According to the theory set forth by this writer, however, religion was the cause of the important change which at this time took place in the positions of the sexes. Although, according to him, the religion which prevailed during the ages of “lawlessness” was of a low “telluric chthonic” type, it was nevertheless the cause, or at least one of the causes which led to the abandonment of promiscuity and the establishment of the monogamic family. It will doubtless be remembered, however, that this age of lawlessness or hetairism which Bachofen has described, represents a very early stage of human existence, in which, according to his reasoning, the baser instincts ruled supreme; nevertheless, within it, he would have us believe that a religious system had been evolved capable of lifting women from a state of degradation to which they had been consigned by nature, or at least to which they had always been committed, to a position of influence and womanly dignity in which they were able to assume supreme control over the forces by which they had been enslaved. With sexual desire as the controlling influence in human affairs, and with women in bondage to this power, it is difficult to conceive of any manner in which such a religion could have arisen. As all religious systems are believed to represent growths, and to indicate a result of the degree of progress attained, it is evident that had a religion appeared at this early age which was capable of elevating women from a condition of degradation, as indicated by the early state described by Bachofen it could not have been the result of natural development, but, on the contrary, must have proceeded directly from a divine source; in which event it would doubtless have remained upon the earth still further to aid development and bless the race. Such, however, was not the outcome of this remarkable but premature religion; for it is asserted by this writer that what women gained by religion they afterward lost through the same source—that in Greece, the loss first came through the oracle of Apollo, which declared the father to be the real parent of the child. Bachofen assures us, also, that through the Bacchanalian excesses which followed the dominion of males in Greece, hetairism was again restored, and through this means gynecocracy reappeared. From this it would seem that although under the earliest stage of hetairism women were without power and wholly under the control of men, with the return, at a later age, of a like state of society, the basis was at once laid for female supremacy.