sibility of such a thing is so
entirely out of the line of our modern thought. So that while it
would seem not unnatural that such a legend should have, sprung up
spontaneously in some odd benighted corner of the world, we find it
very difficult to understand how in that case it should have spread
so rapidly in every direction, or--if it did not spread--how we are
to account for its SPONTANEOUS appearance in all these widely sundered
regions.

I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown
back upon a very early age of human evolution--the age of Magic. Before
any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were
still certain Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had
a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it
deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder'; to hear thunder, to
imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious
attention and imagination. Such another word is 'Serpent,' another
'Tree,' and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the
reverberation of these and other such words and images (1); and among
them, standing prominently out, are the two 'Mother' and 'Virgin.'
The word Mother touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the
earliest word learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with
the heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget
that in a primitive state of society (the Matriarchate) that influence
was probably even greater than now; for the father of the child being
(often as not) UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more
intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about it which has
remained even until to-day. But if that word rooted itself deep in the
heart of the Child, the other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for
the full grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too, has never
lost.

(1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of
such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square,
the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc.,
quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose.

There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human
worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all
things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the
cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of
all t