constituted a beneficent factor in the god-idea. In fact as this
third element really embodied the substance of the other two, it
finally became the supreme God, little afterward being heard
about the Creator and Preserver. The Regenerator or Destroyer
was of course the sun, which in winter died away and rose again
in the spring-time as a beneficent Savior or renewer of life.
The principle involved in these processes represented Fertility,
Life, reproductive energy. As applied to mortals, it
comprehended the power to create combined with perceptive Wisdom
or Knowledge.
This idea, portrayed as it was by a mother and her child, linked
woman with the stars. It produced the "Virgin of the Sphere,"
Queen of Heaven, "Isiac Controller of the Zodiac," at the same
time that it made her the mother of all mankind.
Every year this Virgin of the Sphere as she appeared above the
horizon at the winter solstice gave birth to the sun.
Astronomically this new sun was the Regenerator, by which all
Nature was renewed. Mythologically, after the higher truths
contained in these doctrines were lost, it came to be the Savior,
the Son of the Virgin, the seed of the woman, which was to bruise
the serpent's head.
That the religion of an ancient race comprehended a knowledge of
the evolutionary processes of Nature may not be doubted. The
myths still extant, and even the oldest Assyrian inscriptions
which have been deciphered, reveal the fact that the seeds of the
visible universe were hidden in the "great deep"--that animal
creation sprang from the earth and the sea through the influence
of the sun's rays.
It is now known that the philosophy of an older race involved a
belief in the Eternity of Matter. The abstruse doctrine of
Reincarnation and the Renewal of Worlds seems to have formed the
basis of their philosophy. According to these speculations, a
portion of the earth was destroyed or resolved into its primary
elements every six hundred years, while at the end of each
Kalpia, or great Cycle of several thousand years, the entire
earth was renovated or absorbed into the two fecundating
principles of the universe. These two indivisible forces
represented by Vishnu rested in the water, or brooded on the face
of the deep. When stirred by love for each other they again
became active, and from the germs of a former world, which had
