w her lover
Orion, changed Actaeon into a stag, which was torn to pieces by his
own dogs, and caused numerous deaths by sending a boar to ravage the
fields of Oeneus, king of Calydon. Human sacrifices were frequently
offered to the bloodthirsty "mothers". The most famous victim of
Artemis was the daughter of Agamemnon, "divinely tall and most
divinely fair".[136] Agamemnon had slain a sacred stag, and the
goddess punished him by sending a calm when the war fleet was about to
sail for Troy, with the result that his daughter had to be sacrificed.
Artemis thus sold breezes like the northern wind hags and witches.

It used to be customary to account for the similarities manifested by
the various mother goddesses by assuming that there was constant
cultural contact between separate nationalities, and, as a result, a
not inconsiderable amount of "religious borrowing". Greece was
supposed to have received its great goddesses from the western
Semites, who had come under the spell of Babylonian religion.
Archaeological evidence, however, tends to disprove this theory. "The
most recent researches into Mesopotamian history", writes Dr. Farnell,
"establish with certainty the conclusion that there was no direct
political contact possible between the powers in the valley of the
Euphrates and the western shores of the Aegean in the second
millennium B.C. In fact, between the nascent Hellas and the great
world of Mesopotamia there were powerful and possibly independent
strata of cultures interposing."[137]

The real connection appears to be the racial one. Among the
Mediterranean Neolithic tribes of Sumeria, Arabia, and Europe, the
goddess cult appears to have been influential. Mother worship was the
predominant characteristic of their religious systems, so that the
Greek goddesses were probably of pre-Hellenic origin, the Celtic of
Iberian, the Egyptian of proto-Egyptian, and the Babylonian of
Sumerian. The northern hillmen, on the other hand, who may be
identified with the "Aryans" of the philologists, were father
worshippers. The Vedic Aryo-Indians worshipped father gods,[138] as
did also the Germanic peoples and certain tribes in the "Hittite
confederacy". Earth spirits were males, like the Teutonic elves, the
Aryo-Indian Ribhus, and the Burkans, "masters", of the present-day
Buriats, a Mongolian people. When the father-worshipping peoples
invaded the dominions of the mother-worshipping peoples, they
introduced their strongly in