Emperor, has been deified. The Emperor, in a recent edict, has placed
him among the major gods of China, commanding shrines to be built and
worship to be paid to the memory of this American. The people are
worshiping him along with the most ancient and powerful deities of
their religion as a great deliverer from war and famine—as a powerful
god in the form of man. In every household, school and temple, his name
will be thus commemorated.—_Newspaper Report_.
[26] _Diodorus Siculus_.
[27] “I am nature, the parent of all things, the sovereign of the
elements, the primary progeny of time, the most exalted of the deities,
the first of the heavenly gods and goddesses, the queen of the shades,
the uniform countenances who dispose with my rod the innumerable lights
of heaven.”
[28] The salubrious breezes of the sea, and the mournful silence of the
dead whose single deity the whole world venerates in _many forms_ with
various rites and many names. The Egyptians, skilled in ancient lore,
worship me with proper ceremonies and call me by my true name—Queen
Isis.
[29] Leeks, garlic, onions and beans.
[30] All the ancient nations appear to have had an ark or archa, in
which to conceal something sacred.—Godfrey Higgins, _Anacalypsis I_,
347.
[31] The Sacred Song of Moses and Miriam was an early part of Jewish
literature; the idea was borrowed like the ark from the religion of
Isis.
[32] The throne of this brilliant queen who reigned 1600 years B.C.
has recently been deposited in the British Museum. Her portrait, also
brought to light, shows Caucasian features with a dimpled chin.
[33] Bryant was an English writer of the last century, a graduate of
Cambridge who looked into many abstruse questions relating to ancient
history. In 1796, eight years before his death, he published “_A
Dissertation Concerning the War of Troy_.”
[34] That Homer came into Egypt, amongst other arguments they endeavor
to prove it especially by the potion Helen gave Telemachus—in the
story of Menelaus—to cause him to forget all his sorrows past, for the
poet seems to have made an exact experiment of the potion Nepenthes,
which he says Helen received from Polymnestes, the wife of Thonus, and
brought it from Thebes in Egypt, and indeed in that city, even at this
day, the women use this medicine with good success, and they say that
in ancient times the medicine for the cure of anger and sorrow was
only to be found among the Diospolitans, Thebes and Diospolis being
affirmed by them to be one and the same city.—_Diodorus Siculus_, Vol.
I, Chap. VII.
[35] The remaining three were Cyrus, Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander.
Cyrus met defeat and death at the hands of Tomyris, queen of the
Scythians, who caused him to be crucified, a punishment deemed so
ignominious by the Romans that it was not inflicted upon the most
criminal of their citizens. Because of his barbarity, Tomyris caused
the head of Cyrus to be plunged into a sack of blood “that he might
drink his fill.”
[36] Very few mummies of children have been found.—Wilkinson, _Ancient
Egyptians_.
[37] In relation to women the laws were very severe; for one that
committed a rape upon a free woman was condemned to have his privy
member cut off; for they judged that the three most heinous offenses
were included in that one vile act, that is wrong, defilement and
bastardy.—_Diodorus_, Vol. I, Chap. VII.
[38] _Ancient Rome in the Light of Recent Discoveries._ Chapter on the
Vestals.—Lanciani.
[39] _The Anacalypsis_ II, 241.
[40] According to Commissioner of Education, Chang Lai Sin, Chinese
women can read and write, and when a husband wishes to do anything he
consults with his wife, and when the son comes home, although he may
be prime minister, he shows his respect to his mother by bending his
knee. “I claim that the Chinese institutions and system of education,
both with regard to men and women, are far superior to those of any of
the neighboring nations for a great many centuries, and that it is only
within this century that China, after having been defeated by so many
reverses in her arms, has turned to a foreign country—to the United
States—for example and instruction.”
[41] The Shakers hold that the revelation of God is progressive. That
in the first or antediluvian period of human nature God was known only
as a Great Spirit; that in the second or Jewish period he was revealed
as the Jehovah. He, she or a dual being, male or female, the “I am that
I am;” that Jesus in the third cycle made God known as a father; and
that in the last cycle commencing with 1770, A.D., “God is revealed in
the character of Mother, an eternal Mother, the bearing spirit of all
the creation of God.”—_W. A. Parcelle._
[42] In China the family acting through its natural representative is
the political unit. This representative may be a woman. The only body
in China that may be said to correspond with our law-making assemblies
is the Academy of Science and Letters of Pekin, and women are not
excluded from that learned conclave. _La Cité Chinoise._—G. Eugene
Simon.
[43] _Art Letters_, p. 322.—Bachofen.
[44] _Journal of Jurisprudence_, Vol. XVI, Edinburgh, 1872.
[45] The divine element, according to the idea of the ancient world,
was composed of two sexes. There were _dei femma_, and hence temples
sacred to goddesses; holy sanctuaries where were celebrated mysteries
in which men could not be permitted to participate. The worship of
goddesses necessitated priestesses, so that women exercised the
sacerdotal office in the ancient world. The wives of the Roman Consuls
even offered public sacrifices at certain festivals. The more property
the wife had, the more rights she had.—_M. Derraimes._
[46] The superiority of woman’s condition in Europe and America is
generally attributed to Christianity. We are anxious to give some
credit to that influence, but it must not be forgotten that the nations
of Northern Europe treated women with delicacy and devotion long
before they were converted to the Christian faith. Long before the
Christian era women were held in high estimation, and enjoyed as many
privileges as they generally have since the spread of Christianity.
Nichols.—_Women of all Nations._
[47] When I go back to the most remote periods of antiquity into which
it is possible to penetrate, I find clear and positive evidence of
several important facts: First, no animal food was eaten; no animals
were sacrificed. _Higgins._—_Anacalypsis_ II, p. 147.
[48] Observe that I.H.U. is Jod, male, father; “He” is female, Binah,
and U is male, Vau, Son.—_Sepher Yetzirah._
[49] _The Perfect Way._—Kingsford.
[50] I.A.H. according to the Kabbalists, is I. (Father) and A.H.
(Mother); composed of I. the male, and H. the mother. Nork.—_Bibl.
Mythol., I_, 164-65 (note to _Sod_ 166, 2, 354).
[51] Nork says the “Woman clothed with the sign of the Sun and the Moon
is the bi-sexed or male-female deity; hence her name is Iah, composed
of the masculine I and the feminine _Ah_. _Sod._—Appendix 123.
[52] _The Perfect Way_, p. 78.
[53] That name of Deity, which occurring in the Old Testament is
translated the Almighty, namely El Shaddai, signified the Breasted God,
and is used when the mode of the divine nature implied is of a feminine
character. Kingsford.—_The Perfect Way_, p. 68.
[54] A chief signification of the word Babel among Orientals was “God
the Father.” The Tower of Babel therefore signifies the Tower of God
the Father—a remarkable indication of the confusion, not alone of
tongues, but of religious ideas arising from man’s attempt to worship
the father alone.—_E. L. Mason._ Injustice to the sex reached its
culmination in the enthronement of a personal God with a Son to share
his glory, but wifeless, motherless, daughterless.—_Dr. William Henry
Channing._
[55] Those who have studied the ancient lore of Cabalistic books, know
that in the ineffable name Yod-he-vau (or Jehovah), the first letter
_yod_ signifies the masculine, the second letter _hu_ or _ha_ the
feminine, while the last letter _van_ or _vaud_ is said by Cabalists to
indicate the vital life which fills all the throbbing universe from the
union of eternal love with eternal wisdom. It is this ineffable holy
(or whole) Mother and Father, which must be exalted and imaged forth in
family and government with the woman-force more strongly emphasized,
before even human society can be filled with that new creation with
which the iridescent subtle mother-essence infuses and enwreathes all
other realms of the pulsing universe. No man seems shaken at hearing
of the fatherhood of Jehovah. Is motherhood less divine? Nothing but a
male-born theology evolved from the overheated fires of feeling would
have burned away all recognition of the fact that the presence of the
“Eternal Womanly” in Yod-he-vau’s being is necessary to full-sphered
perfection; none but those whose degraded estimate of woman has caused
them to desecrate her holy office of high priestess of life, will see
anything more sacrilegious in a recognition of “Our Mother in Heaven,”
and in offering her the prayer “hallowed be thy name, they will be done
on earth as it is in heaven,” than in saying the same things to the
Father there. Those who chose to search will discover that the “Eternal
Fatherhood of God,” in regard to which Protestant theologians talk so
much, has been balanced in all ancient religions as well as in the
nature of things by the eternal Motherhood in Jehovah’s being, without
which Fatherhood would be impossible. This Motherhood has always and
everywhere been the preserver and creator of the omnipresent life of
all kinds which fills the throbbing universe. Yod-he-vau’s _Lost Name_
can never be hallowed (made whole) without the Mother is there. _E.L.
Mason.—The Lost Name._
CHAPTER TWO
[1] It was a favorite doctrine of the Christian fathers that
concupiscence or the sensual passion was the original sin of human
nature. Lecky—_Hist. European Morals._ The tendency of the church
towards the enforcement of celibacy was early seen. At the four Synods
which assembled to establish the true faith in respect to the Holy
nature of Christ’s Humanity, the first one at Nice, 318, the second at
Constantinople with forty bishops present; the third at Ephesus with
two hundred bishops present; the fourth at Chaledonia with many bishops
together, they forever forbade all marriage to the minister at the
altar. _Monumenta Ecclesiastica_, p. 347. To no minister at the altar
is it allowed to marry, but it is forbidden to every one. _Ibid._
[2] According to Christianity woman is the unclean one, the seducer who
brought sin into the world and caused the fall of man. Consequently
all apostles and fathers of the church have regarded marriage as
an inevitable evil just as prostitution is regarded today. August
Bebel.—_Woman in the Past, Present and Future._
[3] Spirit in the Hebrew, as shown in the first chapter, answers to
all genders; in the Greek to the feminine alone. With Kabbalists the
“Divine Spirit” was conceded to be the feminine Jehovah, that is, the
feminine principle of the Godhead.
[4] From Marcellina, in the second century, a body of the church took
its name. Her life was pure, and her memory has descended to us free
from calumny and reproach.
[5] Lowest in the scale of being are those invisible creatures called
by Kabbalists the “elementary.”... The second class is composed of the
invisible antitypes of the men _to be_ born. _Isis Unveiled_, I, 310.
[6] Who maintained that Adam did not think of celebrating his nuptials
till he went out of Paradise.
[7] It was the effect of God’s goodness to man that suffered him to
sleep when Eve was formed, as Adam being endowed with a spirit of
prophecy might foresee the evils which the production of Eve would
cause to all mankind, so that God perhaps cast him into that sleep lest
he should oppose the creation of his wife. _Life of Adam by Loredano._
Pub. at Amsterdam, 1696. See Bayle.
[8] Lecky.—_Hist. European Morals._
[9] That marriage was evil was taught by Jerome.
[10] So fully retaining it as to require the circumcision of Timothy,
the Gentile, before sending him as a missionary to the Jews.
[11] The Council of Tours (813) recommended bishops to read, and if
possible retain by heart, the epistles of St. Paul.
[12] Although Paul “led about” other “women” saluting “some with a holy
kiss.”
[13] 964. Notion of uncleanliness attaching to sexual relations
fostered by the church. Herbert Spencer.—_Descriptive Sociology,
England._
[14] In the third century marriage was permitted to all orders and
ranks of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of
celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity
and virtue than others. This was owing to an almost general persuasion
that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the
influence of malignant demons.—_Mosheim._
[15] Old (Christian) theologians for a long time disputed upon the
nature of females; a numerous party classed them among the brutes
having neither soul nor reason. They called a council to arrest the
progress of this heresy. It was contended that the women of Peru and
other countries of America were without soul and reason. The first
Christians made a distinction between men and women. Catholics would
not permit them to sing in Church. _Dictionnaire Feodal_ Paris, 1819.
[16] By a decree of the Council of Auxerre (A.D. 578), women on
account of their impurity were forbidden to receive the sacrament into
their naked hands.
[17] Catherine reproached the Protestants with this impious license as
with a great crime. “Les femmes chantant aux _orgies_ des huguenots,
dit Georges l’apotre; apprenez donc, predicans, que saint Paul a dit;
_Mulieres in_ ecclesiaetaccant; et que dans le chapitre de l’apocolypse
l’evoque de Thyathire est manace de la damnation pour avoir permis a
une femme de parles a l’eglise. See _Redavances Seigneur_.
[18] When part singing was first introduced into the United States,
great objection was made to women taking the soprano or leading part,
which by virtue of his superiority it was declared belonged to man.
Therefore woman was relegated to the bass or tenor but nature proved
too powerful, and man was eventually compelled to take bass or tenor as
his part, while woman carried the soprano, says the _History of Music_.
[19] _Leviticus 12:15._ Dr. Smith characterizes a sin-offering as a
sacrifice made with the idea of propitiation and atonement; its central
idea, that of expiation, representing a broken covenant between God
and the offender; that while death was deserved, the substitute was
accepted in lieu of the criminal.—_Dictionary of the Bible._
[20] _The Talmud_ (Mishna), declared three cleansings were necessary
for leprosy and three for children, thus placing the bringing of an
immortal being into life upon the same plane of defilement with the
most hideous plague of antiquity.
[21] The mean term of life for these wretched girls under religious
confinement in a nunnery was about ten years. From the fifteenth
century a sickness was common, known as Disease of the Cloisters.
It was described by Carmen. Jewish contempt of the feminine was not
alone exhibited in prohibiting her entrance into the holy places of
the temple, and in the ceremonies of her purification, but also in the
especial holiness of male animals which alone were used for sacrifice.
Under Jewish law the sons alone inherited, the elder receiving a
double portion as the beginning of his father’s strength. See Deut.
21-15. If perchance the mother also possessed an inheritance that
was also divided among the sons to the exclusion of daughters. The
modern English law of primogeniture is traceable to Judaism. Even
the commandments were made subservient to masculine ideas, the tenth
classing a man’s wife with his cattle and slaves, while the penalties
of the seventh were usually visited upon her alone.
[22] The reign of Constantine marks the epoch of the transformation
of Christianity from a religious into a political system.
Draper.—_Conflict of Religion and Science._
[23] “The woman that cometh to give thanks must offer accustomed
offering in this kingdom; it is the law of the kingdom in such cases.”
[24] In the year 1867 the Right Rev. Bishop Coxe, of the Western
Diocese of New York, refused the sacrament to those women patients of
Dr. Foster’s Sanitarium at Clifton Springs, N.Y., whose heads were
uncovered, although the rite was performed in the domestic chapel of
that institution and under the same roof as the patient’s own rooms.
During the famous See trial at Newark, N.J., 1876, the prosecutor, Rev.
Dr. Craven, declared that every woman before him wore her head covered
in token of her subordination.
[25] The Catholic Congress of July, 1892, telegraphing the pope it
would strive to obtain for the Holy See the recovery of its inalienable
prerogative and territorial independence, was convened at Fulda.
[26] “In the old days, no woman was allowed to put her foot within the
walls of the monastery at San Augustin, Mexico. A noble lady of Spain,
wife of the reigning Viceroy, was bent on visiting it. Nothing could
stop her, and in she came. But she found only empty cloisters, for
each virtuous monk locked himself securely in his cell, and afterward
every stone in the floor which her sacrilegious feet had touched was
carefully replaced by a new one fresh from the mountain top. Times are
sadly changed. The house has now been turned into a hotel.”
[27] _Sacerdotal Celibacy._—Lea.
[28] _Studies in Church History._—Lea.
[29] _History of Materialism._
[30] Seals upon legal papers owe their origin to the custom of the
uneducated noble warrior stamping the imprint of his clenched or mailed
hand upon wax as his signature.
[31] _St. Theresa_ founded the Barefoot Carmelites, and it is but a few
years since thousands of its members assembled to do honor to her name.
[32] The annals of the Church of Rome give us the history of that
celebrated prostitute Marozia of the tenth century, who lived in public
concubinage with Pope Sergius III., whom she had raised to the papal
throne. Afterwards she and her sister Theodosia placed another of
their lovers, under name of Anastatius III., and after him John X., in
the same position. Still later this same powerful Marozia placed the
tiara upon the head of her son by Pope Sergius under name of John XI.,
and this before he was sixteen years of age. The celebrated Countess
Matilda exerted no less power over popedom, while within this century
the maid of Kent has issued orders to the pope himself.
[33] The first abbess, Petrouville, becoming involved in a dispute
with the powerful bishop of Angers, summoned him before the council
of Chateraroux and Poicters, where she pleaded the cause of her order
and won her case. In 1349 the abbess Theophegenie denied the right of
the seneschal of Poitou to judge the monks of Fontevrault, and gained
it for herself. In 1500, Mary of Brittany, in concert with the pope’s
deputies, drew up with an unfaltering hand the new statutes of the
order. Legouve.—_Moral History of Women._
[34] No community was richer or more influential, yet during six
hundred years and under thirty-two abbesses, every one of its
privileges were attacked by masculine pride or violence, and every one
maintained by the vigor of the women.—_Sketches of Fontervault._
[35] What is more remarkable the monks of this convent were under
control of the abbess and nuns, receiving their food as alms.—_Ibid._
[36] “The Lord’s Prayer,” taught his disciples by Jesus, recognizes the
loss, and demands restoration of the feminine in “Hallowed (whole) be
Thy Name.”
[37] Woman should always be clothed in mourning and rags, that the eye
may perceive in her only a penitent, drowned to tears, and so doing for
the sin of having ruined the whole human race. Woman is the gateway of
satan, who broke the seal of the forbidden tree and who first violated
the divine law.
[38] Gildas, in the first half of the sixth century, declared the
clergy were utterly corrupt. Lea.—_Studies in Church History._
[39] In the third century marriage was permitted to all ranks and
orders of the clergy. Those, however, who continued in a state of
celibacy, obtained by this abstinence a higher reputation of sanctity
and virtue than others. This was owing to the almost general persuasion
that they who took wives were of all others the most subject to the
influence of malignant demons.—_Mosheim._ As early as the third
century, says _Bayle_, were several maidens who resolved never to marry.
[40] The priests of the Greek Church are still forbidden a second
marriage. In the beginning of the reign of Edward I, when men in orders
were prohibited from marriage in England, a statute was framed under
which lay felons were deprived of the clergy in case they had committed
bigamy in addition to their other offenses; bigamy in the clerical
sense meaning marriage with a widow or with two maidens in succession.
[41] Pelagius II., sixty-fifth pope in censuring those priests,
who after the death of their wives have become fathers by their
servants, recommended that the culpable females should be immured in
convents to perform perpetual penance for the fault of the priest.
Cormenin.—_History of the Popes_, p. 84.
[42] A priest’s wife is nothing but a snare of the devil, and he who
is ensnared thereby on to his end will be seized fast by the devil,
and he must afterwards pass into the hands of fiends and totally
perish.—_Institutes of Polity, Civil and Ecclesiastical_, pp. 438-42.
_Canons of Aelfric and Aelfric’s Pastoral Epistles_, p. 458.
[43] _Momumenta Ecclesiastica. Institutes of Polity, Civil and
Ecclesiastical._
[44] In order to understand the morals of the clergy of this period,
it is important that we should make mention of a law which was passed
by the emperors Valentinian, Valerius and Gratian toward the end of
the year 370. It prohibited ecclesiastics and monks from entering the
houses of widows and single women living alone or who had lost their
parents. Dr. Cormenin.—_History of the Popes_, p. 62.
[45] _Lecky_ finds evidence of the most hideous immorality in these
restrictions, which forbade the presence even of a mother or sister in
a priest’s house. _Lea_ says it is somewhat significant that when in
France the rule of celibacy was completely enforced churchmen should
find it necessary to revive this hideously suggestive restriction which
denied the priest the society of his mother and sister.—_Sacerdotal
Celibacy_, p. 344.
[46] He declared it to be the highest degree of wickedness to rise from
a woman’s side to make the body of Christ. He was discovered the same
night with a woman to the great indignation of the people, and obliged
to flee the country to escape condign punishment.
[47] It is not difficult to conceive the order of ideas that
produced that passionate horror of the fair sex which is such a
striking characteristic of old Catholic theology. Celibacy was
universally conceded as the highest form of virtue, and in order
to make it acceptable theologians exhausted all the resources of
their eloquence in describing the iniquity of those whose charm had
rendered it so rare. Hence the long and fiery disquisitions on the
unparalleled malignity, the unconceivable subtlety, the frivolity,
the unfaithfulness, the unconquerable evil propensities of woman.
Lecky.—_Hist. European Morals._
[48] The Fathers of the Church for the most part, vie with each other
in their depreciation of woman and denouncing her with every vile
epithet, held it a degradation for a saint to touch even his aged
mother with his hand in order to sustain her feeble steps.... For it
declared woman unworthy through inherent impurity even to set foot
within the sanctuaries of its temples; suffered her to exercise the
function of wife and mother only under the spell of a triple exorcism,
and denied her when dead burial within its more sacred precincts even
though she was an abbess of undoubted sanctity. Anna Kingsford.—_The
Perfect Way_, p. 286.
[49] _Disease of the Cloisters._