The sky-and the sun-gods, then, were, I think, the two chief male divinities among the Aryan folk taken as a whole. There corresponded to them in most Aryan creeds two female divinities, an older and a younger, a wife and a maiden, such as were on the one side among the Greeks Hera and Demeter, and on the other side Athene and Artemis,[59] or Persephone, the daughter of Demeter. In the Norse creed, again, there is Frigg, the wife of Odin, and Freyja, the sister of Frey. This last is indeed not a maiden in the Eddic mythology. But the husband of Freyja is a person of such very small importance that we may feel sure he is only a sort of _addendum_ to her nature and surroundings, and that she is in character very much the counterpart of her brother, a maiden-goddess--goddess of spring-time and of love. In respect to the elder, the married goddess, we may say, almost with certainty, that she is the earth--the natural wife of the heavens, and naturally thought of as the mother of all mankind--_Terra Mater_. We know that the ancient Germans worshipped a goddess whom Tacitus calls Nerthus (possibly a mistake for _Hertha_, Earth), and, he adds, _Nerthus id est Terra Mater_. And in the Scandinavian offshoot of the ancient German creed there can be no doubt that the same idea of Mother Earth is embodied in the goddess Frigg, the wife of Odin. The Romans had their native goddess Tellus, who was only obscured in later times by such Greek or half-Greek divinities as Demeter or Cybele. For this Demeter of the Greeks bears a name which most philologists are agreed had a signification precisely the same as _Terra Mater_--Gê-mêtêr. Demeter is but one of many wives of Zeus mentioned in the Theogony of Hesiod. All of these wives, including Hera (Juno), the highest in rank of them all, were probably at one time or another personifications of the earth. The Vedas, too, have their mother-goddess, their Mother Earth. This is Prithvi, or Prithivi, the wide-stretching, generally called Prithivi-mátar, which is also Earth-Mother. And some think this word ‘Prithvi’ is connected with that of the Northern Frigg.[60] And the Vedas have their young maiden-goddess, who in the Vedas is called Ushas the Dawn. [Sidenote: Goddesses of Spring and Dawn.]