Atargatis- Canaanite GodDeity"Great Syrian Goddess"

The Temple at Hierapolis

Lucian of Samosata described Atargatis's temple at Hierapolis in vivid detail. It stood in a vast sacred precinct with altars, enormous entrance pillars, and a lake teeming with sacred fish that no worshipper dared harm. To kill one was to invite the goddess's wrath. Inside, Atargatis sat enthroned with lions flanking her, holding a scepter in one hand and a spindle in the other. The temple housed an oracle consulted on matters great and small, and twice a year priests carried water from the Euphrates to the precinct, commemorating a mythical flood that had once covered the earth.

The Mermaid and the Galli

Diodorus Siculus preserved the myth of her transformation. Derceto, the Greek name for Atargatis, threw herself into a lake near Ashkelon after bearing a daughter to a mortal and was changed into a fish from the waist down. Her mermaid form bound her forever to the sacred waters she protected, the pools and springs that sustained life in the arid Syrian landscape. Fish and doves were sacred throughout her cult sites.

The cult's most dramatic feature was the galli, male priests who had castrated themselves in frenzied devotion to the goddess. During festivals, worshippers worked themselves into ecstatic states through music, dance, and self-flagellation. Lucian recorded the annual rite in which young men, caught up in the frenzy, seized blades and castrated themselves on the spot, then ran through the streets holding what they had cut off and flung it into whichever house they chose. That household was obliged to provide the new priest with women's clothing for the rest of his life.