Anat

Anat is the Canaanite goddess of war and of the hunt, the sister and staunch ally of the storm-god Baal, and the most physically violent figure in the mythological tablets recovered from Ugarit, the Bronze Age city on the Syrian coast whose library is our main source for Canaanite religion. One notorious passage describes her wading into battle and then, back in her own hall, wading knee-deep and hip-deep in the blood of the slain, hanging severed heads and hands upon herself, and exulting in the carnage, an image of ferocity with few parallels in ancient literature. Yet she is also fiercely loyal and generative.

When Baal is killed by Mot, the god of death, it is Anat who searches for her brother, who confronts Mot, seizes him, and, in language drawn from the harvest, splits, winnows, burns and grinds him like grain, so that Baal may live again and the fertility of the world be restored. She thus combines the roles of the raging warrior and the devoted sister whose action brings the dead god back. Anat was worshipped beyond Ugarit as well; she appears in Egypt, where she was taken up as a warrior goddess, and her name is preserved in place-names in the southern Levant. The tablets present her as a goddess of overwhelming passion, in both slaughter and loyalty, a reminder that the deities of the region were not the tame figures of later summary but powers of blood and life alike.

A separate Ugaritic narrative, the Epic of Aqhat, preserves a story in which Anat's fierce and dangerous desire is not for her brother's revival but for a beautiful bow. The hero Aqhat, son of the pious but childless king Danel, is given by the craftsman-god Kothar-wa-Khasis an extraordinary bow originally made for Anat herself; when Anat sees it in Aqhat's hands, she is consumed with wanting it and offers him first great wealth and then immortality in exchange. Aqhat refuses, telling her scornfully that bows are for men and that she is asking for something no woman should want, and that even if he agreed, a mortal cannot actually become immortal, since death is the fate of everyone born of woman.

Enraged and humiliated at the refusal, Anat goes to the high god El and secures permission to punish Aqhat, then dispatches her agent Yatpan, in the form of a bird of prey, to kill the young hero and seize the bow, only to have it break or fall into the sea in the struggle, so that she achieves her revenge but loses the very object she wanted. The text, damaged and incomplete at key points as it survives on the Ugaritic tablets, goes on to describe a drought that follows Aqhat's death and the efforts of his sister Pughat to avenge him, though the ending is lost. Alongside the Baal Cycle's Anat, loyal and terrible in her brother's defense, the Aqhat epic shows a colder, more self-interested side of the same goddess, willing to destroy an innocent mortal over a coveted weapon, a portrait consistent with, but distinct from, the blood-soaked warrior of the Baal Cycle.