and the sacred women at festival times in frenzied dances and other wild orgies, shouting, and cutting themselves on the arms, and submitting to be flogged one by another.[11136] At other seasons they “wandered from place to place, taking with them a veiled image or symbol of their goddess, and clad in women’s apparel of many colours, and with their faces and eyes painted in female fashion, armed with swords and scourges, they threw themselves by a wild dance into bacchanalian ecstasy, in which their long hair was draggled through the mud.  They bit their own arms, and then hacked themselves with their swords, or scourged themselves in penance for a sin supposed to have been committed against the goddess.  In these scenes, got up to aid the collection of money, by long practice they contrived to cut themselves so adroitly as not to inflict on themselves any very serious wounds."[11137]

It is difficult to estimate the corrupting effect upon practice and morals of a religious system which embraced within it so many sensual and degrading elements.  Where impurity is made an essential part of religion, there the very fountain of life is poisoned, and that which should have been “a savour of life unto life”—­a cleansing and regenerating influence—­becomes “a savour of death unto death”—­an influence leading on to the worst forms of moral degradation.  Phoenician religion worked itself out, and showed its true character, in the first three centuries after our era, at Aphaca, at Hierapolis, and at Antioch, where, in the time of Julian, even a Libanius confessed that the great festival of the year consisted only in the perpetration of all that was impure and shameless, and the renunciation of every lingering spark of decency.[11138]

A vivid conception of another world, and of the reality of a life after death, especially if connected with a belief in future rewards and punishments, might have done much, or at any rate something, to counteract the effect upon morals and conduct of the degrading tenets and practices connected with the Astarte worship; but, so far as appears, the Phoenicians had a very faint and dim conception of the life to come, and neither hoped for happiness, nor feared misery in it.  Their care for the preservation of their bodies after death, and the provision which in some cases they are seen to have made for them,[11139] imply a belief that death was not the end of everything, and a few vague expressions in inscriptions upon tombs point to a similar conviction;[11140] but the life of the other world seems to have been regarded as something imperfect and precarious[11141]—­a sort of shadowy existence in a gloomy Sheol, where was neither pleasure nor pain, neither suffering nor enjoyment, but only quietness and rest.  The thought of it did not occupy men’s minds, or exercise any perceptible influence over their conduct.  It was a last home, whereto all must go, acquiesced in, but neither hoped for nor dreaded.  A Phoenician’s feelings on the subject were probably very much those expressed by Job in his lament:—­[11142]