Modern writers agree in ascribing to the Touaricks, a people inhabiting the Desert of Sahara, a considerable degree of civilization. We are informed that in the Sahara, which, by the way, is far less a barren waste than we have been taught to suppose it, "the Touaricks have towns, cities, and an excellent condition of agriculture"; that with them fruit is cultivated with great success and skill. Their method of political organization is democratic and similar in construction and administration to the old Cushite municipalities. Baldwin, quoting from Richardson, says: "Ghat, like all the Touarick countries, is a republic; all the people govern. The woman of the Touaricks is not the woman of the Moors and Mussulmans generally. She has here great liberty, and takes an active part in the affairs and transactions of life."(68)
68) Prehistoric Nations, p. 341.
One who is disposed to search for it, will find no lack of evidence going to prove that in an earlier age of the world, prior to the written records of extant history, the human race had attained to a stage of civilization equal in all and superior in many respects to that of the present time.
That this remarkable stage of progress, the actual extent of which has not yet been fully realized, was attained during a period of pure Nature-worship, or while the earth and the sun were venerated as emblems of the great creative energy throughout the universe, is a proposition which, when viewed by the light of more recently acquired facts, is perfectly reasonable, and exactly what might be expected.
That this high stage of civilization was reached while women were the recognized heads of families and of the gentes, and at a time when Perceptive Wisdom, or the female energy in the Deity, was worshipped as the supreme God, is a fact which in time will be proved beyond a doubt. Indeed, had not the judgment of man become warped by prejudice, and his reason clogged by superstition and sensuality, the fact so plainly apparent in all ancient mythologies, that in the early god-idea two principles were contained, the female being in the ascendancy, would long ere this have been acknowledged, and our present religious systems, which are but outgrowths from these mythologies, would, with the partial return of civilized conditions, have been so modified or changed as to embrace some of the fundamental truths which formed the basis of early religion.
Regarding the religion of the ancient race which we have been considering, we are told that they worshipped a dual Deity, under the appellations of Ashtaroth and Baal, and that this God "comprehended the generative or reproductive powers in human beings and in the sun, together with Wisdom or Light." In other words, they adored the great moving force throughout Nature, a force which they venerated as the Great Mother.
Before the Zend and Sanskrit branches of the Aryan race had separated, their religion was doubtless that given them by their Cushite civilizers. The worship of the sun and the planets, with which were inextricably interwoven the fructifying agencies in Nature, explains their devotion to the study of the heavenly bodies and their advanced knowledge of astronomy. The types of regeneration or reproduction which they venerated were symbols of abstract principles, and, from facts connected with their religious ceremonies as practiced by their immediate successors, and from the pure significance attached to their emblems, we are justified in the conclusion before referred to, that the sensuous element, which became so prominent in later religious developments, constituted no part of their worship.
The number of ages during which the most primitive religion, namely, that of pure Nature-worship, prevailed among the inhabitants of the earth may not be conjectured, and the exact length of time during which earth and sun adoration unalloyed by serpent and phallic faiths remained is not known. It is probable, however, that its duration is to be measured by that of the supremacy of the altruistic or mother element in human affairs, and that the gradual engrafting of the later-developed sensuous faiths upon their earlier god-idea, marks the change from female to male supremacy.
We have observed that whenever a remnant of the civilization of the ancient Cushites appears, exactly as might be expected, women hold an exalted position in human affairs, at the same time that the female principle constitutes the essential element in the Deity.
Of the ancient Persians who received their religion and their civilization from this older race Malcolm observes: