with reproduction, like those related to all other natural
functions, were wholly unconnected with impurity either of
thought or deed, still when an age arrived in which all checks to
human passion had been withdrawn, and the lower propensities had
gained dominion over the higher faculties, the influence of
fertility or passion-worship on human development or growth may
in a degree be imagined.
The fact must be borne in mind that curing the later ages of
passion-worship the creative processes and the reproductive
organs were deified, not as an expression or symbol of the
operations of Nature, but as a means to the stimulation of the
lower animal instincts in man.
With religion bestialized and its management regulated wholly
with an idea to the gratification of man's sensuous desires,
religious temples, under the supervision of the priesthood,
became brothels, in which were openly practiced as part and
parcel of religious rites and ceremonies the most wanton
profligacy and the most shameless self-abandonment. The worship
of Aphrodite or Venus, and also that of Bacchus, originally
consisted in homage paid to the reproductive principles contained
in the earth, water, and sun, but, as is well known, this pure
and beautiful worship, in later times, and especially after it
was carried to Greece, became synonymous with the grossest
practices and the most lawless disregard of human decency.
With the light which in these later ages science and ethnological
research are throwing upon the physiological and religious
disputes of the ancients, the correctness of the primitive
doctrines elaborated under purer conditions at an age when human
beings lived nearer to Nature is being proved--namely, that
matter like spirit is eternal and indestructible, and therefore
that the one is as difficult of comprehension as the other, and
that Nature, instead of being separated from spirit, is filled
with it and can not be divorced from it; also that the female is
the original organic unit of creation, without which nothing is
or can be created.
CHAPTER VI.
CIVILIZATION OF AN ANCIENT RACE.
The profound doctrines of abstractions or emanations; of the
absorption of the individual soul into the divine ether or
essence; of the renewal of worlds and reincarnation, were
doubtless elaborated after the separation, in the human mind, of
Spirit from matter, but before mankind had lost the power to
reason abstractly.
Although Pythagoras understood and believed these doctrines, he
