iginal significance. We are assured that
many of these images have been painted over, ostensibly in imitation of
bronze, but the whites of the eyes, the teeth, and colored lips reveal
the fact that they are really not intended to represent bronze, but
figures of a black virgin goddess and child whose worship has been
imported into Europe from the East. I had been told that one of the
oldest of these images extant was to be found in Augsburg; a thorough
search, however, in all the churches and cathedrals of that city failed
to reveal it, but in the museum at Munich such a figure is to be seen.
It is in a state of decay, one arm of the mother and a portion of
the child's figure being worn away. Upon this subject Godfrey Higgins
remarks:

"If the author had wished to invent a circumstance to corroborate the
assertion that the Romish Christ of Europe is the Crishna of India, how
could he have desired anything more striking than the fact of the black
virgin and child being so common in the Romish countries of Europe?
A black virgin and child among the white Germans, Swiss, French, and
Italians!!!"(146)

146) Anacalypsis, book iv., ch. i., p. 175.

We have observed that during an earlier age in the history of religious
worship, as the female was supposed to comprehend both the female and
male elements in creation, a belief in the possible creative power of
the female independently of the male was everywhere entertained, and
that after the schismatic faction arose which endeavored to exalt the
male, the production of a son by a woman unaided by man, was among the
Yonigas to be the sign which would forever settle the question of
the superior importance of the female functions in the processes
of reproduction, and consequently, also, her claim to the greater
importance in the deity.

The sacred books of India show that from a former belief in one or
the other of the two creative principles throughout Nature as God, the
people had come to accept both female and male as necessary elements
in reproduction, the latter being the more important. In course of time
this change seems to have been universal and to have extended to all the
countries of the globe.

As the male could not create independently of the female, or, as spirit
was dependent on matter for its manifestations, there arose a necessity
for a Savior to redeem man from the evil effects arising from his
relations with woman who was regarded as matter, and wh