he gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored far and wide as the
gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the
same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms
of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The
Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and
to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are
strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in
the midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep
and corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was,
in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest
and most spontaneous of cults--the worship of the Earth-mother,
the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her
never-failing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin.

(1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.

But when the Saviour-legend sprang up--as indeed I think it must
have sprung up, in tribe after tribe and people after people,
independently--then, whether it sprang from the divinization of some
actual man who showed the way of light and deliverance to his fellows
"sitting in darkness," or whether from the personification of the tribe
itself as a god, in either case the question of the hero's parentage was
bound to arise. If the 'saviour' was plainly a personification of the
tribe, it was obviously impossible to suppose him the son of a mortal
mother. In that case--and if the tribe was generally traced in the
legends to some primeval Animal or Mountain or thing of Nature--it was
probably easy to think of him (the saviour) as, born out of Nature's
womb, descended perhaps from that pure Virgin of the World who is
the Earth and Nature, who rules the skies at night, and stands in the
changing phases of the Moon, and is worshiped (as we have seen) in
the great constellation Virgo. If, on the other hand, he was the
divinization of some actual man, more or less known either personally
or by tradition to his fellows, then in all probability the name of his
mortal mother would be recognized and accepted; but as to his father,
that side of parentage being, as we have said, generally very uncertain,
it would be easy to suppose some heavenly Annunciation, the midnight
visit of a God, and what is usually termed a Virgin-birth.

There are two elements to be remembered here, as conspi