The religious ideas which found expression in the legend of the fall were undoubtedly of late development,[102] although derived from still earlier phases of religious thought. The simple worship in symbol of the organs of generation, and of the ancestral head of the family, prompted by the desire for offspring and the veneration for him who produced it, was extended to the generative force in nature. The bull which, as we have seen, symbolised this force, was not restricted to earth, but was in course of time transferred to the heavens, and as one of the constellations was thought to have a peculiar relation to certain of the planetary bodies. This astral phase of the Phallic superstition was not unknown to the Mosaic religion. A still earlier form of this superstition was, however, known to the Hebrews, probably forming a link between the worship of the symbol of personal generative power and that of the heavenly phallus; as the worship of the bull connected the veneration for the human generator with that for the universal father. One of the primeval gods of antiquity was _Hermes_, the Syro-Egyptian _Thoth_, and the Roman _Mercury_. Kircher identifies him also with the god _Terminus_. This is doubtless true, as Hermes was a god of boundaries, and appears, as Dulaure has well shown, to have presided over the national frontiers. The meaning of the word “Thoth”—_erecting_—associates it with this fact. The peculiar primitive form of Mercury or Hermes was “a large stone, frequently square, and without either hands or feet. Sometimes the triangular shape was preferred, sometimes an upright pillar, and sometimes a heap of rude stones!”[103] The pillars were called by the Greeks _Hermæ_, and the heaps were known as _Hermèan_ heaps—the latter being accumulated “by the custom of each passenger throwing a stone to the daily-increasing mass in honour of the god.” Sometimes the pillar was represented with the attributes of Priapus.[104]