being insufficient they were united in
nuptials from which the gods were born--demons from whom descended kings
that were sons of heaven and sovereigns of the world.

In the process, man, who had begun by being a brute, succeeded in becoming
a lunatic only to develop into a child. The latter evolution was, at the
time, remote. Only lunatics abounded. But lunatics may dream. These did.
Their conceptions produced after-effects curiously profound, widely
disseminated, which, first elaborated by Chaldaean seers, Nineveh emptied
into Babylon.

Babylon, Queen of the Orient, beckoned by Semiramis out of myth, was made
by her after her image. That image was passion. The city, equivocal and
immense, brilliant as the sun, a lighthouse in the surrounding night, was
a bazaar of beauty. From the upper reaches of the Euphrates, through great
gates that were never closed, Armenia poured her wines where already
Nineveh had emptied her rites. In the conjunction were festivals that
magnetized the stranger from afar. At the very gates Babylon yielded to
him her daughters. He might be a herder, a bedouin, a bondman;
indifferently the voluptuous city embraced him, lulled him with the myrrh
and cassia of her caresses, sheltering him and all others that came in the
folds of her monstrous robe.

In emptying rites into this furnace Nineveh also projected her gods, the
princes of the Chaldaean sky, the lords of the ghostland, that, in patient
perversities, her seers had devised. Four thousand of them Babylon
swallowed, digested, reproduced. Some were nebulous, some were saurian,
many were horrible, all were impure. But, chiefly, there was Ishtar.
Semiramis conquered the world. Ishtar set it on fire.

Ishtar, whom St. Jerome generically and graphically described as the Dea
Meretrix, was known in Babylon as Mylitta. Gesenius, Schrader, Muenter,
particularly Quinet, have told of the mysteries, Asiatically monstrous,
naively displayed, through which she passed, firing the trade routes with
the flame of her face, adding Tyrian purple and Arabian perfumes to her
incandescent robe, trailing it from shore to shore, enveloping kingdoms
and satrapies in her fervid embrace, burning them with the fever of her
kisses, burning them so thoroughly, to such ashes, that to-day barely the
memory of their names endures; multiplying herself meanwhile, lingering
there where she had seemed to pass, developing from a goddess into a
pantheon, becoming Astarte in Syr