Thus the Ophites accounted for the divinity who was in effect their Supreme God, the still higher Bythos, as we have seen, being put in the background as too awful for human consideration[141]. But it was still necessary to make manifest the feminine aspect of the deity which was always very prominent in Asia Minor. The Mother of the Gods, known as Ma in Lydia, Cybele in Phrygia proper, Artemis at Ephesus, the unnamed Syrian goddess at Hierapolis, and Aphrodite in Cyprus and elsewhere[142], was in the early Christian centuries the most prominent person in the Anatolian pantheon, a fact which Sir William Ramsay would attribute to the matriarchate, _Mutterrecht_, or custom of descent in the female line, which he thinks indigenous to Asia Minor. In the earliest Phrygian religion there seems little doubt that the supreme goddess was originally considered to be bisexual, and capable of production without male assistance, as is expressly stated in the legend of Agdistis or Cybele preserved by Pausanias[143], and perhaps hinted at in the stories of Amazons spread throughout the whole of Asia Minor. But it is probable that, as Sir William Ramsay himself says, this idea had become less prominent with the immigration from Europe of tribes of male warriors without female companions,[144] while Semitic influence was always against it. Hence the Ophites found themselves compelled to make their female deity inferior or posterior to their male. “Below these, again (_i.e._ below the First and Second Man or Father-and-Son),” says Irenaeus in reporting their doctrines, “is the Holy Spirit ... whom they call the First Woman[145].” Neither he nor Hippolytus gives us any direct evidence of the source whence this feminine Power was thought by them to have issued. But Hippolytus says without circumlocution that “this Man,” _i.e._ Adamas or the Father-and-Son, “is both male and female[146],” and he quotes the words of an Ophite hymn[147] addressed to him that: “_From_ thee is Father and _through_ thee is Mother, two names immortal, parents of Aeons, O thou citizen of heaven, Man of mighty name[148]!” Later, he puts in the mouth of the Naassene or Ophite writer from whom he repeatedly quotes, the phrase: “The Spirit is where the Father and the Son are named, from whom and from the Father it is there born; and this (that is, the Spirit) is the many-named, myriad-eyed Incomprehensible One for whom every nature in different ways yearns,”