On the mithraitic monuments the spring equinox is represented by lighted and elevated torches, trees covered with leaves, entire bulls, and young men holding lighted torches; while the autumnal equinox is represented by a hydra, or long serpent, a scorpion, reversed and extinguished torches, trees loaded with autumn fruits, a bull with its generative organs torn away, and old men holding reversed and extinguished torches. The Rev. G. W. Cox, M.A. and scholar of Trinity College, Oxford, in his “Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” says: “The male and female powers of nature were denoted respectively by an upright and an oval emblem, and the conjunction of the two furnished at once the altar and the ashera, or grove, against which the Hebrew prophets lifted up their voice in earnest protest.... In the kingdom both of Judah and Israel the rites connected with these emblems assumed their most corrupting form. Even in the temple itself stood the Ashera, or the upright emblem on the circular altar of Baal-Peor, the Priapos of the Jews, thus reproducing the Linga and Yoni of the Hindu. For this symbol the women wove hangings, as the Athenian maidens embroidered the sacred peplos for the ship presented to Athene at the great Dionysiac festival. Here, at the winter solstice, they wept and mourned for Tammuz, the fair Adonis, done to death by the boar.... Here, also, on the third day, they rejoiced at the resurrection of the lord of light. Hence, as most intimately connected with the reproduction of life on earth, it became the symbol under which the sun, invoked with a thousand names, has been worshipped throughout the world as the restorer of the powers of nature after the long sleep or death of winter.”