and trees is not destroyed by eating; all combined to make the
tree symbolical of eternal life. The tree is either male or female,
except in certain instances where it is, like the lotus, androgynous,
such for example as the ash, which is the "sacred" tree of
Scandinavia. Wherever a plant or a tree is found to be bi-sexual, it
has been regarded as "sacred." The same idea is found throughout all
myths, and all religious symbolism, namely: _the attainment of
god-hood is reached when both sexes are united in one Being._

The fuller meaning of this symbolical idea will be considered in a
subsequent chapter; but for the present we are concerned with the
history of sex-degradation from the pure ideal of nature worship to
that of a monistic God whose gender is masculine. The pine tree, held
sacred in many countries as a symbol of generation, and from which our
own Christmas-tree is descended, is distinctively a male emblem, and
its perennial green typifies the hope of Man that he too may manifest,
in some form of life, the never-failing virility of the pine. The
Latin name for the pine is pinus.

Thus from nature worship to phallic worship was but a step, but that
step led to others. The pine, from the fact of its erect form; its
spiral convolutions; its sap; its fruit; its renewal of activity; its
root and veins; became a universally accepted emblem of the
life-energy in man and in animals, and the gradual substitution of the
male principle alone, for the androgynous idea as a symbol of Deity
contributed to the idea of the inferiority of woman, until she finally
became the slave and the plaything of man. The "virgin of the
spheres," from her exalted mission as the Eternal Mother of the race,
became at best but a secondary personality, and finally was refused
any part in the symbol of the Holy Trinity.

Instead of father, mother and child, the Holy Trinity became "Father,
Son and--Holy Ghost."

The early Romans must have been devoid of a sense of humor. But what
of our modern Christian creeds, and their idea of the Holy Trinity
composed of three male beings?

It is in Christian Science alone of all the modern creeds that the
female principle is given a place co-equal with the male. Christian
Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their
reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the
Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are
evidences of the re-establishment of t