rhaps the heavenly Fire is really
not our Fire at all, but a +pempton soma+, a 'Fifth Body', seeing that
it seems not to burn nor the Stars to be consumed.

This is persuasive enough and philosophic; but whither has it led us?
Back to the Olympians, or rather behind the Olympians; as St. Paul puts
it (Gal. iv. 9), to 'the beggarly elements'. The old Kore, or Earth
Maiden and Mother, seems to have held her own unshaken by the changes of
time all over the Aegean area. She is there in prehistoric Crete with
her two lions; with the same lions orientalized in Olympia and Ephesus;
in Sparta with her great marsh birds; in Boeotia with her horse. She
runs riot in a number of the Gnostic systems both pre-Christian and
post-Christian. She forms a divine triad with the Father and the Son:
that is ancient and natural. But she also becomes the Divine Wisdom,
Sophia, the Divine Truth, Aletheia, the Holy Breath or Spirit, the
Pneuma. Since the word for 'spirit' is neuter in Greek and masculine in
Latin, this last is rather a surprise. It is explained when we remember
that in Hebrew the word for Spirit, 'Ruah', is mostly feminine. In the
meantime let us notice one curious development in the life of this
goddess. In the old religion of Greece and Western Asia, she begins as a
Maiden, then in fullness of time becomes a mother. There is evidence
also for a third stage, the widowhood of withering autumn.[138:1] To the
classical Greek this motherhood was quite as it should be, a due
fulfilment of normal functions. But to the Gnostic and his kind it
connoted a 'fall', a passage from the glory of Virginity to a state of
Sin.[138:2] The Kore becomes a fallen Virgin, sometimes a temptress or
even a female devil; sometimes she has to be saved by her Son the
Redeemer.[138:3] As far as I have observed, she loses most of her
earthly agricultural quality, though as Selene or even Helen she keeps
up her affinity with the Moon.

Almost all the writers of the Hellenistic Age agree in regarding the
Sun, Moon, and Stars as gods. The rationalists Hecataeus and Euhemerus,
before going on to their deified men, always start with the heavenly
bodies. When Plutarch explains in his beautiful and kindly way that all
religions are really attempts towards the same goal, he clinches his
argument by observing that we all see the same Sun and Moon though we
call them by different names in all languages.[139:1] But the belief
does not seem to have had much religious