Baetylos
Phoenician · deity · mythic · Recorded classification
Baetylos is a stone with a genealogy. In Philo he is one of four brothers, the others being the figures Philo calls Kronos — whom he explicitly identifies with El — Dagon and Atlas; in the rest of the Phoenician world the word is not a name at all but a thing, a standing stone in which a god lives. The two uses are the same idea seen from opposite ends: a sacred stone is a house of god, bet-el, and if you are writing a theogony in Greek every house of god has to be somebody's son. The registry carries El and Dagan as Canaanite records; his other brothers are not recorded, because Ouranos and Atlas are Philo's Greek names for figures this registry has no Phoenician evidence for.
Domains
- sacred stones
Sources
- Baetylos is named as a son of Ouranos in Philo of Byblos's Phoenician theogony, and his name is also the word for the sacred stones the Phoenicians worshipped as housing a god.: Philo of Byblos, Phoenician History. (primary); Reference treatment of baetyls. (secondary)