was said to be the landing place of the priest who first brought the "dove" or Christian religion to Scotland. It is called Iona, which is the same as Juno or Dione, and is the Greek for dove; while the name of the priest was said to be Columba, which is Latin for dove; while the opposite shore to which Columba took the dove religion is called the "beautiful" Morven shore. Morven is the Gaelic form of Mary, whose symbol is the dove; so here we have the Queen of Heaven symbolised in three forms-priest, island, and mainland or the earth--and this would lead us into another great mythological land of Arks or Coracles bringing gods to land out of the water," as with Osiris Tamuz and Moses. We have the Iona drama enacted between "Arklow" in Mervyn" in Wales. Another Ireland and "Mervyn point which proves the purely symbolical origin of the story is that the Morven shore is not beautiful, but bleak and rocky, the sea end of huge mountains. But Mary is always likened to a beautiful garden, so Morven must be also beautiful. The earliest Queen of Heaven was probably Ma of Cappadocia, and Ma is the earliest word for Mother, as every baby, when it opens its mouth to cry, forms the word "Ma" automatically; and that word came to mean the child's food, for which it cries, hence "mammalia." The simple word formed many variations, most of them retaining the essential letter M, as witness Ma, Maya, Myrrha, Maria, Mylitta, Myrrhina, Mervyn, Morven, Miriam, Mary, and so on. Our Mary is derived from Maya the Dawn and Mother of the Sun, when the sun was the universal god, as shown by our holy day being Sunday, as is or was the holy day all over Asia and Europe from Japan to Ireland as detailed fully in my Christianity. In some parts of Spain, which got many names, not through Rome, but through Africa, brought by the Moors, the original name Maia, or Maya, as used in India, is still in use for the Virgin Mary. 66 We know from Johannes Clericus that the Queen of Heaven was worshipped with profound veneration by all the Kings of Europe and Asia," and, however much the worship was condemned by the reforming and revivalistic Hebrew Nabis, she was ardently worshipped by the Hebrew people. They complained to Jeremiah (14-15-19) that since they had left off her worship owing to condemnation of such practices "We have wanted "all things, and have been consumed by the 'sword and by the famine," whereas before abandoning the adoration of the Queen of Heaven, they had "plenty of victuals, were well, and saw no evil." In fact the Dove, as the symbol of the Queen of Heaven who had always a babe in her arms, like Mary, was universally worshipped, and where can one find a more perfect and touching picture of love than the mother "brooding " over her babe? DOUBLE SEX IN CREATION. In the Catholic Church of Rome the Virgin Mary is called, as I have already explained, the Habitation of God. Now that was figuratively used, but in the symbolism we will see that it is actually and absolutely true. This requires a little excursion into another realm of mythology, intensely interesting, and which I have treated more fully in my larger book, but of which I must here state the bare outlines, to make the creation stories quite clear. Up till now we have considered single-sex creation-birth by the mother Ruach alone, but the Hebrew scriptures deal fully with creation of the two sexes, and their literature is full of symbolism of this kind, as we shall see in their seven-fold candlestick, and other church furniture. They even had an account of single-sex creation by the male alone, in the ancient book of Job. To see how Mary is called the Habitation of God we must now consider the double sex idea. In Genesis 1, 28, the scribe says: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and "female created he them." This verse contains a world of mythology, and we will wander a little in this world and seek the explanation of the Queen of Heaven, or dove, being the "habitation of God." Otherwise it belongs to the second account of creation, which is a very different story, entirely devoid of either poetry or folk-lore, an artificial compilation by some early clerk in Holy Orders in more prosaic times, which interests us but little. It will be evident that the primitive view of creation followed a very natural process, one which was seen daily in the world, the female bringing forth life. In such a creation, of course, it was only life which was "brought forth," the earth, sea, and sky had always existed, but life must be brought forth, not created, for it lay in the mother of the gods, the Queen of Heaven. The scribe, how ever, changed all that. He wrote a new creation, which was not a natural development but a sudden miracle-a creation from nothing (the word "void " in Genesis means vacuum), and so this is the beginning of miraculous religion. The earlier was naturalistic in its idea. The creation of man "in his own image, "male and female," is held by all ancient religions to mean a double-sexed god, or Androgynous (man-wifish), Hermaphroditic (male-female), Omphalic (woman-manish, in this case the female first), and the idea is represented pictorially in India by Ardha-nariIshwara, a figure divided down the middle, one side male, and the other female, and in sculpture by the Greeks and Romans (several in the Louvre, Paris) by a fine figure with the contour of both sexes, so it was a very widely held belief. This double sex of the God necessary to his power to create is explained thus by the Hindus: "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 man and woman. He approached her, and thus were human beings produced." But the symbolism by which this was worshipped or 66 |