The Ideology Of The Ninth And Tenth Centuries 105
awoken, the symbolic Scythian king had a clearly defined period of life
(power)—one year.399
It could be presumed that such beliefs (the strangulation) were later
reflected in the investiture custom of the khagans of the Turks and Khazars.
Like them, the Scythian king was a mediator between his subjects and the
world of the gods and thus was responsible for the fertility and the well-being
of the Scythians.400 The annual killing of the symbolic Scythian king resembles
the myth of Adonis, the husband of Ishtar, who each year died, “passing away
from the cheerful earth to the gloomy subterranean world”.401 The goddess is
closely related to kingship, which is also indicated by the words of the Assyrian
ruler Sargon (circa 2350 BC): “My mother was a high priestess. My mother,
the high priestess, conceived me, in secret she bore me. She placed me in a
basket [.. .] and cast me into the river [.. .] [When the goddess] Ishtar granted
me her love, [.. .] I exercised kingship”.402
According to J. Campbell, during the reign of both Sargon and the
Babylonian ruler Hammurabi (circa 1728–1686 BC) a change in the cult of the
Great Goddess seemed to occur, as a result of the emergence of the male solar
deities. “The formula is derived from the older mythology of the goddess and
her son, but with a transfer of interest to the son—who now is neither a god
nor a dedicated sacrifice, but a politically ambitious upstart [.. .] the celestial
orb to which the monarch (Hammurabi—Author’s note) is now likened is no
longer the silvery moon, which dies and is resurrected and is light yet also dark,
but the golden sun, the blaze of which is eternal and before which shadows,
demons, enemies, and ambiguities take flight. The new age of the Sun God has
dawned, and there is to follow an extremely interesting, mythologically confus-
ing development (known as solarization), whereby the entire symbolic System
of the earlier age is to be reversed, with the moon and the lunar bull assigned to
the mythic sphere of the female, and the lion, the solar principle, to the male”.403
Despite this a part of the old symbolic system, as well as its semantic content,
remained in many parts of the world, existing in a sort of “conflict” with the
new royal solar symbolism. In the steppe world and especially in Middle Asia,
the rulers continued to be associated with the bull (including the solar Mithra)
and the goddesses—with lions. With regard to the sacral king who was killed
399 Raevskii 1977, 110–112; Marazov 1976, 51.
400 Raevskii 1977, 163.
401 Frazer 2006, 304; a prototype of Adonis is the dying and rising Sumerian god Tammuz,
husband and son by immaculate conception of the Mother Goddess (Campbell 2004, 50).
402 Venedikov 1995a, 74.
403 Campbell 2005, 84–86.