She watered the meadows in “Twelfth Night” and punished idle spinsters. The devil’s mother is only a degraded form of the goddess of fertility and domestic activity and her worship was once associated not only with licentiousness but with human sacrifice. It was these women who were primarily in league with the devil and once a year must dance all night. The hag is the woman of the woods who knows and collects herbs, especially those that relieve the labors of childbirth. The priestess of the old civilization became a medicine woman and midwife, the goddess of fertility being killed in the autumn that she may be rejuvenated in the spring. Thus the witch is a relic of the priestess or goddess of fertility, and the hostility they sometimes exhibit for marriage was because at this stage it was not monogamic but group marriage. Thus Pearson thinks that Walpurgis customs bring out most of the weak and strong points of ancient woman’s civilization, fossils of which lurk under all the folklore of witchcraft. Here we find the rudiments of medicine, domestication of small animals, cultivation of vegetables, domestic and household arts, the pitchfork--which was once the fire-rake--etc. All of these are woman’s inventions and were necessary for the higher discoveries. Although he did not invent them, man later made woman use them. The primitive savage knows nothing of agriculture, spinning, and herbs, but his wife does. It is not he but she who made these symbols of a female deity. The fertility, resource, and inventiveness of woman arose from the struggle she had to make for the preservation of herself and her child. Man was quickened by warfare of tribe against tribe, but that came later. The first struggle was for food and shelter. Thus the father-age rests on a degenerate form of an older group and is not the pure outcome of male domination. He thus believes in a direct line of descent from the old salacious worship of the mother-goddess and the extravagances of witchcraft, and he finds survivals of this even in the licensed vice of to-day. Thus this early civilization of woman handed down a mass of useful customs and knowledge, so that she was the bearer of a civilization that man has not yet entirely attained. If many things in her life are vestiges of the mother age, many in his represent a still lower stratum and the drudgery of the peasant woman in many parts of Europe represents the extreme of the reaction brought about by male dominance.