liminating the female element from the
god-idea; hence the ignorance which prevails at the present time in
relation to the fact that the Creator once comprehended the forces of
Nature, which by an older race were worshipped as female.

CHAPTER IV. THE DUAL GOD OF THE ANCIENTS A TRINITY ALSO.

Although the God of the most ancient people was a dual Unity, in later
ages it came to be worshipped as a Trinity. When mankind began to
speculate on the origin of the life principle, they came to worship
their Deity in its three capacities as Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer
or Regenerator, each of which was female and male. We have observed
that, according to Higgins, when this Trinity was spoken of
collectively, it was called after the feminine plural.

By the various writers who have dealt with this subject during the last
century, much surprise has been manifested over the fact that for untold
ages the people of the earth have worshipped a Trinity. Forster, in his
Sketches of Hindoo Mythology, says: "One circumstance which forcibly
struck my attention was the Hindoo belief of a Trinity."

Maurice, in his Indian Antiquities, observes that the idea of three
persons in the Deity was diffused amongst all the nations of the
earth, in regions as distant as Japan and Peru, that it was memorially
acknowledged throughout the whole extent of Egypt and India,
"flourishing with equal vigor amidst the snowy mountains of Thibet, and
the vast deserts of Siberia." The idea of a Trinity is supposed to have
been first elaborated on the banks of the Indus, whence it was carried
to the Greek and Latin nations. Astrologically the triune Deity of the
ancients portrayed the processes of Nature.

This recondite doctrine as understood by the very ancient people
which originated it, involved a knowledge of Nature far too deep to
be appreciated or understood by their degenerate descendants, except
perhaps by a few philosophers and scholars who imbibed it in a modified
form from original sources in the far East.

After the establishment of the Trinity, the creative energy, which had
formerly been represented by a mother and child, came to be figured
by the mother, father, and the life derived therefrom. Sometimes the
Trinity took the form of the two creative forces, female and male, and
the Great Mother.

Whenever the two creative principles were considered separately, there
always appeared stationed over or above them, as their Creator, an