Lady of the Brightest Star

Question: Are there any significant stories around about Astarte? My player is gonna be a Scion of hers, but I can't seem to find much of her doing anything besides being a cheerleader for Baal.

Ooh, one of the terrifying ladies of the Canaanite lands! There are indeed stories about her exploits, although not quite as many as someone like Baal who has an entire surviving myth cycle to his name.

Astarte is interesting because she is one of Baal's two wives along with Anat, and without a lot of material on the two of them, it sometimes seems like they're fairly identical or interchangeable, with Astarte the less well-defined of the two. Both are goddesses of love and sexuality, goddesses of war, and unflinchingly dedicated to the well-being of their husband Baal; but where Anat has separate stories of wading in the blood of her enemies, marching forth to defeat Mot and bearing Baal's child as a heifer, Astarte lacks these extra myths in the main body of Canaanite religion. We have to look a little harder to find stories of her actions, moving out to the wider world of Phoenician myth and her syncretizations with other cultures. We can start with Philo of Byblos, who in his description of Phoenician religion tells us that Baal and Astarte are the rulers of the universe; Anat may be the war-leader who destroys Baal's enemies, but Astarte is the queen who rules alongside him politically.

The most famous of Astarte's appearances are indeed in Baal's set of myths, which are overall the most well-known Canaanite myths we have. When Yam is declared king of the gods and Baal almost attacks the messenger in a fury, Astarte and Anat both restrain him, one on each arm, and remind him that murdering the messenger is not the wisest of all political moves. And when Baal defeats Yam, Astarte rebukes him for his unnecessary cruelty, telling him that Yam was already his prisoner and that killing him would be inappropriate, before moving on to declare before all the gods that since Baal has won, he should now be hailed as king of the gods without question. Different interpreters of the text have different ideas of what's going on here; Astarte may be telling Baal to back off of Yam because he's their sibling, or because since he was invested with power by El himself it would be politically foolish to outright kill him. But her call to the other gods to accept Baal is also a political power play, and a pretty ballsy one since El, who has previously been in charge of choosing who will rule after him, has not yet authorized that shift in power. Calling for Baal's rulership is in a way directly challenging El, who placed Yam above him, and calling the other gods to support Baal is something of a power coup away from the old father of the pantheon.

But these are pretty small mentions of Astarte, and clearly part of Baal's story rather than her own. However, the story of Astarte and Eshmun is all about her, with no whisper of Baal in sight. In that story - related by Photios, a Greek writer, who in usual Greek style uses Greek names for those involved and calls Eshmun "Asclepius of Beirut" since he is associated with healing like the Greek figure of that name - Astarte (here called Astronoe, "the heavenly" or "the starry", referring to her position as the morning star) falls in love with Eshmun, whose youthful beauty so impresses her that she begins purusing him relentlessly. Eshmun is afraid of her, since she is clearly a powerful and dangerous goddess (and possibly because he doesn't want to be on the receiving end of any jealous retribution from Baal) so he flees from her, and when he realizes he can't escape her completely, finally castrates himself so that she'll have no further interest in him. She catches up to him a moment too late, and he dies in her arms; full of grief, Astarte heals his wounds "with her body's warmth" and he becomes a god of healing, whose shrines were visited by those ill or injured. Eshmun does not appear in other myths besides this one, but is probably a Scion; Greek writers in the area claim he was the son of Apollo, which likely means the god Resheph, who is likewise a plague-associated archer who was often glossed as Apollo by Greek and Roman writers. In Syria, male cultists dedicated to her sometimes ritually castrated themselves in honor of her, echoing Eshmun's sacrifice.

The story of Astarte and Eshmun is more than a little bit similar to the story of Aphrodite and Adonis; in both cases, the love goddess falls in love with a beautiful young semi-mortal, who eventually dies because of her infatuation with him but becomes a resurrected divine figure in his own right. The ancient cults of Anat and Astarte (and Ishtar, over in Babylon) probably influenced Aphrodite and her stories considerably, and since Adonis is likewise a Canaanite import, it's very possible that the story of Aphrodite and Adonis was borrowed from this one about Astarte and Eshmun. Originally, anyway, although by the time Adonis' cult became important with its own mystery religion, they had become firmly separate figures.

The other place Astarte turns up in a major myth is, surprisingly, in Egypt. Thanks to being geographically close to one another, several figures from the Canaanite religion were imported into Egyptian cults in the northeast; gods with similar associations were often syncretized, so that some myths became attributed to Egyptian gods despite being originally of Canaanite origin. This led to the rise of a few areas in which Set and Baal were syncretized, since they were both temperamental storm gods with delusions of kingship, and in some of those areas the idea arose that Set was married to Anat and Astarte, who were given to him as consolation prizes when he lost the rulership of the gods to Horus. In those cults, it is Astarte who is the major figure in the myth of the sea falling in love with her and demanding her as tribute lest it overflow and flood the countryside, and it is for her sake that Set must go out and conquer the sea. It's an interesting syncretized myth, since the sea as the antagonist might have some roots in the Canaanite myth of Baal fighting Yam, with Set standing in for his fellow storm god. Further south in Egypt, Nephthys becomes the lady of the myth instead of Astarte since she is Set's traditional wife, but it's still a neat place to mess around with if you're looking for stuff to do with the Canaanite goddesses.

Astarte may not be the no-holds-barred bloodbath runner and war-monger that her conquering sister Anat is, but she's still an improtant goddess with a lot of neat stories and imagery. Good luck to that Scion of yours - they're about to head out into a the wonderful world of the few intrepid children of the war goddesses, and it's a dangerous place.