and the star at which the arrow was shot seems to have symbolized a Sephirah attributed to the Sun, and my invocation had for its object the killing or overcoming in some way of a "solar influence."
(2) The Woman who shot the Arrow.
She was, it seems, the Mother-Goddess whose representative priestess shot the arrow at the Child, whose sacrificial death symbolized the death and resurrection of the Tree-spirit or Apollo. She is pictured upon certain Cretan coins of the fifth century B. C. as a slightly draped beautiful woman sitting in the heart of a branching tree. (G. F. Hill: A Handbook of Greek and Roman Coins, page 163.) She goes back to the very earliest form of the religion of Crete, and is, it seems probable, the Tree as Mother killing the Tree as Son. But she is also Artemis, and there is a beautiful vase at Naples (Reinach: Repertoire des Vases Peints Grecs, I, 379, 1) which shows her archaic image upon a tall pillar, with a strung bow in her left hand and some object too small for my eyes to decipher in her right.
(3) The Heart torn out.
A Father of the Church, Firmicus Maternus, in his book "On the errors of the Profane Religion" turns the Myth of the Child slain and reborn into a story of murder and adultery. The Cretan Jupiter "made an image of his son in gypsum and placed the Boy's heart . . . in that part of the figure where the curve of the chest was to be seen." It had been kept by his sister, Minerva—and a Temple was made to contain the image. There were festivals and noisy processions that followed "a basket in which the sister had hidden the heart." "It may be conjectured perhaps," writes my learned man, "that images were made with a chest cavity to contain the heart of the sacrificed."
(4) The Star.
"The Star goes right back to the Cretan Mother-Goddess. The latter Greek form of it was Asterios or Asterion. The latter, for example, is said to be Jupiter's son by Idaia" (Pausanias, II, 31, 1). "This star name did not mean in its primary use any particular star. It appears to have meant the Starry Heavens. . . . Zeus-Asterios is a late Gortynian (Cretan) collocation (Johannes Malala: Chronicle Five). In the earlier thought of Crete her deified
