I think here, and for the understanding of this problem, we are thrown back upon a very early age of human evolution--the age of Magic. Before any settled science or philosophy or religion existed, there were still certain Things--and consequently also certain Words--which had a tremendous influence on the human mind, which in fact affected it deeply. Such a word, for instance, is 'Thunder'; to hear thunder, to imitate it, even to mention it, are sure ways of rousing superstitious attention and imagination. Such another word is 'Serpent,' another 'Tree,' and so forth. There is no one who is insensible to the reverberation of these and other such words and images (1); and among them, standing prominently out, are the two 'Mother' and 'Virgin.' The word Mother touches the deepest springs of human feeling. As the earliest word learnt and clung to by the child, it twines itself with the heart-strings of the man even to his latest day. Nor must we forget that in a primitive state of society (the Matriarchate) that influence was probably even greater than now; for the father of the child being (often as not) UNKNOWN the attachment to the mother was all the more intense and undivided. The word Mother had a magic about it which has remained even until to-day. But if that word rooted itself deep in the heart of the Child, the other word 'virgin' had an obvious magic for the full grown and sexually mature Man--a magic which it, too, has never lost. (1) Nor is it difficult to see how out of the discreet use of such words and images, combined with elementary forms like the square, the triangle and the circle, and elementary numbers like 3, 4, 5, etc., quite a science, so to speak, of Magic arose. There is ample evidence that one of the very earliest objects of human worship was the Earth itself, conceived of as the fertile Mother of all things. Gaia or Ge (the earth) had temples and altars in almost all the cities of Greece. Rhea or Cybele, sprung from the Earth, was "mother of all the gods." Demeter ("earth mother") was honored far and wide as the gracious patroness of the crops and vegetation. Ceres, of course, the same. Maia in the Indian mythology and Isis in the Egyptian are forms of Nature and the Earth-spirit, represented as female; and so forth. The Earth, in these ancient cults, was the mystic source of all life, and to it, as a propitiation, life of all kinds was sacrificed. (There are strange accounts of a huge fire being made, with an altar to Cybele in the midst, and of deer and fawns and wild animals, and birds and sheep and corn and fruits being thrown pell-mell into the flames. (1)) It was, in a way, the most natural, as it seems to have been the earliest and most spontaneous of cults--the worship of the Earth-mother, the all-producing eternal source of life, and on account of her never-failing ever-renewed fertility conceived of as an immortal Virgin. (1) See Pausanias iv. 32. 6; and Lucian, De Syria Dea, 49.