[5] Max Muller, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 279.


Doubtless the worship of the female energy prevailed under the
matriarchal system, and was practised at a time when women were
the recognized heads of families and when they were regarded as
the more important factors in human society. The fact has been
shown in a previous work that after women began to leave their
homes at marriage, and after property, especially land, had
fallen under the supervision and control of men, the latter, as
they manipulated all the necessaries of life and the means of
supplying them, began to regard themselves as superior beings,
and later, to claim that as a factor in reproduction, or
creation, the male was the more important. With this change the
ideas of a Deity also began to undergo a modification. The dual
principle necessary to creation, and which had hitherto been
worshipped as an indivisible unity, began gradually to separate
into its individual elements, the male representing spirit, the
moving or forming force in the generative processes, the female
being matter--the instrument through which spirit works. Spirit
which is eternal had produced matter which is destructible. The
fact will be observed that this doctrine prevails to a greater or
less extent in the theologies of the present time.

A little observation and reflection will show us that during this
change in the ideas relative to a creative principle, or God,
descent and the rights of succession which had hitherto been
reckoned through the mother were changed from the female to the
male line, the father having in the meantime become the only
recognized parent. In the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the plea of