s Deity indicate
the source whence has sprung the great theological dogma underlying
Christianity, that woman is the cause of evil in the world.

CHAPTER X. ANCIENT SPECULATIONS CONCERNING CREATION.

"Daughters of Jove, All hail! but O inspire The lovely song! the sacred
race proclaim Of ever-living gods; who sprang from Earth, From the
starred Heaven, and from the gloomy Night, And whom the salt Deep
nourished into life. Declare how first the gods and Earth became; The
rivers and th' immeasurable sea High-raging in its foam; the glittering
stars, The wide impending Heaven; and who from these Of deities arose,
dispensing good; Say how their treasures, how their honors each Allotted
shar'd: how first they held abode On many-caved Olympus:--this declare,
Ye Muses! dwellers of the heavenly mount From the beginning; say, who
first arose? First Chaos was: next ample-bosomed Earth, Of deathless
gods, who still the Olympian heights Snow-topt inhabit.... Her
first-born Earth produced Of like immensity, the starry Heaven: That he
might sheltering compass her around On every side, and be forevermore To
the blest gods a mansion unremoved."(92)

92) Hesiod, The Theogony.

So long as human beings worshipped the abstract principle of creation,
the manifestations of which proceed from the earth and sun, they
doubtless reasoned little on the nature of its hitherto inseparable
parts. They had not at that early period begun to look outside of Nature
for their god-idea, but when through the peculiar course of development
which had been entered upon, the simple conception of a creative agency
originally entertained became obscured, mankind began to speculate on
the nature and attributes of the two principles by which everything is
produced, and to dispute over their relative importance in the office of
reproduction. Much light has been thrown upon these speculations by
the Kosmogonies which have come down to us from the Phoenicians,
Babylonians, and other peoples of past ages. In the Phoenician
Kosmogony, according to the Mokh doctrine as recorded by Philo, out
of the kosmic egg Toleeleth (female) "sprang all the impregnation of
creation and the beginning of the universe." In this exposition of the
beginnings of things, it is distinctly stated that the spirit which in
after ages came to be regarded as something outside or above Nature,
"had no consciousness of its own creation." Commenting on the above,
Bunsen is constrain