‘He spake, and they did the will of Zeus, son of Kronos, the Lord, For straightway the Halting One, the Famous, at his word Took clay and moulded an image, in form of a maiden fair, And Athene, the gray-eyed goddess girt her and decked her hair. And about her the Graces divine and our Lady Persuasion set Bracelets of gold on her flesh; and about her others yet, The Hours with their beautiful hair, twined wreaths of blossoms of spring, While Pallas Athene still ordered her decking in everything. Then put the Argus-slayer, the marshal of souls to their place, Tricks and flattering words in her bosom and thievish ways. He wrought by the will of Zeus, the Loud-thundering giving her voice, Spokesman of gods that he is, and for name of her this was his choice, PANDORA, because in Olympus the gods joined together then And _all_ of them gave her, a _gift_, a sorrow, to covetous men.’ Through all the magic of a poet, caught and enchanted himself by the vision of a lovely woman, there gleams the ugly malice of theological animus. Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess, Mother and Maid in one, in his man-fashioned Olympus, but her figure _is_ from the beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave, dowered only with physical beauty, and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal _bourgeois_, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest[740]: ‘He spake and the Sire of men and of gods immortal laughed.’ Such myths are a necessary outcome of the shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, and the shift itself, spite of a seeming retrogression, is a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to women a false because a magical prestige. With patriarchy came inevitably the facing of a real fact, the fact of the greater natural weakness of women. Man the stronger, when he outgrew his belief in the magical potency of woman, proceeded by a pardonable practical logic to despise and enslave her as the weaker. The future held indeed a time when the non-natural, mystical truth came to be apprehended, that the stronger had a need, real and imperative, of the weaker. Physically nature had from the outset compelled a certain recognition of this truth, but that the physical was a sacrament of the spiritual was a hard saying, and its understanding was not granted to the Greek, save here and there where a flicker of the truth gleamed and went through the vision of philosopher or poet. * * * * *