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40 "The Mexican Eve is called Suchiquecal. A messenger from heaven announced to her that she should bear a son, who should bruise the serpent's head. He presents her with a rose. This was the commencement of an Age, which was called the Age of Roses.

[Is this the age when angels became the husbands of pure-minded women—an age fitly symboled by the rose, the flower of perfect love? Note, also, the resemblance between this tradition and the Christian tradition, concerning the angel's offering Mary a lily-branch at the Annunciation. Evidently, these are two different aspects of the same symbolism.]

Higgins, continuing, says:

"All this history the Monkish writer is perfectly certain is the invention of the Devil," and Justin Martyr strove to account for the analogy between the story of Christ and the story of Bacchus by supposing that demons had imitated the Christian Scriptures in advance, so totally unaware was he that both stories had the same esoteric meaning to the initiate. "Torquemada's Indian history was mutilated at Madrid before it was published. Suchiquecal is called the Queen of Heaven. She conceived a son, without connection with man, who is the God of Air * * * *

"The Mohammedans have a tradition that Christ was conceived by the smelling of a rose." Anacalypsis II. 32, 33.

In the Finnish epic of the Kalevala there is a heroine by the name of Mariatta (from Marja, "berry") who becomes pregnant through unwittingly eating a berry—the berry here playing a similar part to the rose referred to above in the Mohammedan tradition. She goes from one to another person, vainly seeking a place in which to bring forth her child. At last she is referred by one household to the stable of "the flaming horse of Hisi;" and she then appeals to the horse of Hisi in the following words: