was represented by various emblems which will be noticed farther
on in this work. In still later ages, after male reproductive
power had become God, and when, through superstition and
sensuality, the masses of the people had descended to the rank of
slaves, monarchs, representing themselves to their ignorant
subjects as the source of all blessings, even of life itself,
appropriated the titles of the sun, and claimed for themselves
the adoration which had formerly belonged to it. From this fact
has doubtless arisen the opinion so tenaciously upheld in recent
times, that the gods of the ancients were only deified heroes of
former times.

If, during the earlier ages of human existence, all the gods
resolved themselves into the sun, and if Light and Life, or
Wisdom and the power to reproduce and sustain life, constituted
the Deity, then of course God or the sun would be female or male,
or both, according to the prevailing belief in the comparative
creative and sustaining forces of the sexes.

From what appears in the foregoing pages the fact has doubtless
been perceived that the worship of a Virgin and Child does not,
as is usually supposed, belong exclusively to the Romish
Christian Church, but, on the contrary, that it constitutes the
most remote idea of a Creator extant. As has been hinted, there
is little doubt that the earliest worship of the woman and child
was much simpler than was that which came to prevail in later
ages, at a time when every religious conception was closely
veiled beneath a mixture of astrology and mythology. After the
planets came to be regarded as active agencies in reproduction,
and powerful in directing all mundane affairs, the Virgin of the