In other words Venus was originally the mother of mankind. She was at once the Queen of Heaven or Juno, the Magna Mater or Venus Genetrix, the educator and teacher or Pallas Athene, the eternal virgin or Diana, and the all-nourishing earth-goddess, Demeter or Ceres; and this view had better be stated inversely, that the original mother of mankind became differentiated in the course of history into these several activities of womanhood, as Juno, Venus, Diana, Ceres and Athene, which divinities were again reunited in Christianity in the form of Mary, the Queen of Heaven, the Mother of God, the Lady as an authority and guide in life, and the Eternal Virgin. Aphrodite was worshiped in a prehistoric age, and the origin of her cult is plainly traceable to the Orient, especially to Phenicia and further back to Pamphylia, Syria, Canaan and Babylon. The Phenician Astarte was imported to the islands of the Ægean Sea, to Cythera, Paphos and Amathus. Hence even in the Hellenistic age she was still honored with the names Cytherea, Paphia and Amathusia. From the Ægean islands the cult of Aphrodite spread rapidly to Sparta, Athens and other Greek centers. The barbaric origin of the Aphrodite cult is in evidence in the myth of Aphrodite’s birth as the foam-born, but it is difficult to say whom we shall deem responsible for the legend--perhaps the inhabitants of the islands. Certainly we cannot lay the burden of the invention of the story upon [Illustration: BIRTH OF VENUS. Relief found in the Villa Ludovisi.] the Asiatics, at least not on the Syrians, for according to an account of Nigidius Figulus,[11] the fish of the Euphrates found a large egg in the floods and pushed it ashore, where it was brooded upon by a dove until the Syrian goddess came forth from it. An exquisitely graceful relief pictures the birth of Venus from the foam of the ocean. She appears as a young maiden covered with a diaphanous garment, and is being lifted out of the water by the Graces. The marble is preserved in the National Museum at Rome and was discovered by excavations in the grounds of the Villa Ludovisi in 1887. The Oriental goddess was originally the queen of the starry heaven, either the moon or the morning star, and as such she was the same figure which in other places gave rise to the development of Artemis. We may emphasize here that like the Christian Mary the pagan female divinity was at the same time both the eternal virgin and the celestial mother. Mythology cannot stand the application of logical rationalism, and we must not try to make the traditional legends rigidly consistent. While we recognize a strong Oriental influence in the Greek construction of the Aphrodite cult, we must acknowledge that in Greece we have a new and independent origin of the divine ideal of femininity. In Mesopotamia Istar was a very popular deity, and innumerable idols have been found in the shape of a naked woman, commonly called [Illustration: DETAIL FROM THE LUDOVISI RELIEF.]