Page:Woman Triumphant.djvu/39

 which Jeremiah too has given indications in his letter directed to Baruch. (Baruch VI. 42, 43.)

According to these statements every woman was compelled to visit the temple of Mylitta at least once during her life and give herself over to any stranger, who would throw some money on her lap and with the words: "I appeal to Mylitta!" indicate his desire to possess her. Such an appeal could not be rejected, no matter how small the sum was, as this money was to be offered on the altar of the goddess and thus became sacred.


 * About this subject Rev. T. M. Lindsay, Professor of Divinity and Church History, Free Church College, Glasgow, writes in the Encyclopaedia Britannica in an essay about Christianity: "All paganism is at bottom a worship of Nature in some form or other, and in all pagan religions the deepest and most awe-inspiring attribute of nature was its power of reproduction. The mystery of birth and becoming was the deepest mystery of Nature; it lay at the root of all thoughtful paganism and appeared in various forms, some of a more innocent, others of a most debasing type. To ancient pagan thinkers, as well as to modern men of science the key to the hidden secret of the origin and preservation of the universe lay in the mystery of sex. Two energies or agents, one an active and generative, the other a feminine, passive, or susceptible one, were everywhere thought to combine for creative purpose, and heaven and earth, sun and moon, day and night, were believed to co-operate to the production of being. Upon some such basis as this rested almost all the polytheistic worship of the old civilization, and too it may be traced back, stage by stage, the separation of divinity into male and female gods, the deification of distinct powers of nature, and the idealization of man's own faculties, desires, and lusts, where every power of his understanding was embodied as an object of adoration, and every impulse of his will became an, incarnation of deity. But in each and every form of polytheism we find the slime-track of the deification of sex; there is not a single one of the ancient religions which has not consecrated by some ceremonial rite even the grossest forms of sensual indulgence, while many of them actually elevated prostitution into a solemn service of religion."