procreation and continuation of the human species, but extended even to the vegetable world, over which he presided, when we find his statue accompanied by trees and plants; and kings offering to him herbs of the ground, cutting the corn before him, or employed in his presence tilling the land, and preparing it to receive the generating influence of the deity. Khem was styled Ammon generator, and was represented ithyphallic.

As Mr. Bonwick writes, "When Ammon, Ptah, Khem, Osiris, or Horus appear in ithyphallic guise, it is in their condition as the Demiurgus, by whom the worlds were made."

At Phila Osiris was worshipped as the generating cause, and Isis the receptive mould.

At Mendis Osiris was considered to be the male principle, and Isis a form of the female principle. Plutarch tells us in his Isis and Osiris that in the Egyptian belief, when a planet entered into a sign, their conjunction was denominated a marriage.

Synesius gives an inscription on an Egyptian deity, "Thou art the father and thou art the mother. Thou art the male and thou art the female."

Mr. Mahaffy, in his Prolegomena, p. 267, gives the following Egyptian text :-"God is the sun himself incarnate; his commencement is from the beginning. He is the God who has existed of old. There is no God without him. A mother hath not borne him, nor a father begotten him. GOD-GODDESS created from himself, all the gods have existed as soon as he began." Upon the latter phrases Mr. Chabas remarks, "These two latter phrases are the most exact formula, the most simple of Egyptian theology, such as it was taught in the highest

system of initiation.

A sole deity, invested with the power of production-that is to say, of the two principles, male and female-he created himself before all things, and the arrival of the gods was only a diffusion, a manifestation of his different faculties and of his all-powerful will." In a hymn the deity is thus addressed, "Glory to thee who hast begotten all that exists, who hast made man, who hast made the gods."

The Egyptian Triads were composed of father, mother, and son—that is, the male and female principles of nature, with their product.

In the Saiva Purana of the Hindus, Siva says: "From the supreme spirit proceed Purusha (the generative or male principle), Prakriti (the productive or female principle), and Time; and by them was produced this universe, the manifestation of one God. . . Of all organs of sense and intellect, the best is mind, which proceeds from Ahankara, Ahankara from intellect, intellect from the supreme being, who is, in fact, Purusha. It is the primeval male, whose form constitutes the universe, and whose breath is the sky; and though incorporeal, that male am I."

In the Kritya Tatwa, Siva is thus addressed by Brahma; "I know that Thou, O Lord, art the eternal Brahm, that seed which, being received in the womb of the Sakti (aptitude to conceive), produced this universe; that thou united with thy Sakti dost create the universe from this own substance like the web from the spider." In the same creed Siva is described as the personification of Surya, the sun; Agni, the fire, or genial heat which pervades, generates, and vivifies all; he is

The Female Principle.

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Bhāva, the lord of Bhavānī the universal mother, goddess of nature and of the earth.

In one of the hymns of the Rig Veda quoted by Professor Monier Williams (Hinduism, p. 26) we perceive the first dim outline of the remarkable idea that the Creator willed to produce the universe through the agency and co-operation of a female principle—an idea which afterwards acquired more definite shape in the supposed marriage of heaven and earth. In the Veda also various deities were regarded as the progeny resulting from the fancied union of Earth with Dyaus, "heaven;" just as much of the later mythology may be explained by a supposed blending of the male and female principles in nature. In the Sama-Veda (viii. p. 44) the idea is more fully expressed: "He felt not delight, being alone. He wished another, and instantly became such. He caused his own self to fall in twain, and thus became husband and wife. He approached her, and thus were produced human beings."

"Brahma," the creator, writes Professor Williams, "was made to possess a double nature, or, in other words, two characters-one quiescent, the other active. The active was called his Sakti, and was personified as his wife, or the female half of his essence. The Sakti of the creator ought properly to represent the female creative capacity, but the idea of the blending of the male and female principles in creation seems to have been transferred to Siva and his Sakti Parvati. One of the representatives of Siva is half-male and half-female, emblematic of the indissoluble unity of the creative principle (hence his name, Ard-hanâ risá, the half female lord ").

Siva represented the Fructifying Principle, the genera

ting power that pervades the universe, producing sun, moon, stars, men, animals, and plants. His wife, or Sakti, was Parvati, for each divine personage was associated with a consort, to show that male and female, man and wife, are ever indissolubly united as the sources of reproduction,

In China, according to Prof. Muller, we find the recognition of two powers, one active, the other passive, one male, the other female, which comprehend everything, and which, in the mind of the more enlightened, tower high above the great crowd of minor spirits. These two powers are within and beneath and behind everything that is double in nature, and they have been frequently identified with heaven and earth. In the Shu-King we are told that heaven and earth together are the father and mother of all things.

At the head of the Babylonian mythology stands a deity who was sometimes identified with the heavens, sometimes considered as the ruler and god of heaven. This deity is named Anu. He represents the universe as the upper and lower regions, and when these were divided the upper region or heaven was called Anu, while the lower region or earth was called Anatu. Anu being the male principle, and Anatu the female principle, or wife of Anu.

The successive forms, Lahina and Lahama, Sar and Kisar, are represented in some of the god lists as names or manifestations of Anu and Anatu. In each case there appears to be a male and female principle, which principles combine in the formation of the universe.t

*Lectures on the Science of Religion.

+ Smith's Chaldæan Genesis, p. 54.

The God of the Moabites.

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Among the Assyrians the supreme god, Bel, was styled "the procreator;" and his wife, the goddess Mylitta, represented the productive principle of nature, and received the title of the queen of fertility. Among the Assyrian deities, writes Dr. Ginsburg (Moabite stone, page 43), "the name Ashtar or Ashter means generative power, tied together, joined, coupled connubial contact, whilst Astarte is the feminine half or companion of the productive power.

Another deity, the god Vul, the god of the atmosphere, is styled the beneficent chief, the giver of abundance, the lord of fecundity. On Assyrian cylinders he is represented as a phallic deity. With him is associated a goddess Shala, whose ordinary title is "Sarrat," queen, the feminine of the word "Sar," which means chief. Sir Henry Rawlinson remarks with regard to the Assyrian Sun, or Shamas, the sun-god, that the idea of the motive influence of the sun-god in all human affairs arose from the manifest agency of the material sun in stimulating the functions of Nature. On the Moabite stone the god of the Moabites is called Ashtar-Chemosh-Chemosh meaning the conqueror, and Ashtar the producer-a joint name, which implies an androgynous (male and female) deity. In Phoenician mythology, Ouranos (heaven) weds Ghè (the earth), and by her becomes father of Oceanus, Hyperion, Iapetus, Cronos, and other gods. In conformity with the religious ideas of the Greeks and Romans, Virgil describes the products of the earth as the result of the conjugal act between Jupiter (the sky) and Juno (the earth.) According to St. Augustin the sexual organ of man was consecrated in the temple of Liber, that of woman in the sanctuaries of Liberia; these two divinities were named father and