The gods reflect not only man’s human form but also his human relations. In the Homeric Olympus we see mirrored a family group of the ordinary patriarchal type, a type so familiar that it scarcely arrests attention. Zeus, Father of Gods and men, is supreme; Hera, though in constant and significant revolt, occupies the subordinate place of a wife; Poseidon is a younger brother, and the rest of the Olympians are grouped about Zeus and Hera in the relation of sons and daughters. These sons and daughters are quarrelsome among themselves and in constant insurrection against father and mother, but still they constitute a family, and a family subject, if reluctantly, to the final authority of a father. But when we come to examine local cults we find that, if these mirror the civilization of the worshippers, this civilization is quite other than patriarchal. Hera, subject in the Homeric Olympus, reigns alone at Argos; Athene at Athens is no god’s wife, she is affiliated in some loose fashion to Poseidon, but the relation is one of rivalry and ultimate conquest, nowise of subordination. At Eleusis two goddesses reign supreme, Demeter and Kore, the Mother and the Maid; neither Hades nor Triptolemos their nursling ever disputes their sway. At Delphi in historical days Apollo held the oracle, but Apollo, the priestess[682] knows, was preceded by a succession of women goddesses: ‘First in my prayer before all other gods I call on Earth, primaeval prophetess. Next Themis on her mother’s oracular seat Sat, so men say. Third by unforced consent Another Titan, daughter too of Earth, Phoebe. She gave it as a birthday gift To Phoebus, and giving called it by her name.’ Gaia the Earth was first, and elsewhere Aeschylus[683] tells us that Themis was but another name of Gaia. Prometheus says the future was foretold him by his mother: ‘Themis she And Gaia, one in form with many names.’ In historical days in Greece, descent was for the most part traced through the father. These primitive goddesses reflect another condition of things, a relationship traced through the mother, the state of society known by the awkward term matriarchal[684], a state echoed in the lost _Catalogues of Women_, the _Eoiai_ of Hesiod, and in the Boeotian heroines of the _Nekuia_. Our modern patriarchal society focusses its religious anthropomorphism on the relationship of the father and the son; the Roman Church with her wider humanity includes indeed the figure of the Mother who is both Mother and Maid, but she is still in some sense subordinate to the Father and the Son.