encement of his story. For the gods and goddesses of his
narrative were only the thinly disguised representatives of much more
ancient deities decked out in the sumptuous habiliments of Greek
culture.

In his lecture on Aphrodite, Dr. Rendel Harris claimed that the goddess
was a personification of the mandrake; and I think he made out a good
prima facie case in support of his thesis. But other scholars have set
forth equally valid reasons for associating Aphrodite with the argonaut,
the octopus, the purpura, and a variety of other shells, both univalves
and bivalves.[245]

The goddess has also been regarded as a personification of water, the
ocean, or its foam.[246] Then again she is closely linked with pigs,
cows, lions, deer, goats, rams, dolphins, and a host of other creatures,
not forgetting the dove, the swallow, the partridge, the sparling, the
goose, and the swan.[247]

The mandrake theory does not explain, or give adequate recognition to,
any of these facts. Nor does Dr. Rendel Harris suggest why it is so
dangerous an operation to dig up the mandrake which he identifies with
the goddess, or why it is essential to secure the assistance of a
dog[248] in the process. The explanation of this fantastic fable gives
an important clue to Aphrodite's antecedents.

[235: An elaboration of a lecture delivered at the John Rylands Library,
on 14 November, 1917.]

[236: "Mycenaean Tree and Pillar Cult," p. 52. Compare also A. E. W.
Budge, "The Gods of the Egyptians," Vol. I, p. 435.]

[237: With a strange disregard of Sir Arthur Evans's "Mycenaean Tree and
Pillar Cult," Mr. H. R. Hall makes the following remarks in his "AEgean
Archaeology" (p. 150): "The origin of the goddess Aphrodite has long been
taken for granted. It has been regarded as a settled fact that she was
Semitic, and came to Greece from Phoenicia or Cyprus. But the new
discoveries have thrown this, like other received ideas, into the
melting-pot, for the Minoans undoubtedly worshipped an Aphrodite. We see
her, naked and with her doves, on gold plaques from one of the Mycenaean
shaft-graves (Schuchhardt, _Schliemann_, Figs. 180, 181), which must be
as old as the First Late Minoan period (_c._ 1600-1500 B.C.), and--not
rising from the foam, but sailing over it--in a boat, naked, on the lost
gold ring from Mochlos. It is evident now that she was not only a
Canaanitish-Syrian goddess, but was common to all the people of the
Levant. She is Aphrodite-Paphia