s of the earth, established at once in regions so distant as Japan
and Peru, immemorially acknowledged throughout the whole extent of Egypt
and India, and flourishing with equal vigor amidst the snowy mountains
of Thibet, and the vast deserts of Siberia."

We have observed that the idea of a trinity as conceived by the
so-called ancients, although at all times founded on the same
conception, viz., that of the reproductive powers of Nature and
especially of mankind, differed in expression according to its
application. Although in human beings this triune creative idea was
expressed by the mother, father, and child, as set forth in the temples
and on the monuments of Egypt, when applied directly to the sun and
the planets, it appears as the Creator, Preserver, 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 the
evolutionary processes of Nature may not be doubted. The myths still
extant, and even the oldest Assyrian inscriptions which have been
deciphered, reveal the fact that the seeds of the visib