Its symbol was the mystery which lifted only a corner of the veil and left an abundant opportunity for wonder, imagination, thought, and mysticism, which was entirely lacking in the perfect statue and the finished creed. It made man, through its sympathetic magic, a coworker with his divinities or dæmons in gaining the answer to an intensive desire or prayer acted by all the members of the community with all their united might, instead of expressed merely in words, the utterance of his whole being and life. Such a system or chaos overflows with sublime possibilities. The introduction of agriculture had produced another most important change in religious views and ritual. In tillage the earth brought forth and gave birth to the crops which furnished their chief food supply, and probably, in their view, to animals and men also; just as the human mother gives birth to the child. Hence there was a wide-spread belief in, and cult of, an earth divinity, of course female, or in a goddess or dæmon of fertility. She is sometimes or usually accompanied by a male partner, companion or son, but he occupies a lower place. [Illustration: FEMALE IDOLS, THRACE] [Illustration: FEMALE IDOL, ANAU Reproduced from "Explorations in Turkestan." Carnegie Institute of Washington, Publishers.] This cult of the goddess seems to have been a marked feature of Neolithic religion.[161] We find it in the remains of the Minoan periods in Crete; Isis and her companion god Osiris were very prominent in Egypt. The cult was wide-spread throughout Asia Minor: Diana, or better Artemis, of the Ephesians, Ma in Anatolia, the great goddess of the Hittites are a few examples. Farther eastward we find Astarte. Pumpelly found a female idol (Astarte?) at Anau. The cult dots, if it does not cover, the old middle migration route. We remember the wide-spread distribution of the painted pottery from Susa to Anau and over to Boghaz-keui in the land of the Hittites. Art and religion are closely related during the early times and a wide-spread type of art suggests, though it does not prove, an accompanying form of religion similar throughout the same wide area. In Greece we find Demeter, and in "Pelasgic Athens" the goddess Athena always held the highest place. Hera may well have been another great goddess of the Pelasgi. When the conquering Achæans came in and their chieftains wedded the princesses of the land, they married their god Zeus to the goddess of the land. Hence this cult has been displaced and its records blotted out by later changes. That so many traces of it outlasted the Bronze Age is a proof of its firm hold and great vitality.