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His mother-goddess, with her hands divine, Had formed his curling locks, and made his temples shine, And given his rolling eyes a sparkling grace, And breathed a youthful vigor on his face. AEneas now made himself known to the queen and thanked her for her kindness to his people. Dido was astonished at the sudden appearance of the hero, of whom she had already heard much.
It is a demarcation as sharp as that involved in the primitive taboos which set women apart as sacred or unclean. In building up the Madonna concept and requiring the women of his family to approximate this mother-goddess ideal, man made them into beings too spiritual to satisfy his earthly needs. The wife and mother must be pure, as he conceived purity, else she could not be respected.
By degrees Osiris came to be regarded as the god of death pure and simple, or as the personification of Death, and he ceased to be regarded as the great protecting ancestral spirit, and the all- powerful protecting Father of his people. As the importance of Osiris declined that of Isis grew, and men came to regard her as the great Mother-goddess of the world.
The servants of these goddesses were priestesses, or at a later date men dressed as women. At first the gods, in so far as they had any existence, appear in the form of temporary lovers of the goddesses; they are very plainly the transitory male element needful for fertilisation, and then destined to disappear. We find very early the brother as the husband and dependent of the Mother-goddess.
From a very early time the fertility of nature has been referred appropriately to female Powers, and in the Semitic pantheon a large number of such divinities occur. A deity of this sort naturally becomes a mother-goddess, with all the attributes that pertain to this character; in some cases a mother-goddess becomes supreme.
At each of these festivals many victims were offered in sacrifice, some upon the stone and some by being hurled into the boiling pool beneath the statue, there to be consumed by the Snake or swept down the secret course of the underground river. The feast celebrated in the spring was sacred to Jal, and that in the autumn to the mother-goddess.
But there was this difference between them that at the spring ceremony female victims only were sacrificed to Jal to propitiate him and to avert his evil influence, while at the autumn celebration males alone were offered up to the mother-goddess in gratitude for her gifts of plenty. Also criminals were occasionally thrown to the Snake that his hunger might be satisfied.
And he does well; the title Princess belongs of right to 'Shabbath. For the name be it said in passing is probably a corruption of a title of the Mother-goddess Ashtart, and it would, I think, have been no blameworthy act if the religious transformers of Israelite myths had made a special myth, representing Shabbath as a man. When the Messiah comes, I trust that He will do this.
He killed him, skinned him and sold his pelt; and, sure enough, he received five thousand pieces of copper for it. From that time on the fox-spirit ceased to show itself. "The Old Mother" is really the mother-goddess of the Taischan. But in other localities she is chiefly honored as a child-giving goddess. The war god Guan Di also is appealed to as a savior in all sorts of emergencies.
It was the custom of sacrifice which kept down the population to its low level, made the power of the priests absolute, and their wealth greater than that of all the other inhabitants of the country put together, for they chose the victims that had offended against Jal or against the mother-goddess, and confiscated their possessions to "the service of the temple."
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