to all religious feeling," but, on the contrary, that it was the lack
of such appreciation which stimulated the lower nature of man and
encouraged every form of sensuality and superstition. In other words, it
was the subjection of the natural female instincts and the deification
of brute passion during the later ages of human history which have
degraded religion and corrupted human nature.

Although at the present time it is quite impossible for scholars to veil
the fact that the god-idea was originally worshipped as female, still,
most modern writers who deal with this subject seem unable to understand
the state of human society which must have existed when the instincts,
qualities, and characters peculiar to the female constitution were
worshipped as divine. So corrupt has human nature become through
over-stimulation and indulgence of the lower propensities, that it
seems impossible for those who have thus far dealt with this subject to
perceive in the earlier conceptions of a Deity any higher idea than that
conveyed to their minds at the present time by the sexual attributes and
physical functions of females--namely, their capacity to bring forth,
coupled with the power to gratify the animal instincts of males,
functions which women share with the lower orders of life.

The fact that by an ancient race woman was regarded as the head or crown
of creation, that she was the first emanation from the Deity, or, more
properly speaking, that she represented Perceptive Wisdom, seems at the
present time not to be comprehended, or at least not acknowledged. The
more recently developed idea, that she was designed as an appendage to
man, and created specially for his use and pleasure,--a conception which
is the direct result of the supremacy of the lower instincts over the
higher faculties,--has for ages been taught as a religious doctrine
which to doubt involves the rankest heresy.

The androgynous Venus of the earlier ages, a deity which although female
was figured with a beard to denote that within her were embraced the
masculine powers, embodied a conception of universal womanhood and
the Deity widely different from that entertained in the later ages of
Greece, at a time when Venus the courtesan represented all the powers
and capacities of woman considered worthy of deification.

To such an extent, in later ages, have all our ideas of the Infinite
become masculinized that in extant history little except occasional
hints