Plutarch, in the _De Iside et Osiride_,[15.1] is one of our witnesses. He finds a profounder significance for theosophy in the beetle, the asp, and the weasel than in the most beautiful anthropomorphic work of bronze or marble. He here turns his back on his ancestors, and goes over to the sect of the Egyptian mystic. But the most curious testimony to my thesis is borne by an inscription on an Egyptian lamp--an invocation of the God Thoth: “O Father of Light, O Word (λόγος) that orderest day and night, come show thyself to me. O God of Gods, in thy ape-form enter.”[15.2] Here the association of so mystic a concept as the “Logos,” the divine Reason, an emanation of God with the form of an ape, is striking enough, and suggests to us many reflections on the contrast between the Egyptian theriomorphism and the human idolatry of the Greek. The Hermes of Praxiteles was too stubborn a fact before the people’s eyes to fade or to soar into {16} the high vagueness of the “Logos,” too stable in his beautiful humanity to sink into the ape. But before leaving this subject I would point out a phenomenon in the Hellenic world that shows the working of the same principle. The Orphic god Dionysos-Sabazios-Zagreus was πολύμορφος, a shape-shifter, conceived now as bull, now as serpent, now as man, and the Orphic sects were penetrated with a mystic theosophy; and, again, they were a foreign element embedded in Greek society and religion. While we were dealing with the subject of anthropomorphism, we should consider also the question of sex, for a religion that gives predominance to the god is certain to differ in some essential respects from one in which a goddess is supreme. Now, although the conception of an All-Father was a recognised belief in every Greek community, and theoretically Zeus was admitted to be the highest god, yet we may believe Athena counted more than he for the Athenians, and Hera more for the Argives. And we have evidence of the passionate devotion of many urban and village communities to the mother Demeter and her daughter Kore, to whom the greatest mysteries of Greece, full of the promise of posthumous salvation, were consecrated. Also, in the adjacent lands of earlier culture we mark the same phenomenon. In Egyptian religion we have the commanding figure of Isis, who, though by no means supreme in the earlier period, seems to dominate the latter age of this polytheism. In the Assyrian-Babylonian Pantheon, though the male deity is at the head, Ishtar appears as his compeer, or as inferior only to Asshur. Coming westward towards Asia Minor, we seem to see the goddess overshadowing the god. On the great Hittite monument at Boghaz-Keui, {17} in Cappadocia, skilfully interpreted by Dr. Frazer, we observe a great goddess with her son coequal with the Father-God. In the lands adjacent to the coast a Mother-Goddess, sometimes also imagined as virgin, Kybele of Phrygia, Ma of Cappadocia, Hipta of Lydia, Astarte of Askalon, Artemis of Ephesos who