Eresh-ki-gal or
Allatu. They were accompanied by shadowy male forms ere they became
wives of strongly individualized gods, or by child gods, their sons,
who might be regarded as "brothers" or "husbands of their mothers", to
use the paradoxical Egyptian term. Similarly Great Father deities had
vaguely defined wives. The "Semitic" Baal, "the lord", was accompanied
by a female reflection of himself--Beltu, "the lady". Shamash, the sun
god, had for wife the shadowy Aa.

As has been shown, Ishtar is referred to in a Tammuz hymn as the
mother of the child god of fertility. In an Egyptian hymn the sky
goddess Nut, "the mother" of Osiris, is stated to have "built up life
from her own body".[129] Sri or Lakshmi, the Indian goddess, who
became the wife of Vishnu, as the mother goddess Saraswati, a tribal
deity, became the wife of Brahma, was, according to a Purana
commentator, "the mother of the world ... eternal and
undecaying".[130]

The gods, on the other hand, might die annually: the goddesses alone
were immortal. Indra was supposed to perish of old age, but his wife,
Indrani, remained ever young. There were fourteen Indras in every "day
of Brahma", a reference apparently to the ancient conception of Indra
among the Great-Mother-worshipping sections of the Aryo-Indians.[131]
In the _Mahabharata_ the god Shiva, as Mahadeva, commands Indra on
"one of the peaks of Himavat", where they met, to lift up a stone and
join the Indras who had been before him. "And Indra on removing that
stone beheld a cave on the breast of that king of mountains in which
were four others resembling himself." Indra exclaimed in his grief,
"Shall I be even like these?" These five Indras, like the "Seven
Sleepers", awaited the time when they would be called forth. They were
ultimately reborn as the five Pandava warriors.[132]

The ferocious, black-faced Scottish mother goddess, Cailleach Bheur,
who appears to be identical with Mala Lith, "Grey Eyebrows" of
Fingalian story, and the English "Black Annis", figures in Irish song
and legend as "The Old Woman of Beare". This "old woman" (Cailleach)
"had", says Professor Kuno Meyer, "seven periods of youth one after
another, so that every man who had lived with her came to die of old
age, and her grandsons and great-grandsons were tribes and races".
When old age at length came upon her she sang her "swan song", from
which the following lines are extracted:

Ebb tide to me as of the sea!
Old age cau