and Regenerator or Destroyer.

Destruction, or the absence of the sun's heat, represented by
winter, was necessary to life, and therefore the Destroyer was
also the Regenerator and equally with the Creator and Preserver
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