the winds. The incomprehensible lords of cupidity and rank
vegetation did not suffer the individualisation of desire. The complete
union of the male and female qualities, as manifested both in nature and
man, was solemnised in the Orgies, and not by any means the relationship
of an individual man to an individual woman, or sexuality connected with
individuals and dominated by them. Nor was this unfettering of instinct
a symbolical act; for it to be so, man must have stood over against
nature as an intellectual being, mirroring and transforming her acts by
his own deeds. He was as yet far from this. His ambition did not reach
beyond the desire to fulfil nature in himself. Before the majesty of
sex--worshipped in the vague, shadowy mothers of mankind, Rhea, Demeter,
Cybele, and their human offspring, the phallic Dionysus and the
hundred-breasted goddess of Ephesus--the individual with his piteous
limitations shrank into insignificance. Sex was immortal, sex and
primary matter, the [Greek: ule] contrasted by Aristotle with the
[Greek: eisos], the form. "The female principle is the mother of the
body, but the mother of the spirit is the male." The substance of those
ancient cults was birth and death, meaningless, purposeless, apparently
without rhyme or reason; their sacrament the perpetual union of the
sexes. Between the succeeding generations there was but one bond, the
natural bond of motherhood. It was the first tie realised by mankind, a
tie not felt as a concrete relationship between two individuals, but as
a general, maternal, natural force. The presiding divinities were the
"mothers," the eternal, incorporeal deities, enthroned outside time and
space, and therefore immortal givers of life and preservers of mankind.
Before their silent greatness the desire of man to know his whence and
whither, to win shape and individuality, became blasphemy. They had
given immortality to sex, but upon the individual they had laid the
curse of death.

Thus we have first a stage of fatherless, natural conception,
corresponding with the philosophical theories which maintained that all
created things had sprung from the elements. Later ages discovered a
spiritual principle, a becoming, or an eternal being, and finally a
conflict between spirit and matter.

But the general attitude towards sexual intercourse underwent a change
as soon as here and there individuals appeared who were conscious of
their individuality. Natural selection c