is represented as a man, and that he is of equal importance with
the woman; later he is identical with the sun, the woman,
although still a necessary factor in the god-idea, being
concealed or absorbed within the male. It is no longer woman who
is to bruise the serpent's head, but the seed of the woman, or
the son. He is Bacchus in Greece, Adonis in Syria, Christna in
India. He is indeed the new sun which is born on the 25th of
December, or at the time when the solar orb has reached its
lowest position and begins to ascend. It is not perhaps
necessary to add that he is also the Christ of Bethlehem, the son
of the Virgin.
Nowhere, perhaps, is the growing importance of the male in the
god-idea more clearly traced than in the history of the Arabians.
Among this people are still to be found certain remnants of the
matriarchal age--an age in which women were the recognized heads
of families and the eponymous leaders of the gentes or clans.
Concerning the worship of a man and woman as god by the early
Arabians, Prof. Robertson Smith remarks:
"Except the comparatively modern Isaf and Naila in the sanctuary
at Mecca where there are traditions of Syrian influence, I am not
aware that the Arabs had pairs of gods represented as man and
wife. In the time of Mohammed the female deities, such as
Al-lat, were regarded as daughters of the supreme male God. But
the older conception as we see from a Nabataean inscription in De
Vogue, page 119, is that Al-lat is mother of the gods. At Petra
the mother-goddess and her son were worshipped together, and
there are sufficient traces of the same thing elsewhere to lead
us to regard this as having been the general rule when a god and
goddess were worshipped in one sanctuary."[38]
[38] Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, ch. vi., p. 179.
As the worship of the black virgin and child is connected with
the earliest religion of which we may catch a glimpse, the exact
locality in which it first appeared must be somewhat a matter of
conjecture, but that this idea constituted the Deity among the
Ethiopian or early Cushite race, the people who doubtless carried
civilization to Egypt, India, and Chaldea, is quite probable.
If we bear in mind the fact that the gods of the ancients
