She was the great nature-goddess, the Magna Mater, regent of the stars, queen of heaven, giver of life, and source of woman's fecundity.[1127] Just as Baal had a solar, so she had a lunar aspect, being pictured with horns upon her head representative of the lunar crescent.[1128] Hence, as early as the time of Moses, there was a city on the eastern side of Jordan, named after her, Ashtoreth-Karnaim,[1129] or "Astarte of the two horns." Her images are of many forms.

Most commonly she appears as a naked female, with long hair, sometimes gathered into tresses, and with her two hands supporting her two breasts.[1130] Occasionally she is a mother, seated in a comfortable chair, and nursing her babe.[1131] Now and then she is draped, and holds a dove to her breast, or else she takes an attitude of command, with the right hand raised, as if to bespeak attention.
Sometimes, on the contrary, her figure has that modest and retiring attitude which has caused it to be described by a distinguished archaeologist[1132] as "the Phoenician prototype of the Venus de Medici." The Greeks and Romans, who identified Baal determinately with their Zeus or Jupiter, found it very much more difficult to fix on any single goddess in their Pantheon as the correspondent of Astarte.

Now they made her Hera or Juno, now Aphrodite or Venus, now Athene, now Artemis, now Selene, now Rhea or Cybele.

But her aphrodisiac character was certainly the one in which she most frequently appeared.

She was the goddess of the sexual passion, rarely, however, represented with the chaste and modest attributes of the Grecian Aphrodite-Urania, far more commonly with those coarser and more repulsive ones which characterise Aphrodite Pandemos.[1133] Her temples were numerous, though perhaps not quite so numerous as those of Baal.