hey were
searching for some explanation of, or a working hypothesis to include,
most diverse natural phenomena within a concise scheme. The very essence
of such attempts was the institution of a series of homologies and
fancied analogies between dissimilar objects. Aphrodite was at one and
the same time the personification of the cowry, the conch shell, the
purple shell, the pearl, the lotus, and the lily, the mandrake and the
bryony, the incense tree and the cedar, the octopus and the argonaut,
the pig, and the cow.

[Illustration: Fig. 21.--(a) A slate triad found by Professor G. A.
Reisner in the temple of the Third Pyramid at Giza. It shows the Pharaoh
Mycerinus supported on his right side by the goddess Hathor, represented
as a woman with the moon and the cow's horns upon her head, and on the
left side by a nome goddess, bearing upon her head the jackal-symbol of
her nome.

(b) The Ecuador Aphrodite. Bas-relief from Cerro Jaboncillo (after
Saville, "Antiquities of Manabi, Ecuador," Preliminary Report, 1907,
Plate XXXVIII).

A grotesque composite monster intended to represent a woman (compare
Saville's Plates XXXV, XXXVI, and XXXIX), whose head is a
conventionalized Octopus, whose body is a _Loligo_, and whose limbs
are human.]

Every one of these identifications is the result of a long and chequered
history, in which fancied resemblances and confusion of meaning play a
very large part. But I cannot too strongly repudiate the claim made by
Sir James Frazer that such events are merely so many evidences of the
innate human tendency to personify nature. The history of the arbitrary
circumstances that were responsible for the development of each one of
these homologies is entirely fatal to this wholly unwarranted
speculation.[294] Tuempel claims[295] the Aphrodite was associated more
especially with "a species of _Sepia_". He refers to the attempts to
associate the goddess of love with amulets of univalvular shells "in
virtue of a certain peculiar and obscene symbolism".[296] Naturalists,
however, designate with the term _Venus Cytherea_ certain gaping
bivalve molluscs.

But, according to Tuempel (p. 386), neither univalvular nor bivalve
shells can be regarded as a real part of the goddess's cultural
equipment. There is no representation of Aphrodite coming in a shell
from across the sea.[297] The truly sacred Aphrodite-shell was entirely
different, so Tuempel believes: it was obviously difficult to preserve,
bu