is that in no Aryan polytheism is there to be found the worship of an isolated or virgin-goddess, keeping apart from relations with the male {96} deity: the goddesses in India, Germany, Ireland, Gaul,[96.1] Thrace, and Phrygia are usually associated temporarily or permanently with the male divinity, and are popularly regarded as maternal, if not as wedded. Trusting to the guidance of these two inductions, and always conscious of the lacunae in our records, we may draw this important conclusion concerning the earliest religious history of Hellas: namely, that where we find the powerful cult of an isolated goddess, she belongs to the pre-Hellenic population. The axiom applies at once and most forcibly to Artemis and Athena; the one dominant in certain parts of Arcadia and Attica, the other the exclusive deity of the Attic Acropolis. Their virginal character was probably a later idea arising from their isolation, their aversion to cult-partnership with the male deity.[96.2] The Aryan Hellenes were able to plant their Zeus and Poseidon on the high hill of Athens, but not to overthrow the supremacy of Athena in the central shrine and in the aboriginal soul of the Athenian people. As regards Hera, the question is more difficult: the excavations at the Heraeum have been supposed by Dr. Waldstein to prove the worship of a great goddess on that site, going back in time to the third millennium B.C.,[96.3] a period anterior to the advent of the god-worshipping Aryan Hellenes. And this goddess remained {97} dominant through all history at Argos and Samos. But we have no reason for supposing that her name was Hera in that earliest period. Phonetically, the word is best explained as “Aryan”: if it was originally the name brought by the Hellenes and designating the wife-goddess of the sky-god--and in spite of recent theories that contradict it I still incline to this view--the Hellenes could apply it to the great goddess of the Argolid, unless her aversion to matrimony was a dogma, or her religious isolation a privilege, too strong to infringe. This does not seem to have been the case. The goddess of Samian cult, a twin-institution with the Argive, was no virgin, but united with the sky-god in an old ἱερὸς γάμος. Nevertheless, throughout all history the goddess in Argos, and probably in Samos, is a more powerful cult-figure than the god.