age of human history of divine
fathers and earthly mothers; for instance, Alexander of Macedon, Julius
Caesar, and later the mythical Christ who superseded Jesus, the Judean
philosopher and teacher of mankind.

Henceforth, caves, wells, cows, boxes and chests, arks, etc., stand for
or symbolize the female power. We are given to understand, however, that
for ages these symbols were as holy as the God himself, and among many
peoples even more revered and worshipped.

We have seen that the ancients knew that matter and force were alike
indestructible. According to their doctrine all Nature proceeded from
the sun. Hence the power back of the sun, which they worshipped as the
Destroyer or Regenerator, or, in other words, as the mother of the sun,
was the Great Aum or Om, the Aleim or Elohim, who was the indivisible
God. The creative agency which proceeded from the sun was both male
and female, yet one in essence. Later, the male appeared as spirit, the
female as matter. Spirit was something above and independent of Nature.

It had indeed created matter from nothing. The fact will be remembered
that man claimed supremacy over woman on the ground that the male is
spirit, while the female is only matter; in other words, that she was
simply a covering for the soul, which is divine.

Thus was the god-idea divorced from Nature, and a masculine principle,
outside and independent of matter, set up as a personal potentate or
ruler over the universe.

The logic by which the great female principle in the Deity has been
eliminated, and the subterfuges which have been and still are employed
to construct and sustain a Creator who of himself is powerless to
create, is as amusing as it is suggestive, and forcibly recalls to mind
la couvade, in which, among certain tribes, the father, assuming all the
duties of procreation, goes to bed when a child is born.(59)

59) The Evolution of Woman, p. 127.

All mythologies prove conclusively that ages elapsed before human beings
were rash enough, or sufficiently blinded by falsehood and superstition,
to attempt to construct a creative force unaided by the female
principle. Just here it may not be out of place to refer to the fact
that in the attempt to divorce God from Nature have arisen all the
superstitions and senseless religious theories with which, since the
earliest ages of metaphysical speculation, the human mind has been
crowded.

To this separation of the two original eleme