

(b) with a brother of the same name ;

repetition of one of these cases ^

We must now add a few more words with regard to the

Dokana.

The foregoing argument is valid, with regard to Nabor and
Felix, whether the identification of the H mark with the
Dioscuric Dokana is valid or not. And it must not be disguised
that there are serious objections to the identification. The
mark is found upon Christian monuments, representing Peter
and Paul; e.g. in the Church of S. Cosmas and S. Damian at
Rome, but apparently not on the robes of the titular saints of
the Church, who are being presented to Christ by the two

1 Tree-worship conies out agaiu in this martyrdom, for the Acts tell us that
it took place at a sacred tree on the Ostian way.

* The reader of legends will find that Nola is full of chapels to holy Felixes
in the old time : that the most famous saint of Nola had care over perjury,
over shipwrecks, and over lost cattle. S. Augustine sent a brother from Africa
to take an oath at the tomb of S. Felix of Nola, for whom he evidently had a
high regard. The superstitious side of S. Augustine's character has never been
properly appreciated.

XIX] ON THE SYMBOLS OF THE DIOSCURIC CULT. 151

chief apostles. The sign is also found on the Mausoleum of
Galla Placidia at Ravenna, apparently on the skirts of the
apostles, Peter and Paul. It is also found on the mantle of
Christ in a catacomb at Syracuse, and probably elsewhere. It
would not be difficult to maintain that Peter and Paul, as the
spiritual founders of Rome, who often have twin-like analogies,
and who sometimes actually displace the Twins, might be
honoured with the Dioscuric mark\ But the sign seems to be
too widely diffused for a certain identification. What makes
for its acceptance is the fact that it appears to be non-Christian,
as well as Chiistian. The problem, however, requires a closer
investigation. But, as we have said, we can establish the
Mithraic and Dioscuric character of Nabor and Felix, without
reference to the signs which first led us to the interpretation
which we have given of these very popular saints. We might,
indeed, have suspected that Mithra must have been writ larger
on the Church and its Calendar than the single instance which
we gave of a S. Mitraeus, who was worshipped in the south of
France. Nabor and Felix are of wide and early diffusion ; and
there must be more traces of this Persian religion in the
Christian records and practices than people generally have
suspected or thought possible '^

1 Peter and Paul do, sometimes, succeed to the Dioscuri : at Naples, for
example, in the church of S. Paolo Maggiore, may be seen the broken statues
of the Twins, and the following lines may be read :

"Audit vel surdus Pollux cum Castore Petrum ;
Nee mora : praecipiti marmore uterque ruit.
Tyndaridas vox missa ferit : palma Integra Petri est ;
Dividit at tecum, Paule, tropaea libens."

See Albert : Castor et Pollux, p. 48.

2 I add in a note the philological identification of Nabarzes, which Cumont
quotes from G6za Kliun, Arch. Epigr. Mitth. vi. (1882), p. 107 :

" Die Endung des Namens Nabarza ist das altpers. und altbakt. Suffix a,
welches zur Bildung von Hauptwortern verwendet wird. Dem 2-Laut der
altbaktr. Sprache entspricht hiiufig in der alt- und neu-persischen Sprache d,
welche Laut-veriinderung auch hier in der neupers. Form Nabarda (vgl. den
altbakt. Namen Nabarzanes) vorkommt. Nabard bedeutet in der neupers.
Sprache Kampf und Nabarza den Starken, Tapfern."

CHAPTER XX.

Concluding Remarks.

We have now taken our rapid survey of what may, perhaps,
be described as the oldest religion in the world; a religion
which is still extant in some of its simplest and most primitive
forms, though, of course, it will very soon disappear. We have
shown that in all parts of the world and in all periods of
history, there is evidence of a taboo of extraordinary force upon
twin children and their mother. We have traced the modifi-
catiou of this taboo from its more cruel forms to a milder cult.
We have shown how twin-asylums were formed, how the taboo
was gradually restricted from the mother and children to a
sintde child, and how the belief arose that one of the children
was of spirit-ancestry and not really normal. We found that
at a later stage both children were credited with sky-parentage,
and were known as the Children of the Sky. We have shown
that this is exactly the Greek belief, as disclosed by the legends
of Castor and Polydeuces, the Children of the Sky-god. But
the belief is not limited to Aryan civilization ; it occurs in
Semitic circles also, and can be traced in the earlier chapters
of Genesis, and down to the building of Solomon's Temple, as
well as in Phenicia and Mesopotamia. It was further pointed
out that the cult was not limited to male twins, but that the
sacred twins were found in both sexes : that they were sources
of fertility, and were able to charm rain from heaven ; at a
later stage they become the healers of diseases, the great
saviours of the distressed, the protectors of women in travail,
of sick persons, those that travel by land and water, of young
children and the newly married. They are the patrons of
truthfulness, and punish perjury. In literature and art they
are differentiated, one from the other, by names, colours, stature,
age, hair, beards and the like.

CH. XX] CONCLUDING REMARKS. 153

We then proceeded to show that the Calendar of the
Christian Church is full of converted pairs of twins, of w hom
it is safe to say that hardly any are othe r than mythical. We
examined the legends of French and Italian saints in order
to make this more clear, devoting special attention to a case
which has been challenged — that of the patron saints of Milan.
We pointed out that similar unhistorical creations exist in
the Eastern Church, and examined the cases of Cosmas and
Damian, Cyrus and John, Nearchus and Polyeuctes. We then
discussed again the evidence that the twins were worshipped
in Edessa, and displaced by a cult of Jesus and his twin-brother
Judas. It was seen that this surprising belief was not limited
to Mesopotamia, but that it could be traced all over Western^.
Europe ; and the meaning of this strange conjunction was
reserved for further study in a subsequent volume.

Some attempt was made, perhaps not altogether successful,
to show that S. Thomas had displaced the Dioscuri in Antioch.

Returning to the West it was pointed out that S. Ambrose
became a D ioscure in the middle ages.

Search was then made for Graeco-Roman sanctuaries that
might be parallel to the Twin-towns of West Africa, and some
were found. Certain Asiatic cults were tested for parallelism
with the Dioscurism of Greece and Rome. S. Michael was
shown to be in the Dioscuric succession ; and finally it was
proved that the w orship of Mithra and the Twins was still
extant in the Church, and that the presence of the Persian
sun-god was not limited to a stray instance of the Mithra cult,
which had previously been detected in the south of France.

It would be superfluous to re-state at length the case
which has been made out in the foregoing investigation for
the fundamental paganism of the Christian Church, as disclosed
by its calendar of saints and registered rituals. Faustus the
Manichee was surely right when, in his disputation with
Augustine, he says that " you have turned the pagan sacrifices
into love-feasts, their idols into martyrs, whom you honour
with like sacrifices to them : you appease the shades of the
dead with wine and banquets, and celebrate the solemn days
of the Gentiles along with them\" Nor would it be a sufficient

^ Aug. Contra Faustuin xx. 20.

154 THE CULT OF THE HEAVENLY TWINS. [CH. XX

reply to Faustus, or to his modern representatives, to say that
the changes were for the better, when the changes are the
result of an astonishing cooperation in ecclesiastical frauds, in
which some of the most honoured names in the Church are
involved. So far from the Church leaders being ashamed of
what they have done, they rather glory in it. For instance,
Theodore t, who was bishop of Cyrrhus, to which place we
traced the fabrication of the legends of Cosmas aud Damian,
glories in the transfer of the false miracles of paganism to the
Church, and tells us that the ex votos of the ancient sanctuaries
are to be seen as before. An examination of his language
will show conclusively that the martyrs had, amongst other
triumphs, displaced the Dioscuri and taken over their functions^
For he tells us that those who are in health come to pray for a
continuance of that blessing; those who are worn by disease,
desire relief; childless men and sterile women come to pray
for offspring, or bring grateful acknowledgements for the same.
Those who are planning a journey ask for the companionship
and guidance of the martyrs. True, they do not address them
as gods, but only as divine men. The dedications in the
Church prove the answers to their prayers : the place is
adorned with models of restored hands and feet, &c. The
Lord has, he says, introduced his own dead men in place of
the Greek gods, and so the faithful may be encouraged to
abandon the error of the demons, and take the martyrs as
their luminaries and guides.

It does not look as if they had abandoned very much at
Cyrrhus, at all events. Nor is the case very different in other
centres-.

We may at least be thankful, in view of the wide-spread
veil of error that has been cast over peoples and countries, that
there has been one Reformation, and that another is coming.

1 Theodoret, ed. Migne, eoL 1031.

- It is curious that while Theodoret mentions certain Apostles and Saints
who have succeeded to the pagan honours, he does not number Cosmas and
Damian amongst them. He says that they celebrate instead of the Pandia and
Diasia and Dionysia, the festivals of Peter and Paul and Thomas, of Sergius
and Marcellus and Leontius, and Antoninus and Maurice. But perhaps he was
not thinking of his own diocese when he wrote, so much as of the Greek world
generally.

SUPPLEMENT AHY NOTES.

p. 7, note 3. Jeremias has fallen into confusion over the
Babylonian Sin and Nergal, which he explains as sun and moon.
Zimmern, however, explains both Sin and Nergal of the moon,
accoixling as it is waxing or waning. And although, as we have
said, it is difficult to comprehend this division or to put ourselves
into a state of mind where the moon is regarded as twins, it is not
an impossible solution, as that of Jeremias is. It would be easier
to apprehend if we were to regard the lunar month as divided into
three portions ; the waxing moon, the full moon, and the waning
moon. And this might possibly give us Helena between her two
brothers. Such a conception must, in any case, belong to a very
early period, earlier, at all events, than the period wlien Hesper-
Phosphor was regarded as a pair of twin stars.

p. 18, note 3. On the other hand there are traces that twin
murder once prevailed on the Congo. Mrs Stephens, who belongs to
the same mission as Dr Bentley, tells me that it is the custom to
neglect the care of the second of a pair of twins : and that few of
them survive. The names given to twins in this region are Nssimbe
and Nzuzi. Mrs Stephens has only once met a person bearing the
second of these names. This information comes from the Cataract
region on the lower Congo. Higher up the river, the neglect is
extended to the mother and the other child.

Since writing the foregoing, I have been sorry to hear of
Dr Bentley's sudden death.

p. 28. Twins and Fertility. Mr Frazer points out to me, that
at Thebes a magical virtue was supposed to be inherent in the earth
of the grave of Amphion and Zethus. The reference is to Pausanias
(IX. 17. 4).

" The common tomb of Zethus and Amphion is a small mound
of earth. The people of Tithorea, in Phocis, try to filch some of the

-A.

156 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.

earth from this mound at the time when the sun is i)i Taurus, for if
at that time they take earth from tlie mound [and place it on] the
tomb of Antiope, their land will bear fruit, but the Theban land
will be less fertile. Therefore at that season the Thebans keep a
watch on the tomb."

p. 33. Diosctirism in the Temple at Jerusalem. Tliere is a piece
of evidence from an unexpected quarter which shows that, in the
popular mind at all events, the Jewish monotheistic worship at
Jerusalem had not been altogether purged of its Dioscuric elements.

In the second book of the Maccabees we have an account of
the Jewish fortunes in the period of the Seleucid domination and
subsequently, which is recognized to be largely non-historical, and to
be surcharged with folk-lore and miracle. That does not make it
less valuable or less interesting for an enquiry like the one on which
we are engaged. And we may draw attention to the record which
the book contains of an attempted raid upon the treasures which
were deposited in the temple at Jerusalein (which in many ways
may be looked upon as a Semitic Delphi) and the manner in which
the outrage was resented by the presiding and protecting deity.

The account appears to be taken from the history of Jason of
Cyrene, and is found in the third chapter of the second hook of
Maccabees. Here we are told how one Heliodorus had been sent
by Seleucus IV. {c. 187 b.c.) to annex the temple deposits. He
forced his way into the treasury, the whole city being aghast with
fear at his audacity, and as he was standing there with an armed
guard, the Lord of Spirits, the Prince of all Power, caused an
apparition. " There appeared unto them a horse with a terrible
rider upon him, and adorned with a very fair covering, and he ran
fiercely and smote at Heliodorus with his forefeet, and it seemed
that he that sat upon the horse had complete harness of gold.
Moreover two other young men appeared before him, notable in
strength, and excellent in beauty, and comely in apparel, who stood
by him on either side and scourged him continually and gave him
many stripes." So he was carried out half-dead and put in a litter.
The high-priest Onias made intercession for him : and the two
young men appeared again, and told Heliodorus that he might
thank the high-priest for his prayers, which had been answered, and
tell the whole world that he had been scourged of Heaven for his
crimes.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. 157

There can be little doubt that this is Dioscuric folk-lore ; and so
the Dioscuri were still at home in the Temple, according to the
tradition of the vulgar.

It is recognized as belonging to this class of legend by
W. Fairweather in the Supplement to Hastings' Dictionary, p. 287,
as follows :

" The same idea [of angelic guardianship] was extended to
nations and armies (Dan. xii. 1, 2 Mac. xi. 6, xv. 23). Indeed we
find in 2 Mac. almost a i-epetition of the old Roman legend of Castor
and Pollux mounted on white steeds and appearing at the head of
the Jewish ai-mies (iii. 25 fF.). A somewhat similar tale is told in
X. 29 f. where ' five ' such men appear, two of them leading on the
Jews."

No doubt this is the right explanation : the ang els have displaced
the Dioscuri , as we pointed out in the .story of Abiaham and his
heavenly guests. But this leads us to recognize in the Maccabean
story a theophany, as well as an angelophany. The third rider
must be the figure of Jahveh ; a suggestion which is made by
Nestle in his Miszellen in Stade's Zeitschrift for 1905.

p. 54. The statement made by the saints, that they were not
to be regarded as the Heavenly Twins, will be found in Diibncr,
De Incubatione, p. 77 :

^Od(TavT€<; ets tov toVoi', eV w 6 7r€/ic^^ei? Trapa twv 'EA/\»;Vwi/ "EAAr;i'
Kai avTOS V!rdpxfJ>i' eKctro tovtov dwoaTpecfio/Jiei'ot Trj<; Trpos Tov<i aXXov%
6kif3ofX€vov<; ^cpttTTCtas €t';^ovTo. to 8e toiovto a-^rjixa TrXeia-TaKLS virb
Tcov aytwv ett aurw ycvoju.evoi' o 7r€[X(fiOei<; vtto twi' 'EAAt^'i'wi/ Oiwprjcra^. ..
r]p$aTO...Kpd^eiv kul oeW^ai avTMV, ws ai' kol Trpos avTOV d-rreXOojaa' hat
KOV<^i(TW(TLV Trj'i Trepie^ovcrr]'; avTOf OXLif/ew';.. .direKpivavTo opyiAcos ol
ayiOL- fxi] yap Trpos 77/^as iXrj\v9a<;, eratpe- fxr] yap 7//xu? Xeyo/xeOa
K-oxTTiop KOL noXvSiVKr]^- TOVTOv Sc eTTip.eVoi'TOS. . . <^^€yyovTat TrdXtv ol
uepaTTorTes tt/jos avrov WTTo/xciSiwrres" eraipe, rt KaraKpa^et? 7;p,wi', Kat
ravTa Trpos r]fi.d^ /j.r] Trapayei d/xevos, aA.Aa Trpo? dXXov<; aTroo-TaAet's; ry/xeis
yap ovK icrfx^v KacrrcDp Kal noAwSevKTy?, aAAa SovAot XpicrTov. . .VTrdpyo/xev
KaL Ko(r/xa Kat Aa/Atavou irpoa-qyopiav KiKTijixiOa.

p. 57, 1. 26. "The Twins were far-seeing like their Sire."
We may compare Furtwangler's description of the artistic repre-
sentation of the Dioscuri (Roscher, Lex. s.v. Dioscuri) : "die Augen
sind gross und weit geofihet wie bei Helios."

158 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES,

p. 85, 1. 21. For Chronos read Kronos.

p. 93. For the Twins as traditional figures of Life and Death,
cf. Cu mont, Mon. i. 304 : " a un autre point de vue, on regardait
I'un des porte-flambeau comnie I'embleme de hi chaleur et de la vie,
I'autre, comma celui du froid et de la mort."

p. 95. Some of my friendly Roman Catholic critics think I
have exaggerated the language of S. Ambrose about his finding
" plurimum sanguinis" in the grave of Protase and Gervase, and
that it does not mean more than the stains of blood. But Ambrose
was not thinking how the matter would be accepted in the twentieth
century : when he discovered Agricola and Vitalis, he says, or is
made to say, " Collegi sanguinem," evidently liquid blood. When
he brought the body of S. Nazarius into Milan, the blood was not
only liquid but fresh ; Paulinus, who was present, tells us (c. 32)
that it was fresh, as if newly shed (quasi eodem die fuisset eff"usus) ;
and he goes on to say that the hair, which the godless had cut off",
was grown again and orderly, to fulfil the Lord's promise that " not
a hair of your head shall perish." There is more evidence of the
kind, if wanted : and we ought not to spoil S. Ambrose's miracles, in
order to please the twentieth century.

p. 100. It is curious that at Aegae again we have a place
name in the plural. I do not know whether this is accidental, or
whether the plurality can be explained.

p. 101, note 2. Procopius tells us of the affection which
Justinian had for Cosmas and Damian, who had appeared to him_
when he had been given up by the physicians and restored him to
life. In their honour he not only built temples at Constantinople,
but in Cyrrhus, where the bodies of the saints were lying {down to
my time, sa ys Proc opius : see de Aedif. u. Jl}.

p, 102, note 1. Correct the reference to Overbeck to p. 163.

p. 105. S. Thomas in Edessa. Lucius, Anfmige des HeiliyenkuUs,
p. 244, comes very near to the discovery of the predecessor of Thomas
at Edessa. It is clear, he says, that Thomas has displaced a Syrian
irod : and the god was of no mean rank, since, according to Gregory
of Tours, S. Thomas was honoured with a month of free markets
and of immunity from taxation. This holy fifth month must be due
to the cult of one of the most important Edessan deities.

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES. 159

Unfortunately Lucius had already come to the conclusion that
the Syrian Aziz had been displaced by S. Sergius. So he left
S. Thomas hanging on nothing.

p. 125, 1. 17. For Leucuis read Lucius.

p. 132. Serapis or the Dioscuri ? The substitution of S. Michael — \
the Archangel for Serapis by Lucius was justifiable, so far as it
recognized Serapis as presiding over navigation and having a special
cult amongst Black Sea sailors. But, as we have pointed out, it
came just short of the truth, because it threw Serapis into conflict
with Amykus, the King of the Bebryces. For an interesting case
where Serapis and the Dioscuri appear together in the interests of
navigation, we may take a lamp in the Cabinet Durand, described ^
by Albert, Castor et Pollux en Italie, p. 168, as follows :

La7npe en forme de barque frouvee pres de Pouzzoles dans la mer.
Vers la proue, Serapis est represente avec Isis, deesse de la naviga-
tion. Au-dessous, un des Dioscures, vetu de la chlamyde, coiffe du
pileus, arme de la lance et debout a cote de son cheval, qu'il tient par
la bride.... A I'extremite de la barque, la tete radiee du soleil.
Enfin sur la barque, on lit AABEMETONHAIONCEPAniN.

p. 137. DisplacPAyient of the Twins by Apollo and Artemis.
This displacement can be traced on the imperial coins of Asia
Minor, where we constantly find Apollo and the Dioscuri associated ; "^
sometimes the Dioscnre is carried on the arm of Apollo, and
described as a Syrian Kabir. Thus the coins tell the same story of
the equivalence of the Dioscuri and the Kabiri and their displace-
ment by Apollo.

p. 137. The equivalence of the Korybantes and the Kabiri
comes out in Strabo x. 472 en Se Kpovov rwh tovs Kopvj3uvTa<; ■ ctAAoi
8c Tov Aio? Kol KaAAtoTTv;? (ftacri, tous aurov? Tot? Ka/3eipots ovTas.

p. 138. For the descent of the Kabiri from Hephaestus and
for the existence of male and female triads of Kabiri see Strabo, I.e. -
'AKOvo-iAaos 8' o 'Apyeto? ek Ka/3eipr;9 koi 'H<^at(rTOi' Katr/xtAoi/ ('?)A€yef
TOV 8e, Tpct? Ka^ei'poi;?, wv NiJ/x^as Ka^eiptSa?* $€pe/cuSr/? 8' i^ 'AttoA-
Aojvo? KOL Pu7tas' Kopv/SavTas Ivvia' olKrjcraL 8e avrovs iv %ap.o6 paKiq-
Ik 8e Ka(3eLpr]<; Trj<; ITpwrco)? koI H<^aicrTov Ka/3£tpovs rpct? kol Nv/A(^as
Tpeis Ka/3etptSas.

p. 138. Samothrace as a Twin-Sanctuary. Our investigation
into the possibility of the existence of primitive twin-sanctuaries led

160 SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES.

us to the consideration of the worship of the Kabiri at Miletus and
at Samothrake. At this point we are reminded by Strabo that the
original name of Samothrake was Melite. And since we are
entitled from the Kabiric worship to assume that Samothrake was
originally a Phenician settlement, we ought to interpret its pi'imitive
name as from a Semitic root, just as we do with the word Kabir
(Heb. 133). The root is easily recognized ; it is the Hebrew U7J2),
which means " to escape " ; a word which is played upon in
Acts xxviii. 1 where Luke says that " when we were escaped, we
knew that the island was called Scape." Here then are two islands,
which bear the Semitic name oi place of escape. And since we know
that one of them is a famous sanctuary, we must explain the name
in accordance with the fact, and recognize the islands, not merely
as places where shipwrecked people have been saved, but in the
more general sense, of places consecrated as shelters by religious
custom.

p. 141. Dioscuri on Seleucid Coins. The Dioscuri appear on
the coins of Antiochus I. (281 — 261 B.C.) (see Imhoof-Blumer, i/oww.
gr. p. 425) : and apparently from that time forward they can be
numismatically recognized.

A particularly interesting case is their appearance on the coinage
of Seleucus II. (246 — 226 B.C.), for here Apollo has one side of the
coin, and the Twins the other ; which is a good illustration of our
statement that Apollo and the Twins were honoured together at
Daphne.

THE END.

West African twins saved by British Missionaries.

The twin-pillars at Edessa.

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The inscribed pillar at Edessa.

A sepulchral mosaic at Edessa.

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nisffrttflisfi6rttsfio5in.i

Legenda Sanctorum with lessons for S. Thomas' day.

^ }

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY

Los Angeles
This book is DUE on the last date stamped below.

>w.

OL OCT 7" 1991

igt AUG loisab

BRTITLE ililfeeiED BY BINDERY

iQ inQ9

APR 3 1990

REC'D LD-URl

1989

: 2 lit
*RGE-

2 ISO

5'.

^ III

3 1

58 00620 5263

'I, ft