After all this it seems rather naïve to believe that the parents of the "historical" Jesus were called Joseph and Mary, and that his father was a carpenter. In reality the whole of the family and home life of the Messiah, Jesus, took place in heaven among the Gods. It was only reduced to that of a human being in lowly circumstances by the fact that Paul described the descent of the Messiah upon the earth as an assumption of poverty and a relinquishment of his heavenly splendour. [185] Hence, when the myth was transformed into history, Christ was turned into a "poor" man in the economic sense of the word, while Joseph, the divine artificer and father of the sun, became an ordinary carpenter. Now it is a feature which recurs in all the religions of Nearer Asia that the "son" of the divine "virgin" mother is at the same time the "beloved" of this Goddess in the sexual sense of the word. This is the case not only with Semiramis and Ninus, Istar and Tammuz, Atargatis (Aphrodite) and Adonis, Cybele and Attis, but also with Aphrodite (Maia) and Hermes, [186] Maia and Iasios, one of the Cabiri, identical with Hermes or Cadmus, who was slain by his father, Zeus, with a lightning stroke, but was raised again and placed in the sky as a constellation. [187] We may conclude from the connection between Iasios and Joshua that a similar relationship existed between the latter and his mother Mirzam. Indeed, a glimmer of this possibly appears even in the Gospels in the relationship of the various Maries to Jesus, although, of course, in accordance with the character of these writings, they are transferred into quite a different sphere and given other emotional connections. [188]