Astarte is an ancient Phoenician goddess worshiped under many names throughout the Mediterranean, she is a goddess associated with fertility, sexuality, love, and war along with being the deification and one of the earliest incarnation of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.
Appearance[]
Astarte is usually shown as a beautiful, naked woman. It is common for Astarte to be shown with overly round hips, which is associated with motherhood and fertility. Sometimes her body is shown as androgynous, which simply means that it looks neither male nor female.
Often, she wears a set of bull horns on her head, a sign of dominance and power. Many depictions also show her with a set, or even two sets, of wings. Astarte can also be shown wearing a crown. Because she is considered the mistress of horses by Egyptians, many depictions of her show the goddess on horseback or otherwise in the company of horses.
Myth and Legends[]
| “ | A Middle Eastern goddess of fertility. Many scriptures note her folklore, and there is even a mention of her as the "Queen of Heaven" in the Bible. | „ |
| ~ The Demonic Compendium. |
Her symbols were the lion, the horse, the sphinx, the dove, and a star within a circle indicating the planet Venus. Pictorial representations often show her naked. She has been known as the deified morning and/or evening star.
Equivalents[]
The deity takes on many names and forms among different cultures, and according to Canaanite mythology, is one and the same as the Assyro-Babylonian goddess Ishtar, taken from the third millennium BC Sumerian goddess Inanna, the first and primordial goddess of the planet Venus. Inanna was also known by the Aramaic people as the god Attar, whose myth was construed in a different manner by the people of Greece to align with their own cultural myths and legends, when the Canaanite merchants took the First papyrus from Byblos (the Phoenician city of Gebal) to Greece sometime before the 8th century by a Phoenician called Cadmus the first King of Thebes.
In Greece she is known as Aphrodite and was worshiped as a Goddess of Love. In Egypt Astarte was a warrior goddess paired with Anat. In Phoenicia she is a sister of Asherah and Ba'alat Gebal who are married to their brother El by order of their father Epigeius. The name Astarte is sometimes also applied to her cults in Mesopotamian cultures like Assyria and Babylonia. Ashtoreth is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as a foreign, non-Judahite goddess, the principal goddess of the Sidonians or Phoenicians, representing the productive power of nature.
In Abrahamic lore she is known as Ashtoreth and is seen by them as a Canaanite fertility goddess as well as a productive power of nature itself. Statues of her would be found throughout Israel with her symbol the crescent moon horns. She is sometimes mistaken for Asherah, but both Ashtoreth and Asherah are different deities even though the two do share the title of Queen of Heaven. She was eventually demonized into the demon Astaroth. She is a counterpart deity to Ishtar and the two are often associated with the other.
Family[]
In the Baʿal Epic of Ugarit, Athirat, the consort of the god El, plays a role. She is clearly distinguished from Ashtart in the Ugaritic documents, although in non-Ugaritic sources from later periods the distinction between the two goddesses can be blurred; either as a result of scribal error or through possible syncretism. In the Contest Between Horus and Set, these two goddesses appear as daughters of Ra and are given as allies to the god Set, here identified with the Semitic name Baal Hadad. Astarte also was identified with the lioness warrior goddess Sekhmet, but seemingly more often conflated, at least in part, with Isis to judge from the many images found of Astarte suckling a small child.
Astarte’s father was either the sun god Ra, or Ptah, the god of craftsmen. If she is a daughter of Ra it means that she is also the sister of Anat, another war goddess. Astarte is also associated with another daughter of Ra, namely Hathor. Hathor is a goddess of fertility, which is of course an attribute Astarte is also known for.
Her consort was Set, who is (no surprise) a god of war. He is also god of winds, storms, evil, chaos and darkness. It seems that even some goddesses have a soft spot for bad boys. Astarte also had a son, according to the Canaanites, by the name of Hauron. Hauron was also later officially accepted into Egyptian religion.
Some ancient sources assert that in the territory of Sidon the temple of Astarte was sacred to Europa. According to an old Cretan story, Europa was a Phoenician princess whom Zeus, having transformed himself into a white bull, abducted, and carried to Crete. Some scholars claim that the cult of the Minoan snake goddess who is identified with Ariadne (the "utterly pure") was similar to the cult of Astarte. Her cult as Aphrodite was transmitted to Cythera and then to Greece. Herodotus wrote that the religious community of Aphrodite originated in Phoenicia and came to Greeks from there. He also wrote about the world's largest temple of Aphrodite, in one of the Phoenician cities. Their names together are the basis for the Aramaic goddess Atargatis.