new birth, the Virgin was seen just rising on the Eastern
sky--the horizon line passing through her centre. And
many people think that this astronomical fact is the explanation
of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I
do not think that it is the sole explanation--for indeed in
all or nearly all these cases the acceptance of a myth seems
to depend not upon a single argument but upon the convergence
of a number of meanings and reasons in the same
symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious,
and its importance is accentuated by the following
considerations.

In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside
of the dome, there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation
of the Northern hemisphere of the sky and the
Zodiac.[1] Here Virgo the constellation is represented, as
in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in her
hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating
and explicatory figure--a figure of Isis with
the infant Horus in her arms, and quite resembling in style
the Christian Madonna and Child, except that she is
sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to show
that--whatever other nations may have done in associating
Virgo with Demeter, Ceres, Diana[2] etc.--the Egyptians
made no doubt of the constellation's connection with Isis
and Horus. But it is well known as a matter of history
that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the early
Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form
of the worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior,
and so passed into the European ceremonial. We have