recognized parent on earth, but that the female principle was
worshipped as the more important creative force throughout Nature.

5) Max Muller, Origin and Growth of Religion, p. 279.

Doubtless the worship of the female energy prevailed under the
matriarchal system, and was practised at a time when women were the
recognized heads of families and when they were regarded as the more
important factors in human society. The fact has been shown in a
previous work that after women began to leave their homes at marriage,
and after property, especially land, had fallen under the supervision
and control of men, the latter, as they manipulated all the necessaries
of life and the means of supplying them, began to regard themselves as
superior beings, and later, to claim that as a factor in reproduction,
or creation, the male was the more important. With this change the ideas
of a Deity also began to undergo a modification. The dual principle
necessary to creation, and which had hitherto been worshipped as an
indivisible unity, began gradually to separate into its individual
elements, the male representing spirit, the moving or forming force
in the generative processes, the female being matter--the instrument
through which spirit works. Spirit which is eternal had produced matter
which is destructible. The fact will be observed that this doctrine
prevails to a greater or less extent in the theologies of the present
time.

A little observation and reflection will show us that during this change
in the ideas relative to a creative principle, or God, descent and the
rights of succession which had hitherto been reckoned through the mother
were changed from the female to the male line, the father having in
the meantime become the only recognized parent. In the Eumenides of
Aeschylus, the plea of Orestes in extenuation of his crime is that he is
not of kin to his mother. Euripides, also, puts into the mouth of Apollo
the same physiological notion, that she who bears the child is only
its nurse. The Hindoo Code of Menu, which, however, since its earliest
conception, has undergone numberless mutilations to suit the purposes
of the priests, declares that "the mother is but the field which brings
forth the plant according to whatsoever seed is sown."

Although, through the accumulation of property in masses and the capture
of women for wives, men had succeeded in gaining the ascendancy, and
although the doctrine had been propoun